I confess: I avoided watching the 2011 Oscar award-winning movie The Descendants (directed by the acclaimed Alexander Payne of Sideways and Nebraska, starring George Clooney) for a long time. I had read the book of the same name, by Kaui Hart Hemmings, on which the movie is based. I have complicated feelings about the book—a witty and often wrenching portrayal of a rich Native Hawaiian family that doesn’t seem to feel, look, or know much about being Native Hawaiian. Though I recognize such struggles, about feeling or being disconnected from your own culture and nation, as a very Native story (or perhaps, more precisely, as the story of settler colonialism), I don’t recognize the ending of Hemmings’ story. After much turmoil, the protagonist of her novel decides not to sell the land he has inherited from his family. It is hard to connect with the rich protagonists of Hemmings’ novel because I don’t know any Native Hawaiians who have land to be inherited. I don’t know any Native Hawaiians who frequent yacht clubs. And I don’t know any Native Hawaiians who seem so completely unaware of the truly amazing achievements of recent cultural revitalization efforts in the Native Hawaiian community—from language revitalization to traditional seafaring (our beloved Hōkūleʻa has set sail on a round-the-world voyage this past week). But, to each her own, I thought.


When I did finally watch the movie, despite the fact that I knew the story, despite the fact that I spend most of my time writing, researching and thinking about whiteness and settler colonialism in the Pacific, and despite the fact that I attended (for a time) the very same, very white-dominated private high school in Honolulu that Hemmings (and, incidentally, President Obama) attended, I was stunned. In the film, the residents of Hawaiʻi are shown to be, almost entirely, white people. Where the Hawaiʻi of the novel I have glimpsed from a distance, the Hawaiʻi of the film is utterly unrecognizable to me. Asian Americans, who make up at least 40% of Hawaiʻi’s population, are barely represented, much less Native Hawaiians. Hemmings herself has a cameo as the lead’s assistant and there are a few Hawaiian musicians in another scene. George Clooney is one of the film’s most “ethnic” looking characters and, as the lead role, he plays the scion of a poorly fictionalized royal Hawaiian lineage. It must be said: Native Hawaiians look a lot of different ways, but in no way does George Clooney adequately represent us. My concern here is less about authenticity, as I think many of us must suspend disbelief during Hollywood movies if we are to endure them at all. A more representative cast would not fix the problems of the movie. No matter who was cast in the lead role, a viewer could still easily come away from the film with the sense that the main problems facing Native Hawaiians today are (a) being cuckolded and (b) negotiating real estate deals. I am more concerned about questioning the genealogy and the effects produced by the representation of Hawaiʻi as chiefly a place of white people, some of whom have Native heritage that they find alternately puzzling, romantic, and lucrative. What allows a movie (with the apparent consent of a Native Hawaiian author) to portray Hawaiʻi as so blindingly white, in both cast and storyline?

There is a long history – in scientific and popular representations – of understanding the Polynesian race (of which Native Hawaiians are understood to be a part) as ancestrally and biologically white. With Western “exploration” and colonization of the Pacific, Oceania was divided into three ethnologically derived areas: Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia. As constructed by European and American imperialists, Polynesia signified the islands where the natives often appeared to be “almost white.” Ethnologists, physical anthropologists, and sociologists from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century deployed various methodologies to prove that Polynesians had branched off close to the “Aryan stem,” and were thus closely akin to Caucasians. White settlers saw Polynesians as ‘friendly people’ with whom they could live safely and securely with. In contrast, Melanesians were written about as decidedly more savage and hostile; as “black.” The word Melanesia is derived from “melas,” meaning black in Greek (whereas “Poly” and “Micro” are geographic distinctions: Polynesia, the area of many islands, Micronesia, the area of small islands). Micronesia was somewhere in the middle and could swing either way, racially—sometimes it was seen as related to Polynesia, and other times it was more akin to Melanesia.

These imposed Western divisions are certainly porous in the lives of Pacific Islander communities. Peoples from across the areas deemed Polynesia, Melanesia, and Micronesia have long made meaningful connections through their shared identities and genealogies (long before settler colonialism, in fact). Maori scholar Alice Te Punga Somerville’s groundbreaking book Once Were Pacific reminds us, however, that within the Indigenous communities of Polynesia, and Oceania more widely, we must engage the “disjunctures” and “rather embarrassing genealogies of suspicion, derision, and competition between our communities” which are often structured by racism and colonialism. For example, in Hawaiʻi, many diasporic Micronesian communities have recently begun speaking out against the racism they face daily, from other residents of Hawaiʻi, including, at times, Native Hawaiians. Micronesians, many of whom have been forcibly dispossessed of their homelands and their health from the reverberating legacies of US nuclear testing there, arrive in Hawaiʻi to find that they are seen as undeserving, welfare-seeking immigrants.