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A Chosen People, A Promised Land: Mormonism and Race in Hawai'i, by Hokulani K Aikau. First Peoples: New Directions in Indigenous Studies Series. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012. isbn cloth, 978-0-8166-7461-9; paper, 978-08166-7462-6; xiii + 232 pages, photographs, notes, glossary, bibliography, index. Cloth, us $67.50; paper, us$22.50.
Hokulani K Aikau's A Chosen People, A Promised Land: Mormonism and Race in Hawai'i critically reflects on the history and contemporary life of Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders in the Mormon Church, with a focus on how the North Shore town of La'ie, O'ahu, developed into the Mormon community it is today. The book's central concern is with the seeming paradox of how "colonial religious traditions such as Mormonism can be lived and inhabited as sites and sources of indigenous cultural vitality" (xii), which Aikau argues hinges on an "ideology of faithfulness" embedded within the discourse of Polynesian people being designated a "chosen people" by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (lds). The book provides both an essential history of the establishment of Mormonism in Hawai'i and an ethnographic account of what Mormonism means to Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders who first migrated to La'ie to serve the Church in the early to mid-twentieth century. In productive conversation with Pacific studies, Indigenous studies, and Hawaiian studies, Aikau is deeply critical of the roles has played in the US colonization of Hawai'i. At the same time, acknowledging her own Native Hawaiian family's experience within the Church, Aikau is thoughtfully attentive to the multiple spiritual, material, and political reasons why Pacific Islander members find participation in the Church meaningful.
As the book explains, Mormon missionaries first arrived in Hawai'i in 1850 seeking primarily to convert Hawai'i's haole (white, foreign) residents but unexpectedly found Native Hawaiians...