Mapping Sovereignty in Print: Moʻolelo as Visual Cartographies in the Nūpepa

Abstract This article argues that moʻolelo ʻāina (land narratives) published in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century nūpepa (Hawaiian language newspapers) are a crucial archive for understanding Kānaka Maoli visual cartographies of resistance. Framing the nūpepa as a colonial-imported yet Native-transformed print medium, I demonstrate how it became a critical nexus for Indigenous visual and spatial forms of refusal against an encroaching, multiethnic settler matrix. I argue that toponymic silencing—the conscious cartographic erasure of Indigenous place names—is a form of cognitive imperialism within settler colonial projects. In response, Kanaka Maoli writers, such as J. W. H. I. Kihe, actively engaged in a practice of “Kanaka performance cartography” through print. By intricately detailing locations and their associated histories in moʻolelo, these authors created alternative spatio-visual landscapes that countered the imposition of colonial spatial narratives and the decerebralization of Kanaka Maoli thought. Focusing on the contested history of Kaʻawaloa on Hawaiʻi Island, this essay demonstrates how Kihe’s detailed moʻolelo served as counter-histories to territorial naming practices, such as the post office’s adoption of “Captain Cook,” which aimed to render Kanaka Maoli lands legible as property. Moving beyond conventional deterministic frameworks that view the 1848 Māhele as an absolute initial dispossession, I draw on recent historiography to illuminate how Kānaka strategically navigated public land grants to maintain possession under an independent Kingdom, shifting the critical locus of actualized dispossession to the illegal overthrow of 1893. Finally, my analysis positions the nūpepa as a cross-cultural, transpacific medium circulating within a changing landscape where Asian immigrant laborers simultaneously navigated their own displacements and competed for agricultural space. By connecting these historical “settler map-overs” to the contemporary landscape of multiethnic Asian settler colonial governance such as the naming of the Daniel K. Inouye Highway, this work highlights how moʻolelo in print remain vital, enduring acts of Kanaka Maoli survivance and intellectual sovereignty that preserve the essence of a place for decolonial futures.