The Plantation as Contested Territory: Aloha ʻĀina and Indigenous Resistance in Shark Dialogues

Shark Dialogues (1995) by Kiana Davenport introduces a critical question often overlooked in Hawaiian plantation literature: not only how communities survived, but whose ʻāina (land) was taken. Davenport addresses this through Pono, a Kānaka woman whose story reveals the plantation’s impact on land, bodies, and family lines, from forced labor on the ancestral land to the reclamation of 300 acres lost due to the stigma of colonial disease. This article examines reclamation through Aloha ʻĀina, the deep relationship between the lāhui Hawaiʻi and the land, and argues that Davenport presents it as an ongoing political practice rather than a narrative conclusion. Pono passes this responsibility, or kuleana, for ancestral land to her hapa granddaughters based on practice rather than documented bloodline. Thus, land-based practice, not racial purity, becomes central to Kānaka identity.