From “Squatter” to Homesteader: Being Hawaiian in an American City

Papakōlea, a neighborhood at the edge of downtown Honolulu, was granted legal status as a Hawaiian Homestead in 1934. The urban homestead represented an important departure from the 1921 Hawaiian Homes Commission Act, a congressional act whose purpose was to “rehabilitate” Native Hawaiians by returning them to the land. My paper examines the steps through which residents of a city neighborhood turned to their advantage an act emphasizing the rural basis of authentic Native Hawaiian identity. I argue that from the 1920s until the present, activists have drawn on interpretations of being Hawaiian as a primary tactic for claiming rights to urban land in an American legal context. In conclusion, I suggest that Papakōlea exemplifies the role that legal protection of a social space, the essence of the homestead idea beyond its ill‐fated rural model, can play in establishing and preserving indigenous identities, community engagement, and the activism of an urban population. [Indigeneity, Hawaiian Homes Commission Act, Honolulu, social activism]