Growing up in southern California, J. Kēhaulani Kauanui would spend each summer on the island of Kaua‘i in Hawaii. But she wasn’t luxuriating in hotels or vacation homes; Kauanui’s father hails from Anahola, a specially designated territory for native Hawaiians that was — and still is — regulated by blood quantum policy.
“The state requires Hawaiians to prove that they have 50% Hawaiian blood to even be on a waiting list for a lease,” Kauanui says of the land. “It is a quasi-reservation, and pretty impoverished, to boot. That fantasy of the Hawaiian Islands — I knew, as a young kid, this place was not the same.”
Kauanui carried this awareness into adulthood, dedicating her life to Indigenous studies and activism. She earned her bachelor’s degree in women’s studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and her Ph.D. in history of consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research focuses on a variety of Indigenous issues including sovereignty and self-determination, settler colonialism and decolonization, and gender and sexuality.
“My research really comes out of social movement politics and also cross-racial explorations around what we now would call solidarity.”
Quick Facts
Title
Professor of Indigenous studies and anthropology
Time at Princeton
5 months
Upcoming Class
Decolonizing Indigenous Genders and Sexualities
Kauanui’s Research: A Sampling
Hawaiian Feminism
By the time Kauanui was getting involved with the Hawaiian Renaissance movement in the 1990s, it had grown from a cultural revitalization effort focused on preserving language, hula, genealogy, traditional medicines, tattooing, and voyaging canoes to a nationalist, anti-colonial struggle. Kauanui noticed that Hawaiian women were often at the forefront of the movement, yet their role did not seem to inspire a wave of Hawaiian feminism during this period. Her current book project, tentatively titled A Question of Decolonization: Hawaiian Women and a Dilemma of Feminism, explores this disconnect and investigates what feminism means in Hawaii.
Ethical Engagement
As a professor at Wesleyan, Kauanui taught a service-oriented course called Decolonizing Indigenous Middletown. Quickly realizing there was very little research or resources available on the Wangunk, a people indigenous to central Connecticut, Kauanui founded the Wangunk Studies Working Group in 2024. It brings together community historians, archaeologists, genealogists, and academic scholars — along with tribal elder Gary Red Oak O’Neil — to conduct and share research on the Wangunk people. Kauanui hopes the group will also “be leveraged to think about ethical relations for any university living on Wangunk lands,” and hopes the Princeton community will similarly work to build on existing and ongoing efforts to engage with the Lenni-Lenape people. “What does it mean ... to actually engage in ethical ways?”
Righting Wrongs
There is a movement sweeping across North America that aims to return land to Indigenous communities. Called Landback, this movement has inspired a variety of actions: “Some city councils are giving back part of the lands that they sit on to the nearest tribe,” Kauanui says. Other examples include people returning land to tribes in their wills, churches repatriating their land, and some tribes buying their land back, she says. In recent years, millions of acres have been returned to Indigenous communities nationwide. To deepen understanding of the movement and the issues around it, Kauanui aims to teach a course at Princeton in which students choose specific instances of reclamation — and investigate them. She says the course “hits on the global and local [implications], it hits on decolonization, and it hits on solidarity.”
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