“National Defense Is Based on Land”: Landscapes of Settler Militarism in Hawai‘i
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Published:September 2024
This chapter examines the US federal government’s acquisition of land for military purposes via eminent domain cases in the US district court, and via leases, licenses, and permits from the territorial government and private landowners. Legal regimes of eminent domain and land leasing employed capitalist logics of property and fair exchange to conceal the reiteration of primitive accumulation and render the US military’s unilateral environmental desecration of Hawaiian land as “just.” At the same time, this settler military logic was always responding to Native sovereignty and assertions of the right to remain: prior to military occupation and desecration of landscapes on Kaho‘olawe and at M?kua Valley, Kanaka Maoli had thrived there for generations.
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