ABSTRACT
The nomoscapes of mako’ainana and ali’i, of ahupua’a, ‘a-pana, and ‘ili appear to have disappeared. Certainly the king is gone, even if some Native Hawaiians assert the continued existence of the Kingdom (Kamakawiwoole Osorio, 2004). The distinctive nomic settings that once organized social life and social relations have been replaced by state parks, naval bases, public housing, condominiums, schools, and hotels. In many respects the nomospheric organization of everyday life in Honolulu now resembles Manhattan as much as, if not more than, it does Fiji. In the mid-nineteenth century, American missionaries such as Hiram Brigham, and lawyers like William Lee, sought to change Hawaii from what they regarded as a backward, feudal society to a modern nation-state (Merry, 2000). Stuart Banner quotes Stanford Dole, President of the Hawaiian Republic after the overthrow of the monarchy, that the Ma-lele was an effort “to climb the difficult path from a selfish feudalism to equal rights, from royal control of all the public domain to peasant proprietorship and fee simple titles for poor and for rich” (Banner, 2005: 275). In 1840 the missionaries and lawyers helped King Kamehameha I establish a constitutional monarchy with all of the attributes of Western notions of sovereignty and government, including a bicameral legislature and a Supreme Court-on which William Lee served as the first Chief Justice. They then initiated a widespread land-reform movement (the Great Ma-hele) whose aim was to reconfigure “property” so as to conform to modern ideas of fee simple ownership (Executive Organic Act of 1845). A Land Commission was established that required occupants to make claims and give testimony. It was empowered to make determinations and awards (Stauffer, 2004). As Banner tells us:
The Commission was charged, not just with cases where two people claimed the same land, and not just with land claims from foreigners, but with converting all the land in Hawaii from an oral tenure to a scheme of written titles, even land that had been uncontroversially used by particular Hawaiian families for as long as anyone could remember. This was a massive transformation of the Hawaiian property system, for
the purpose of creating a formal written record of who owned what, on every square foot of every island.
