Hawai’i Steering Committee Statement

Message from the steering committee on the 2026 AAAS Honolulu conference

We are writing as a coalition of Kanaka ʻŌiwi scholars and members of the Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS) across the University of Hawaiʻi system. Since the release of the CFP for the April 2-4, 2026, AAAS conference in Honolulu, we have been aware of online critiques regarding the conference venue as reflecting Asian settler colonial dynamics through what some call “colonial conferencing.” This statement lays out alternative ways to turn the conference into an opportunity to radically engage with Kanaka ʻŌiwi and their relations with land and water, and in the process reflect on Indigenous and Asian settler relationalities. The statement also provides an explanation of the conference site and clarifies the proposed institutional changes.

Because the Hawaiʻi-based AAAS membership was not consulted, many of us were surprised that the national conference was going to be held at the Hilton Hawaiian Village in Waikīkī. The previous AAAS board selected this site three years ago, focusing on the hotel’s strong union representation but overlooking the fact that the hotel complex sits on land desecrated and degraded by settler colonial institutions. As such, we have asked the association to amend the AAAS bylaws given the association’s missteps in determining a venue without adequate and sustained consultation with the Indigenous and local community. The new bylaws will create concrete structural reform to the association’s practices and establish an ongoing process of relationship-building with Indigenous peoples at future conference sites.

Despite the previous AAAS board’s lack of foresight, the Kanaka ʻŌiwi members of our committee have urged us to turn this into an opportunity to reframe Waikīkī as a wahi pana, a storied place, and to reclaim Waikīkī as Hawaiian land with a Hawaiian history and future. These ideas first originated in a meeting with Kanaka ʻŌiwi and Hawaiʻi-based community organizers and scholars to voice concerns over the conference. As a result, we formed this ad hoc Steering Committee composed of Hawaiʻi-based AAAS members and Kanaka ʻŌiwi scholars to move forward with the conference with kuleana, a sense of responsibility and accountability that one is given and continues to earn by being in good relations with community and land. Collectively, we have decided that, like other academic conferences recently held in Hawaiʻi such as the American Association of Geographers (2024), American Studies Association (2019), and Native American Indigenous Studies Association (2016), there are ways to host the conference in a manner that highlights not only the devastations of settler occupation but also the everyday resistances against it. In so doing, the conference can offer critical opportunities for attendees to learn about and support Kanaka ʻŌiwi land, water, and entitlement protection movements while grappling with the ongoing challenges of U.S. settler colonialism.

While holding the AAAS conference at the Hilton Hawaiian Village was not our choice, we would like for AAAS members to come as responsible guests, not tourists. As such, we would like guests to look beneath and beyond the tourist resort to visit Kālia, Waikīkī, as a wahi pana. Kālia, the name of the land on which the resort sits, can be translated as “Waited For.” Before the hotels, manufactured beaches, and entitled tourists, Waikīkī was a fertile marshland supporting farms and several fishponds (by some counts as many as 45). Kālia itself had 10 loko puʻuone, inland shore fishponds naturally formed by a sand berm that sheltered the muliwai (brackish water) so young ʻamaʻama (mullet) and awa (milkfish) could proliferate. This land was an ʻāina momona, abundant in diverse fish, a wide variety of edible seaweeds (Kālia was renowned for its limu līpoa), and further inland, kalo, ʻuala (sweet potatoes), and maiʻa (bananas) were grown. Following Asian immigrant labor on the sugar plantations, rice was grown as well.  This was a prized and famous land that nurtured and fed generations of Oʻahu’s people, and also held their bones after they died. This was before the ecological destruction that came with the onslaught of U.S. militarization and tourism following the illegal annexation of Hawaiʻi to the United States. The Hilton Hawaiian Village was built as part of the colonial project to displace and disconnect Hawaiian and other local people from their lands, forcing all into a wage and service economy, while profiting from the exploitation of Hawaiian culture and Pacific Islander and Asian labor. Yes, to stay at the Hilton Hawaiian Village is to be immersed in that violent colonial project. This is an uncomfortable but undeniable truth. We invite you to confront and act with us, as responsible guests, in resisting and dismantling these colonial structures through education, analysis, and decolonial praxis. We invite AAAS members to join us in this fight.

All of the lands and waters claimed by the United States, from Turtle Island to the Hawaiian Islands, are Indigenous. AAAS has been a critical site for problematizing these realities and has provided space for scholars who began organizing against Asian settler occupation nearly 25 years ago by acting as allies in Kanaka ʻŌiwi struggles to end U.S. occupation. Moreover, AAAS was the first U.S. academic institution in 2013 to courageously support the call from the Palestinian society to endorse the academic boycott of Israeli academic institutions. In 2017, AAAS pulled out of the conference site in Tennessee after legislators there banned gender affirming care for transgender minors and sought to prevent same sex marriage. AAAS has yet to recover financially from this principled stand.

In this spirit and as Hawaiʻi-based scholars and activists with actual stakes in the future of such issues, we hope that the conference will foster genuine decolonial conversations in the face of a settler colonial engendered fascism. These conversations feel especially urgent given the fact that we are in a dangerous moment where non-citizens are facing deportation and detention thus further entrenching white supremacist control. We believe that the conference will provide meaningful points of departure from which to think through Indigenous and Asian relationalities, Kanaka ʻŌiwi political independence and land-based movements, the logics of empire, white supremacy, racial capitalism, labor, militarism, tourism, multicultural forms of settler colonialism, and the rampant fascism of this historical moment.

We are thus committed to the CFP’s provocation: “How can we attend to the contradictions of our presence in Hawai‘i as an organization in light of Kanaka Maoli calls for consent and reciprocity?” To this end, we wish to offer multiple opportunities for AAAS members to learn about and reflect on what it means to be in Hawai‘i as guests who take seriously these calls to be in good relation with Kanaka ‘Ōiwi and in solidarity with those working toward decolonial futures. In the coming weeks, we will post information on:

• A series of pre-conference webinars on Hawaiʻi that will help conference participants set their intentionality and to think critically not only about what reciprocity means but also what they have to concretely offer to Hawaiʻi;
• Several huakaʻi, or tours, that allow conference participants to engage in reciprocity work while learning, including work on a loʻi and ancestral fishing grounds, and seeing  firsthand military installations around Oʻahu;
• AAAS-sponsored Kanaka ‘Ōiwi-centered plenaries that foreground Kanaka Maoli struggles to protect lands and waters and to dismantle the structures of settler occupation; and
• A resource syllabus of readings on settler colonialism in Hawaiʻi and other Indigenous lands.

As the CFP reminds us, “Hawai‘i serves as a space, place, and time through which to collectively reflect on, respond to, and/or reckon with settler colonial and U.S. imperial desires and designs that continue to shape everyday life and futures.” We encourage and invite you to think critically and collectively with us through the upcoming programming and resources as we prepare for the 2026 conference in Honolulu.

2025-2026 Hawai‘i Ad Hoc Steering Committee, October 2025

Maile Arvin
Monisha Das Gupta
Leanne Day
Candace Fujikane
Kristiana Kahakauwila
Kyle Kajihiro
S. Heijin Lee
Joyce Mariano
Brandy Nālani McDougall
Dean Saranillio
Lawrence Ypil
Department of Ethnic Studies, UH-Mānoa