A Chosen People, a Promised Land: Mormonism and Race in Hawaii

(Paperback)

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Christianity figured prominently in the imperial and colonial exploitation and dispossession of indigenous peoples worldwide, yet many indigenous people embrace Christian faith as part of their cultural and ethnic identities. A Chosen People, a Promised Land gets to the heart of this contradiction by exploring how Native Hawaiian members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (more commonly known as Mormons) understand and negotiate their place in this quintessentially American religion.

Mormon missionaries arrived in Hawaii in 1850, a mere twenty years after Joseph Smith founded the church. Hokulani K. Aikau traces how Native Hawaiians became integrated into the religious doctrine of the church as a chosen peopleeven at a time when exclusionary racial policies regarding black members of the church were being codified. Aikau shows how Hawaiians and other Polynesian saints came to be considered chosen and how they were able to use their venerated status toward their own spiritual, cultural, and pragmatic ends.

Using the words of Native Hawaiian Latter-Day Saints to illuminate the intersections of race, colonization, and religion, A Chosen People, a Promised Land examines Polynesian Mormon articulations of faith and identity within a larger political context of self-determination.

Reviews

"A Chosen People, a Promised Land is a fascinating book. Attending to fraught and revealing episodes in Hawaiian-Mormon history, Hokulani K. Aikau opens up new terrain for historical analysis in a manner that is theoretically engaged yet accessible."Greg Johnson, author of Sacred Claims: Repatriation and Living Tradition

"More than finding an eager audience, this pathbreaking book will add convincingly to the growing body of work inside and outside the continental United States and the Pacific Islands region that compels critical audiences in the studies of American culture and Native Pacific struggles of the absolute need to read work coming out of the other."Vicente M. Diaz, author of Repositioning the Missionary

"An excellent examination of the complex intersection of race, religion, and culture in Hawaii."Indigenous Peoples Issues and Resources

"Aikau's personal experiences, her interviews with LDS members in the islands, the inclusion of oral history and journal entires and her storytelling skills provide fresh and valuable insight into a fascinating segment of Hawaii's people and history."Honolulu Civil Beat

"This groundbreaking, transnational, and more inclusive approach to Hawaiian studies grants Native Hawaiians agency and offers a much needed alternative representation of Hawaii within the national history of the United States."American Studies

"This book shows the complicated nature of colonial interactions. Aikau masterfully uses native voices, especially through oral histories, to critique existing scholarship that has not addressed the colonial legacy of the Church. This book is an important work for other scholars to build on as they do further research on Mormonism in the Pacific."Journal of Mormon History

Author Bio

Hokulani K. Aikau is associate professor of indigenous and Native Hawaiian politics at the University of Hawaii at Mnoa. She is coeditor of Feminist Waves, Feminist Generations: Life Stories from the Academy (Minnesota, 2007).