Indigenous Hawaiian Sexuality and the Politics of Nationalist Decolonization

This chapter examines the Hawaiian sovereignty movement during the early and mid-1990s to document some of the practices of gender and sexuality based exclusion, mis-recognition, and misrepresentation to provide context for reading the contemporary gestures of True Aloha, an indigenous social media group on Facebook that emerged in the fall of 2013 in support of the Hawaii Marriage Equality Act that passed the Hawaiʻi State Legislature in November 2013. The chapter argues that, while there is Indigenous cultural revitalization of Hawaiian concepts that may be considered part of broader cultural decolonization, the State Legislature’s passage of the same-sex marriage bill is a form of settler colonial continuity.