2025 Creighton Lecture - The Place to Lay Your Body Down: Native Hawaiian Diasporic Indigeneity on Native  North American  Homelands

Register Here: University of Toronto - Creighton Lecture 2025

The Department of History at the University of Toronto invites you to the Creighton Lecture featuring Professor David Aiona Chang, for an insightful lecture on Native Hawaiian diasporic indigeneity.

In the mid-19th century, labour diasporas landed Native Hawaiians on the homelands of Native North American people from Vancouver Island down the coast to California. In this context, they confronted an ethical dilemma: how were they to approach the ideal of a reciprocal relationship to the land as a relative — an ethical ideal important to Hawaiians and many other Indigenous people? 

This talk looks to kanikau (mourning songs) composed by diasporic Native Hawaiians to understand how they thought through this question. Readings of these kanikau reveal their composers found building reciprocal relations with the land could only happen in the context of sustained and reciprocal relationships to the Indigenous people of that land. In their songs, these composers theorized diasporic Indigeneity and mapped out a way to think through core issues for diasporic Indigenous people in the present.

This event is presented by the Department of History in collaboration with the Centre for the Study of the United States (CSUS), the Asian Institute, and the Munk School of Global Affairs & Public Policy.

Abstract

In the mid-19th century, labor diasporas landed Native Hawaiians on the homelands of Native North American people from Vancouver Island down the coast to California. In this context, they confronted an ethical dilemma: how were they even to approach the ideal of a reciprocal relationship to the land as a relative—an ethical ideal important to Hawaiians and many other Indigenous people? This paper looks to kanikau (mourning songs) composed by diasporic Native Hawaiians to understand how they thought through this question. Historically and spatially situated readings of these kanikau reveal that their composers found that building reciprocal relations with the land could only happen in the context of sustained and reciprocal relationships to the Indigenous people of that land. In their songs, these composers theorized diasporic Indigeneity and mapped out a way to think through core issues for diasporic Indigenous people in the present. 

Speaker Bio:

David Aiona Chang is a Native Hawaiian historian of Indigenous people, colonialism, borders and migration in Hawaiʻi and North America, focusing especially on the histories of Native North American and Native Hawaiian people. Moving between hyperlocal and global scales, he centers the perspectives and experiences of Indigenous people, integrating close textual analysis, granular social history, Indigenous geographies and epistemologies, and theoretically informed analysis of race, gender, sexuality, and nationalism. He is the author of a number of articles and two books, The World and All the Things Upon It: Native Hawaiian Geographies of Exploration (2016) and The Color of the Land: Race, Nation, and the Politics of Landownership (2010).