Abstract
A decade of controversy over the Akaka Bill that would extend recognition to native Hawaiians under Article I, Section 8 of the US Constitution has debated numerous meanings of the Indian in an effort to reconstitute Hawaiian governance. This paper applies a theory of legal aesthetics to apprehend the postcolonial dynamics of legal recognition through the trope of the Indian. It shows that the persistence of the Indian as a hollowed legal fiction enabling the power of Western law is also susceptible to a creative play in which law is resisted and deflected into new ideas of indigenous sovereignty. The trope of the Indian persists not only as a marker of the continuing discursive divide between what is civilized and savage, but also as a mechanism for aesthetic reimagination of alternative political possibilities.
