What Returns, What Remains

Abstract: In February 2020, a group of Kanaka 'Ōiwi cultural practitioners arrived in Cambridge, England, to repatriate ancestral remains stolen from Hawai'i in the late nineteenth century. This essay explores the possession, return, and interpretation of these remains, specifically fourteen iwi po'o (human skulls) originating from the Pali, an important historic battle site in the Ko'olau mountain range of O'ahu. In telling the story of their possession and dispossession, I draw upon theories of haunting from Indigenous studies and Black studies in order to challenge the way that settler colonial structures work to limit and potentially foreclose Hawaiian relationships to spiritual presence and placemaking. Through the Native Hawaiian concept of ho'opahulu, which, in 'ōlelo Hawai'i (Hawaiian language), encompasses both spectrality and the exhaustion of land from overfarming, this essay highlights connections between land, spirit, and haunting that provide a more comprehensive framework for understanding spectral placemaking beyond colonial geographies. In doing so, I argue against possessive logics, showing how contemporary Hawaiian cultural geographies fundamentally refuse, upend, and replant relations that exceed the American state.