Ho‘ailona: Homelessness, Extinction, and Conservation in Hawai‘i

Abstract

This article asks what it means for conservation scientists to label a member of an endangered, endemic species homeless. By considering the boundary-crossing figure of Ho‘ailona, a partially blind Hawaiian monk seal who was declared homeless and translocated six times between 2008 and 2009, the article argues that the language of home points to the ongoing operations of colonialism in Western conservation. Reading the discourse of homelessness offers a methodology for tracing the histories and manifestations of colonial logics as they circulate in conservation science. At the same time, the article considers how Kānaka Maoli articulated a contrapuntal claim to home that positioned Ho‘ailona as belonging in his natal waters and among a multispecies community of caregivers. Bringing together critical homelessness studies and settler colonial studies, the essay examines how settler societies and institutions use endangered marine species to make specific claims to home and, by extension, erase Indigenous claims to place.

On a warm spring day in early May 2008, a newborn Hawaiian monk seal was deserted on the sandy shoreline of Kaua‘i. His mother—a seal known by scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) as “RK22”—left the pup to survive on his own shortly after giving birth, a move she made the previous year with her first pup, who grew malnourished and was eventually euthanized. Concerned that the newborn pup would meet a similar demise and that his species would slide further toward extinction, NOAA officials made the unprecedented decision to intervene in his life. Veterinarians with NOAA Fisheries found the endangered monk seal suckling beach rocks “for comfort” and promptly transferred him to the Kewalo Marine Laboratory in Honolulu, a research station operated by the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.¹ At Kewalo veterinarians force-fed the undernourished seal until he recovered body weight and ate independently. Over the next few months he became conditioned to the caretakers who visited, fed, and played with him, learning to socialize and identify with humans instead of Hawaiian monk seals. He also developed cataracts, an exceptionally rare condition in young, free-living pinnipeds.² The seal became known by conservation scientists as “KP2”—an abbreviation for “Kaua‘i Pup 2,” the second Hawaiian monk seal pup born on Kaua‘i in 2008. As NOAA scientists grew increasingly optimistic about the seal’s chances of short-term survival, they began to overlook the constraints placed upon his future. Unbeknownst to them the monk seal would become a site of contestation where the roles of conservation science, the meanings of home, and the violence of colonialism played out, all amid the contexts of extinction.

State officials displaced and relocated the monk seal several times during his first years of life. Four months after he arrived at Kewalo NOAA veterinarians moved KP2 to a shoreline pen at the US Marine Corps Base on O‘ahu. During his three-month stay in the ocean enclosure KP2 taught himself how to hunt and his cataracts improved. In mid-December 2008, with the assistance of the US Coast Guard, NOAA scientists relocated the seal to the waters off the Kalaupapa Peninsula on Moloka‘i, a place where they hoped KP2 would coexist with other Hawaiian monk seals. Unused to living without humans, the young seal soon began visiting and playing with island residents at a wharf near Kaunakakai (fig. 1). His friendliness around Moloka‘i islanders—especially his attachment to an eleven-year-old boy, his attraction to a pink boogie board, and his playfulness with an enthusiastic dog—quickly earned him international fame.³ With the exception of some local fisherpeople who believed that seals threatened their livelihood, Moloka‘i residents—many of whom identify as Kānaka Maoli—enjoyed the monk seal’s company and saw him as a ho‘ailona, a sign of something good.⁴ Conservationists, on the other hand, viewed the multispecies play happening at the wharf as an imminent threat to humans and the seal. In a controversial move NOAA scientists relocated KP2 from Kaunakakai to an isolated coastal location six months after he became friendly with island residents. When the adolescent seal returned just a few days later, officials made the unilateral decision to remove him from Moloka‘i entirely. Without alerting island residents, NOAA staff transported KP2 to a holding tank on O‘ahu and, a month later in November 2009, sent him across the Pacific Ocean to become a research subject in the laboratory of Terrie Williams, a wildlife biologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Before the seal left, however, Kānaka community members performed a blessing, giving him the name “Ho‘ailona,” which meant, in this context, “a special seal with a special purpose.”⁵ For two years the seal lived in a small tank where he participated in experiments designed to determine Hawaiian monk seal physiology. In November 2011, with 80 percent of his vision obscured by cataracts, he was sent to the Waikīkī Aquarium in Honolulu, where he still resides.

The scientific authorities and government officials who supported Ho‘ailona’s survival came to view the seal as an aberrant outsider, a creature stuck somewhere between nature and culture who was unfit to live in his natal waters. Abandoned at birth, the “orphaned seal” was “cast out by his own species.”⁶ To make matters worse, life in captivity left him habituated to humans and visually impaired. He was, as Williams puts it in her memoir The Odyssey of KP2, “neither wild nor tame.”⁷ Unable to inhabit either category of “nature” or “culture,” Ho‘ailona defied the boundaries that organize modern science and wildlife management policy. From the perspectives of conservation scientists, the Hawaiian monk seal was “a creature that had no home.”⁸ Despite having been born on Kaua‘i and having lived on O‘ahu and Moloka‘i, Ho‘ailona became known, with all its contradictions, as the “homeless monk seal pup from Hawai[‘]i.”⁹ Such a characterization helped marine scientists move the seal from Hawai‘i, where his belonging was in question, to Williams’s lab at UC Santa Cruz, where he “found a home.”¹⁰ Corporate news outlets in Hawai‘i and the continental United States used the same language and narrative arc in their coverage of the seal’s relocation to the Waikīkī Aquarium, describing Ho‘ailona as leaving behind an itinerant life in wild nature to finally secure a stable home in the managed nature of the research laboratory and aquarium. One journalist remarked that the adolescent monk seal achieved “permanent residence” at the aquarium after a turbulent string of relocations, while the Waikīkī Aquarium’s quarterly newsletter featured a winding timeline of the seal’s movements that ended with his “new home” in captivity.¹¹ As these accounts demonstrate, the language of home and homelessness not only runs throughout conservation discourse but also provides a set of optics through which conservation issues become framed. Home, as construed in these narratives, exceeds its ecological definition. Far more than the environments and conditions necessary for a species to practice their unique lifeways, home becomes a measurement of nonhuman belonging and an idealized space managed by science.

This article asks what it means for marine conservationists to label a member of an endangered, endemic species “homeless.” Ho‘ailona offers an especially visible and tragic instance of the discursive and material evacuation of nonhumans that occurs when decision makers cast these beings as homeless, even as they continue to occupy their natal territories. Endemic to the coastal waters of Hawai‘i, Ho‘ailona and his species can only be at home in this place. The label, then, was used to achieve certain ends—namely, to provide a reason and justification for NOAA officials to displace the seal from Moloka‘i and to remove him from the entanglements he shared with residents, dogs, and other beings. It also conveniently allowed scientific authorities to construct a savior narrative, one that transformed conservationists into heroes and overlooked the injustices experienced by the Hawaiian monk seal and the communities to which he belonged.

While conservation scientists argued that the seal’s disability and behavioral conditioning made him unfit to lead a free-living existence, Kānaka Maoli have repudiated this view. They have maintained, instead, that the seal belongs with his multispecies kin and that his treatment and eventual removal by scientific authorities constituted a form of colonial violence, one that disadvantaged them as a people and produced suffering for Ho‘ailona. Seeking to further substantiate this critique, I understand marine conservation as a vehicle of displacement that separates Indigenous peoples from the nonhuman beings who sustain their cultures and selves. This article, then, joins scholarship that identifies the multiple ways Western conservation produces and legitimizes Indigenous dispossession. Postcolonial thinkers Mark Dowie, Rob Nixon, and Amitav Ghosh, among others, have demonstrated how fortress conservation projects steal Indigenous land and displace ecosystem people, often in collusion with the state and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).¹² Scholars have also begun to consider how conservation disrupts Indigenous relationships with nonhuman kin and produces suffering for humans and nonhumans alike.¹³ In addition a related body of work has emerged that outlines the core practices and goals of Indigenous conservation. Not only does this area of research examine how Indigenous conservation approaches differ from, and are impacted by, Western conservation, it also makes the case that Indigenous conservation is needed to address the ongoing erasures caused by colonialism, including species loss.¹⁴ This article engages all these critical orientations, focusing on the ways marine conservation disrupts Indigenous relationships with multispecies communities and the ways Kānaka conservation pursues healing, abundance, and justice. Such an approach acknowledges that Indigenous peoples practice their own robust forms of conservation science, and it strategically emphasizes Indigenous knowledges and relationships that are often marginalized or erased by the logics of Western conservation. Throughout the article I draw upon news coverage produced by corporate media to piece together Ho‘ailona’s story. This presents methodological challenges as “settler media” frames stories in ways that erase, obscure, and minimize Indigenous positions.¹⁵ In analyzing this material I read against the grain of settler narratives and ask how Indigenous values and perspectives erupt through the structures and ideologies of corporate media.

Bringing together critical homelessness studies and settler colonial studies, I argue that the term “homeless” points to the ongoing operations of colonialism in marine conservation. Reading the discourse of homelessness offers a methodology for tracing the histories and manifestations of colonial power as they circulate in modern conservation science. The category of home, I contend, is both a rhetorical tool used by marine conservation scientists to remove nonhuman beings from particular communities and ecologies, and a powerful analytic that can be used to trace the ongoing operations of colonialism as they manifest in Western conservation. Ho‘ailona’s experiences illustrate how settler societies and institutions use endangered marine species to make specific claims to home and, by extension, erase Indigenous claims to place.

The first section examines the worsening problem of displacement in Hawai‘i. I consider how US colonialist-capitalist activities have made it increasingly difficult for Kānaka Maoli and Hawaiian monk seals to inhabit the very islands that brought them into existence. The next section examines the multiple techniques used by conservation scientists to physically and imaginatively remove Ho‘ailona from the environments and communities that sustained him. I trace the connections linking marine conservation to police and military organizations, and to nineteenth- and twentieth-century histories of ableism and colonial disease management. Rather than see Indigenous peoples and Hawaiian monk seals as the passive victims of conservation science and its colonial regimes, I demonstrate that Kānaka Maoli and Ho‘ailona resisted the language and violence of homelessness. In the third section, then, I examine how Kānaka-led demonstrations deployed a contrapuntal claim to home to argue for the seal’s belonging and to hold conservationists accountable for mistreatment. The article concludes by describing Kānaka conservation, a complex set of experiences and knowledges premised upon justice, abundance, and healing that offer the possibility of mutual cohabitation among the po‘e (human and nonhuman beings) who populate the ‘āina and wai (land and water) of Hawai‘i.

Island Displacement

Hawai‘i has one of the highest rates of houselessness in the United States, an injustice that is actively managed by tourism corporations and state agencies seeking to promote narratives of endless relaxation, escape, and pleasure. Point-in-Time (PIT) counts from 2020 revealed that Hawai‘i had the second-highest rate of houselessness in the country.¹⁶ The majority of Hawaiians experiencing houselessness are Kānaka Maoli, or—in the colonialist terminology favored by the US government—“Native Hawaiian.” Despite representing 10 percent of Hawai‘i’s population, approximately half the people experiencing houselessness in the state identify as Native Hawaiian.¹⁷ Indeed, as a culturally diverse group, Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders suffer from houselessness at rates that far exceed any other racial or ethnic group in the United States.¹⁸ A primary factor driving the housing insecurity and displacement that overburdens Kānaka communities is the absence of affordable shelter. With a median price of $870,000 in 2020, single-family houses in O‘ahu cost 270 percent more than the national median.¹⁹ Renters face similar difficulties finding income-appropriate housing. Honolulu, for instance, recently became the third most expensive city for renters in the country.²⁰ In addition to suffering from substantial cost burdens, homeowners and renters face low inventory and few options for affordable housing. Rental vacation units built for tourists lie empty during the offseason, while pro-tourism interests aggressively push for the criminalization of unhoused people.²¹ Kānaka Maoli remain disproportionately impacted by housing injustices and other systemic inequities, including lower pay, lower education rates, and higher unemployment.

Neoliberal policies and colonial violence—along with the political, economic, and legal actors who facilitate the reproduction of these unjust structures—are collectively responsible for the housing crisis in Hawai‘i. Since the 1970s neoliberal policies instituted by the United States, the United Kingdom, and other global powers have siphoned funds for social services, including money to support affordable housing and financial safety nets.²² In its aggressive defense of free-market capitalism and individual prosperity, neoliberalism has produced extreme wealth inequality, deregulated labor forces, and stripped away environmental protections. As the National Homelessness Law Center explains, “Most paths to homelessness are . . . the result of collective policy choices over time that have created a critical deficit of adequate, affordable housing and other safety net services.”²³ The tourism industry in Hawai‘i has grown out of, and benefited from, an economic environment that favors human and ecological exploitation, unfettered wealth accumulation, and social service eradication. At the same time, centuries of colonial dispossession by the US government has systematically disadvantaged Kānaka communities. The theft of lands and waters, the pollution of environments, and the extraction of natural resources, among other colonial processes, have displaced Kānaka Maoli and weakened their social resiliency. As sovereignty activist Haunani-Kay Trask observed, “Hand in hand with protection of the ocean and land environments goes protection of the many Native cultures, which are dependent on the island/sea ecosystem.”²⁴

Colonial and neoliberal violence never stay put within species lines; rather, they operate by destroying nonhuman ecologies and severing reciprocal relationships. Equally responsible for damaging nonhuman lifeways, colonial-neoliberal orders have displaced Hawaiian monk seals and threatened the species with extinction. Endemic to a single geographically restricted area of the Pacific Ocean, Hawaiian monk seals live exclusively in the warm coastal waters of the Hawaiian islands, where they prey upon fish, cephalopods, and crustaceans. While geographic separation and hunting specialization benefited Hawaiian monk seals for millions of years when food supplies were reliable, the harmful activities of settler industries have led the seals to teeter on what Thom van Dooren calls the “dull edge of extinction.”²⁵ Collectively the loss of food resources from overfishing, entanglement in discarded fishing gear, displacement by tourists, intraspecies male aggression, erosion of beaches, military activity, historical seal hunting, and effects of toxins have limited the population to approximately 1,500 individuals.²⁶ Despite over a century of protections meant to safeguard endemic species—including the creation of the Hawaiian Islands Reservation in 1909 by President Theodore Roosevelt and its subsequent extension in 1940 by President Franklin Roosevelt, along with the creation of the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument by President George W. Bush in 2006 and its expansion by President Barack Obama a decade later—the Hawaiian monk seal has remained federally classified as endangered since 1976.²⁷

Centuries of intersecting harms have displaced Hawaiian monk seals from the waters and beaches that have historically sustained them, making it increasingly difficult for individuals to survive into adulthood, to reproduce, and to flourish. They must choose from overcrowded beaches and waters where giving birth and raising young is difficult, or from empty beaches and waters where food sources are scarce. Faced with increasingly hostile living conditions created by colonial and neoliberal forces, monk seals have become “refugees of the Anthropocene”—creatures who are unable to occupy the devastated and rapidly transformed “extinctionscapes” of the present.²⁸ As Donna Haraway laments, “The earth is full of refugees, human and not, without refuge.”²⁹ Conservation scientists call these creatures “refugee species,” or species that find themselves “confined to suboptimal habitats” where “decreasing fitness” takes its toll on populations, often quite rapidly.³⁰ Today the Hawaiian monk seal is the “most endangered marine mammal in US waters.”³¹

International tourism, military activities, fishing industries, and, increasingly, climate change have rendered the coastal waters and beaches unlivable for monk seals. Far from merely abstract structures or ideological frameworks used to organize and make sense of the world, colonialism and neoliberalism are ways of relating with land and water, relations that treat the earth as resource, dumping ground, and exploitable other.³² In some cases these dominant relations have convinced Kānaka fisherpeople that Hawaiian monk seals constitute an invasive species introduced by colonialists to consume fish and eradicate their livelihoods. A few individuals have even killed endangered monk seals, and, in at least one incident, a man was sent to prison.³³ Though anti-seal aggression remains rare, it has emerged through “the history of invasion, colonization, dispossession, and ongoing antagonisms between Native Hawaiians and outsiders.”³⁴ Even with these insurmountable troubles, however, there is some indication that the Hawaiian monk seal population is gradually increasing. The seals who live on the most populated islands have increased their population by 6.5 percent per year since the early 2000s.³⁵

The Science of Belonging

Conservation science draws upon the language of home. Conservationists use the term homeless to call attention to the problems of habitat loss, population decline, and global change. For example, Reed Noss and Dennis Murphy warned in an editorial for Conservation Biology at the height of the timber wars in the mid-1990s that northern spotted owls near Sweet Home, Oregon, would become “homeless” following a court decision that further restricted the ability of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) to protect old-growth habitats.³⁶ Similarly a Canadian magazine reporting on conservation issues cautioned its readers about “homeless caribou” after researchers learned that populations in the Eastern Rockies were “facing extinction” due to extensive habitat loss in the early 2000s.³⁷ In these instances the term homeless describes populations of endemic animals displaced by, and made vulnerable to, habitat loss. Other conservation scientists have called non-native, invasive species—including a tropical earthworm and feral cats—“homeless.”³⁸ Such examples troublingly associate non-native species with homelessness, a semantic slide that implies those suffering from homelessness and those categorized as invasive not only are synonymous but also are out of place and therefore must be removed, exterminated, or otherwise managed. Though it carries different meanings depending on species and context, the term homeless reflects broader cultural assumptions about who belongs in specific environments. When used to describe endemic species it emphasizes the displacement of populations from areas previously inhabited. When used to describe invasive species, however, the term indicates that an entire species does not belong in a particular region.

When scientists with NOAA, UC Santa Cruz, and the Waikīkī Aquarium described Ho‘ailona as homeless, they went beyond signaling his tenuous position as a member of an endangered species suffering from environmental degradation. Instead, they used the term to make larger claims about his belonging in the Hawaiian archipelago and to assert Western scientific knowledge over Kānaka expertise. The label allowed conservationists to displace Ho‘ailona, justify his repeated removal and relocation, and conceal the actors responsible for his cataracts and social conditioning. To their credit NOAA veterinarians and researchers initially acted in ways that they believed would support Ho‘ailona and his species. Marine conservationists are people who, as the multispecies ethnographer and feminist philosopher Deborah Bird Rose observes, “become committed in mind, body, and spirit to creatures with whom they don’t share a language, a culture, or a way of life except that they all live near beaches.”³⁹ The trouble is that the actions conservationists took and the tools they used ultimately produced dispossession and suffering for Ho‘ailona and Kānaka residents. Further compounding the problem, the scientists tasked with making decisions did not stop or reevaluate their colonial positions, not even amid protests by Kānaka Maoli and Ho‘ailona, nor after it became apparent that their actions were unjust toward the seal and the communities he shaped. Conservation has a long history of forcing inadequate Western frameworks onto populations in ways that erase Indigenous knowledges and harm nonhuman species, sometimes even the species receiving protection. Rather than correct the mechanisms and activities of displacement, conservation science de-homes nonhuman species. As Ho‘ailona’s experiences illustrate, Western conservation draws upon and deploys colonialist logics, including the use of force and criminalization by the militarized state and the othering of disabled bodies. Operating in tandem, the logics of militarization and ableism positioned the seal’s body as a commodity under the control of the US settler state.

NOAA repeatedly partnered with the US military and with federal and state law enforcement agencies to relocate Ho‘ailona. To move the seal from his shoreline pen at the US Marine Corps Base on O‘ahu to the coastal waters of Moloka‘i in December 2008, NOAA veterinarians turned to the US Coast Guard. Together they loaded the young seal onto an HH-65 helicopter, an aircraft used to conduct short-range rescue and drug enforcement operations, and flew him to Moloka‘i.⁴⁰ Just six months later, when Ho‘ailona garnered national attention by swimming at the Kaunakakai wharf, NOAA officials took notice and began plotting his next relocation. After a failed attempt to restrict his movements to a less populated part of the island, NOAA received reports of the seal playing rough with Kaunakakai swimmers. In July 2009, the adolescent monk seal briefly pulled Ingrid Toth, a Moloka‘i resident, under the water. Despite Toth’s protests that the monk seal should be “allowed to stay on the island,” NOAA teamed up with state and federal agencies to permanently remove him.⁴¹ At daybreak on October 16, NOAA officials joined local police and agents from the Hawai‘i Department of Land and Natural Resources (DLNR). In a move more suggestive of tactical planning than wildlife relocation, they posted guards around the Kaunakakai wharf and then woke the sleeping Ho‘ailona before corralling him into a cage. From there, the group transported the 175-pound seal to the Moloka‘i airport, where members of the US Coast Guard placed him in a C-130 cargo plane and flew him to the Barbers Point air station on O‘ahu (fig. 2).⁴² Shortly after landing, the US Navy loaded him onto “an enormous” C-17 plane that was, at the time, being used to transport bomb-detecting dolphins and flew him to Coronado, California, where Williams and a team of researchers picked him up in a rental truck and drove him to Santa Cruz.⁴³

Ho‘ailona’s multiple displacements reveal the extent to which the militarized, colonial state is implicated in marine conservation. The US military has occupied, and played a central role in controlling, the Hawaiian Archipelago since it illegally overthrew the Kingdom of Hawai‘i in 1893. Today the military operates dozens of bases, housing complexes, and training areas on two hundred thousand acres of land, making it “one of the most densely militarized regions under U.S. control.”⁴⁴ Since the early nineteenth century the US Coast Guard has been tasked with “protecting living marine resources and the sea itself,” a job that includes translocating marine animals for conservation science, and the US Navy has been transporting marine mammals since at least 1959 when the Marine Mammal Program began training bottlenose dolphins and California sea lions to detect underwater explosives.⁴⁵ Today translocation “missions” function largely to portray the US Coast Guard and Navy as environmental stewards and governmental collaborators. Partnerships between conservation scientists and the US military have, in effect, produced a version of what political ecologist Rosaleen Duffy terms “militarized conservation.”⁴⁶ Troublingly, militarized conservation has led scientific officials to deploy military technologies and tactics in the apprehension and relocation of endangered species, and it has eroded the already tenuous relationships conservation programs share with Indigenous communities.

Indeed, many Kānaka Maoli recognized NOAA’s partnership with the police and US military as ongoing colonialism. Uncle Walter Ritte—a Kānaka community organizer and sovereignty activist—described Ho‘ailona’s removal from Moloka‘i as a militaristic response carried out by the colonial state:

In addition to breaching Kānaka values of trust and open communication, the response by NOAA, the DLNR, the US military, and the police criminalized Moloka‘i residents and the young monk seal. This display of militarized conservation severed the multispecies relationships coproduced with Ho‘ailona, and dislocated the Hawaiian monk seal from the community he cocreated. Those who shared meaningful relationships with the seal felt that the reason given for his removal was wholly inadequate. As Uncle Walter retorted, “Moloka‘i people grew up in the ocean, and can protect themselves against aggressive seals.”⁴⁸ Ho‘ailona’s removal signaled the degree to which Hawai‘i functions as a “militarized outpost of empire.”⁴⁹ Throughout the nineteenth century, the US Navy freely slaughtered Hawaiian monk seals as part of its imperial surveillance of the islands. According to some experts, the military is responsible for suppressing the population to thresholds that qualified the species as endangered.⁵⁰

If the mobilization of military and police forces, along with their technologies and transportation infrastructures, enabled conservationists to displace Ho‘ailona from the ecologies and communities that mattered to him, the logic of ableism allowed them to manage Ho‘ailona’s body and justify his displacement. When the infant monk seal lived at the Kewalo Marine Laboratory, he was constantly exposed to chemicals used to clean his pool and bright, artificial lights that reflected off the water. Greg Levine, a NOAA veterinarian who helped care for Ho‘ailona at Kewalo, argued that this “combination of environmental factors” likely caused the seal to develop advanced cataracts.⁵¹ Carmen Colitz, a veterinary ophthalmologist who examined Ho‘ailona’s eyes, suggested that nutrient deficiency as a juvenile could have also contributed to premature cataract development.⁵² Researchers studying pinnipeds in Japanese aquariums and zoos recently determined that cataracts and other ophthalmic disorders are typically caused by the inadequate conditions afforded by captivity.⁵³

Conservationists began to manage Ho‘ailona’s disability once the rapid onset of cataracts became apparent at Kewalo. Relocation functioned as a management technique, one that allowed NOAA scientists to move the seal to places where his disability would be less apparent and where, it was believed, his risks of injury were reduced. Together with the US military, veterinarians first moved the juvenile seal to Marine Corps Base Hawai‘i, a sprawling military complex on O‘ahu that encompasses a peninsula separating Kāne‘ohe and Kailua Bay. For five months, Ho‘ailona lived in an ocean enclosure where he taught himself how to hunt and his cataracts improved.⁵⁴ Confident that he could survive independently, NOAA officials, together with the US Coast Guard, translocated the seal to the Kalaupapa Peninsula on Moloka‘i. Williams explains that the Kalaupapa Peninsula, “one of the most remote areas of the Main Hawaiian Islands,” was chosen as a relocation site because its “wild waters” and “isolated beaches” prevented regular contact with humans.⁵⁵

More than simply an attempt to give Ho‘ailona the best chance at life, however, the relocation to Moloka‘i recalled colonial histories of disability management, and it demonstrated the degree to which colonial logics of ableism and fear of disabled bodies continue to shape marine conservation and the lives of marine animals with disabilities. From 1866 to 1969, the Hawaiian government—first under the rule of the Hawaiian monarchy and then under the colonial United States—sent an estimated eight thousand Hawaiians believed to have contracted Hansen’s disease, or leprosy, to the Kalaupapa Peninsula on Moloka‘i.⁵⁶ A bacterial infection that can cause bodily disfigurement, paralysis, scarring, and blindness when left unmedicated, Hansen’s disease was viewed by government officials as a disease to be “feared,” not “treated.”⁵⁷ By removing those who were said to “endanger the health of others” and allowing these individuals to suffer, often until their death, the Hawaiian government practiced an official policy of ableism in their efforts to control the disease.⁵⁸ Such ableist policies of displacement were inseparable from racial and colonial violence; an estimated 90 percent of those relocated to Moloka‘i were Kānaka Maoli.⁵⁹ Seen as socially impure and racially inferior, and thus more susceptible to the disease, suspected Kānaka patients were “arrested” by police officers and sheriffs and forcibly brought to the state-managed board of health.⁶⁰ After health care workers evaluated the new arrivals, often through nonconsensual procedures, police transported those diagnosed to Kalaupapa, where it was expected they would “never return to society.”⁶¹ As the critical race scholar Neel Ahuja explains, efforts to contain Hansen’s disease relied upon the incarceration and erasure of Kānaka Maoli. From the perspective of the settler state, “the risky touch of the so-called leper suggested the endangerment of able-bodied whiteness.”⁶² To protect bodies marked as white and able from the “bioinsecurities” of Hawai‘i and to eradicate the peoples who lived in this place since time immemorial, the colonial state criminalized, separated, and neglected thousands of Kānaka community leaders and family members.

The Hawaiian government strategically chose the Kalaupapa Peninsula as a resettlement site for people diagnosed with Hansen’s disease. With its high sea walls and rough waters, this region of Moloka‘i was viewed as a “natural prison,” a place “set apart” from the rest of the Hawaiian archipelago.⁶³ Acting as a “natural quarantine facility,” Kalaupapa was believed to prevent the disease from spreading throughout Hawai‘i by confining prisoner-patients to a geographically restricted place and minimizing visits from outsiders.⁶⁴ The move to relocate populations deemed undesirable—whether prisoners, individuals with disabilities, or the sick—to marginalized lands has been a tactic of containment practiced by colonial powers for centuries. Indeed, a “strategy of containment” drives settler-colonial endeavors to control land and manage Indigenous bodies.⁶⁵ Despite efforts by the state to operationalize what might be called an “ecology of containment and incarceration,” Kalaupapa residents created community with one another and maintained meaningful relationships across Hawai‘i. Today many of the Kānaka residents living on Moloka‘i are descendants of people separated from their families and exiled during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.⁶⁶ It is little surprise, then, that island residents saw a kindred spirit in the young Hawaiian monk seal who played at the wharf.

Conservationists pointed to Ho‘ailona’s disability as a justification for relocating the seal and, eventually, an excuse to keep him in captivity. NOAA officials first moved the seal to Marine Corps Base Hawai‘i and the Kalaupapa Peninsula because they believed these locations would provide some relief for his cataracts. When Ho‘ailona departed Moloka‘i in a C-130 aircraft, cataracts obscured an estimated 80 percent of his vision.⁶⁷ In the month before his translocation to California, veterinarians assessed his eyes and determined that cataract surgery could improve his vision.⁶⁸ However, once in California, another group of veterinarians determined that cataract surgery was not feasible. They decided that “the risks of operating on his eyes posed a greater risk than the inconvenience Ho[‘]ailona is experiencing from his condition.”⁶⁹ At this point conservationists began arguing that the seal’s impairment necessitated a captive life. Gone were concerns about aggression and social conditioning; instead, marine conservationists contended that because Ho‘ailona was “unlikely to survive in the wild” with advanced cataracts in both eyes, he had to lead “a life in captivity.”⁷⁰

As work emerging at the intersections of disability studies and critical animal studies demonstrates, however, nonhumans living with disabilities can flourish outside of captivity. “Recent research offers numerous examples of disabled animals surviving and sometimes thriving,” disability and animal rights scholar Sunaura Taylor explains.⁷¹ Animals with disabilities, Taylor argues, have suffered from ableist logics that position them as “aberrant” and “unnatural,” and therefore “better off dead.”⁷² The disability and queer rights activist Eli Clare observes that the categories of “natural” and “normal” are coconstitutive: what is normal is natural, and vice versa.⁷³ The biological sciences, for instance, teach that “survival of the fittest” results in the total elimination of nonhumans with disabilities.⁷⁴ Instead of viewing his disability as another way of occupying and navigating the world among myriad ways of doing so, marine conservationists viewed Ho‘ailona’s cataracts as a severe limitation that would have led to premature death had NOAA staff not relocated him. During Ho‘ailona’s seven translocations, conservationists opted not to relocate him to places where he could flourish, but rather moved him to places where they believed he was less likely to hurt himself, cause injury to others, or die.

In deploying the interconnected logics of criminalization and ableism to repeatedly displace Ho‘ailona, conservation science revealed its complicity with, and active participation in, the colonial state. Each act of removal participated in colonial structures, histories, and narratives that further dispossessed Moloka‘i communities and disadvantaged Ho‘ailona. As political scientists Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller and Noenoe Silva argue, ecological science and the state collude to manage nonhuman beings and Indigenous communities, typically in ways that “bury responsibility for the settler state’s own destruction of land and animal habitat in scientific management.”⁷⁵ They refer to this collective entity as “the ecological state.”⁷⁶ In Ho‘ailona’s case, the ecological state constituted a constellation of scientific, military, and governmental actors that collectively dislocated Ho‘ailona and, by doing so, vacated Kānaka kin relations with nonhumans and harmed the monk seal. Moreover, the process of displacement transformed Ho‘ailona into a “lively commodity,” a living entity owned and managed by the ecological state that accumulates social and economic value as it circulates amid wider systems of meaning.⁷⁷ In this case the logics of militarization and disability aligned Ho‘ailona with the categories of the infirm, the criminal, and the homeless.

Kānaka Resistance and Conservation

Outraged by the colonialist, scientific mismanagement of Ho‘ailona and his species, many Kānaka Maoli and haole protestors—all possessing different historical relations with the island and its inhabitants—led efforts to articulate a contrapuntal claim to home that positioned the Hawaiian monk seal as belonging among a community of caregivers in his natal waters. Ho‘ailona’s disability was the initial point of conflict between protestors and conservationists, as the former sought to hold the latter accountable. When the young monk seal first arrived at Kaunakakai, Moloka‘i residents noticed his clouded eyes. Out of concern for the seal’s well-being, volunteers immediately reported his cataracts to NOAA officials who “never sent a doctor to check on him.”⁷⁸ Kānaka residents revisited the issue when Ho‘ailona was forcibly removed from Moloka‘i. Arguing that “the seal should have been treated for cataracts months ago,” a group of protestors organized by Uncle Walter asked conservation scientists with NOAA and UC Santa Cruz to promise that veterinarians would operate on his cataracts once he arrived in California.⁷⁹ Conservation officials assured protestors that the “best surgeon and staff will come in from all over the country for the operation.”⁸⁰ This never transpired as veterinarians determined that cataract surgery could not proceed. In demanding that conservationists address Ho‘ailona’s cataracts via medical intervention, Kānaka-led protestors sought accountability and health justice for the seal.

In the days and weeks following Ho‘ailona’s removal from Moloka‘i, community members mobilized their own vernacular of belonging. Against declarations of the seal’s homelessness, they argued that the Hawaiian monk seal had already cocreated a home with them, and that translocation erased the multispecies relationships so many shared with the seal. During October and November 2009, Kānaka and non-Kānaka residents wrote letters to their state representative, organized a public protest outside the Waikīkī Aquarium, and performed a blessing ceremony. Though settler media covered these events, the protest and ceremony explicitly centered Kānaka values of community decision-making, open communication, and spiritual blessing. At the protest Uncle Walter and dozens of community activists requested that Ho‘ailona be brought “back home to Moloka‘i.”⁸¹ They marched with signs that read “NOAA STOLE OUR SEAL,” “SHARKS ARE DANGEROUS, NOT SEALS,” and “BRING OUR SEAL HOME.”⁸² A few weeks after the march, Kānaka community members gathered to perform a blessing. Alongside guests from NOAA, Moloka‘i islanders of all ages remembered the joy this “dog who runs in rough seas” brought to their community.⁸³ Led by Reverend David Kaupu, they gave the seal the name “Ho‘ailona,” after the Hawaiian word for “symbol” or “sign,” and wished him safe passage across the Pacific.⁸⁴ These communal acts of resistance challenged the colonialist logics and tactics that rendered Ho‘ailona out of place. They asserted that the seal already had a home and need not be relocated. Each became a display of “multispecies solidarity,” a way to claim the seal as one of their kind and to declare their ongoing commitments to his well-being.⁸⁵

By taking up the category of home to argue for Ho‘ailona’s continued existence on Moloka‘i, Kānaka-led activists sought to reestablish the multispecies kin relations vacated by conservation science. For some, his presence offered a glimpse of the relationships their ancestors may have enjoyed before colonialism, and then neoliberalism, arrived. As Uncle Walter told one journalist, “The [Indigenous] Hawaiians are trying to survive, and the monk seals are trying to survive. There’s a strong relationship with the seals. Now that the seals are back, the Hawaiians need to have time to reintroduce themselves to the seals.”⁸⁶ As a “sign” of future relations with his kin, Ho‘ailona gave residents the chance to “reintroduce themselves” to a creature many had never known. The term home, then, encompassed the multispecies relationships and ecologies that Moloka‘i residents cultivated with Ho‘ailona and members of his species. Moloka‘i musician Uncle Lono Hirakawa, for example, drew upon this understanding in a spiritual song he wrote for the island’s children. In the only English verse of the Hawaiian-language song, Uncle Lono asks the deities, and perhaps those in power, to “Please, oh please, bring Ho‘ailona home.”⁸⁷ The home at the center of the song is a place where humans and seal care for, and learn from, each other.

After officials removed Ho‘ailona from Moloka‘i, Kānaka residents developed their own conservation plan, one modeled on Indigenous values, kin relations, and ancestral architecture. Designed from the perspective of Ho‘ailona—who, they believed, should “have a say in where he’s going to go”—Kānaka leaders proposed building an “ocean enclosure where ‘tame’ seals can safely live” and “the species can survive.”⁸⁸ Uncle Walter offered to keep Ho‘ailona in a sixty-acre fishpond along the Moloka‘i shoreline that had been built and used by Kānaka Maoli for centuries.⁸⁹ Requiring “intimate observation of environmental processes specific to particular places and from the deep relationships that Kanaka Maoli had (and some still have) with our ‘āina and kai (seas),” fishponds, or loko kuapā, are built by constructing stone walls in shallow ocean water.⁹⁰ The rising tides draw fish over the walls and then, once inside the ocean sanctuary, the fish grow, reproduce, and provide a steady food source for Kānaka communities.⁹¹ As Moloka‘i leaders saw it, the fishpond enclosure would give Ho‘ailona the opportunity to live with other Hawaiian monk seals in a food-rich and stimulating environment, all while sustaining a web of interrelations among the monk seal and Moloka‘i residents. Conservationists with NOAA, however, claimed that housing Ho‘ailona in such an enclosure would be too expensive.⁹²

The plan to house Ho‘ailona in a loko kuapā–style enclosure centered Kānaka knowledges, worldviews, and familial relations. An example of Indigenous conservation science, the proposal accounted for Ho‘ailona’s needs as a free-living, endemic resident of Hawai‘i, and it offered ways to cultivate and maintain the relationships he shared with humans and nonhumans. A fishpond promotes Kānaka economies of abundance over the economies of scarcity produced by the ecological state, and it creates communal modes of living that disrupt the anti-Indigenous and anti-animal logics of neoliberalism and colonialism.⁹³ By supporting reciprocal, kin-based relationships among humans and monk seals, fishponds reconnect Kānaka Maoli to their endangered ocean relatives, and they strengthen their spiritual “mana,” or the “life force” that flows from “familial relationships with nature.”⁹⁴ The seal sanctuary imagined by Uncle Walter and others promised to support Kānaka sovereignty, all while providing a nurturing place where Ho‘ailona and his species could thrive. As Kānaka organizer Kumu ‘Īmaikalani Winchester explained, “The push toward sovereignty and independence is as much about interdependence and the realization of it.”⁹⁵ While Ho‘ailona continues to benefit from human engagement at the Waikīkī Aquarium, he has been reduced to a flag bearer of extinction, an “ambassador” or “spokesseal” for his doomed species.⁹⁶ In their proposal to establish an ocean enclosure, Kānaka residents pursued pono, or “harmonious relationships, justice, and healing,” among seals, themselves, and their shared communities.⁹⁷

This model of Indigenous conservation aimed to heal the lands, waters, and multispecies relationships compromised by the ecological state. By proposing a community-based solution that celebrated kinship and abundance, Kānaka residents contended that the search for animal refuges located outside the catastrophes of modernity is not only misguided but also harmful. The task ahead requires healing the places, beings, and relationships that hold our worlds together. Such work necessarily involves partnering with Kānaka Maoli, and doing so in ways that center and privilege their knowledges, histories, and values, while also addressing “the contemporary manifestations of colonial power that continue to structure conservation.”⁹⁸ In attending to past and present wrongs and listening to those harmed, conservationists can begin to create more livable homes for Kānaka Maoli, Hawaiian monk seals, and diverse others.

Acknowledgments

I would like to express deep gratitude toward the interlocutors who told part of Ho‘ailona’s story, especially the seal’s Kānaka companions. Early drafts of this article were shared at the American Comparative Literature Association’s 2021 conference and the Blue Extinction Symposium. Many thanks to Tess Shewry, Yanoula Athanassakis, and Melody Jue for offering comments at these events. Also, thanks to Thom van Dooren and the editorial team at The Living Archive for publishing an earlier essay on Ho‘ailona. The project has also benefited from conversations with past and present colleagues at Princeton University. Special thanks to Christian Rivera, Juan Rubio, Davy Knittle, Nathan Jesse, Maria Taylor, and Agustín Fuentes. Finally, I owe thanks to Stacy Alaimo and Kyle Keeler for discussing and teaching early versions of this project at the University of Oregon, along with the anonymous reviewers whose comments shaped my thinking.

Notes

References