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The Past before Us: Mo'okū'auhau as Methodology, edited by Nālani Wilson-Hokowhitu. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2019. ISBN hardback 9780824873387; ISBN paper 9780824873394; xiv + 158 pages, index. Hardback, US$78.00; paper, US$27.00.
In recent years, the publication of texts reflecting on Indigenous Pacific research approaches has brought renewed attention to Pacific studies' focus on Indigenous research methods. Edited by Nālani Wilson-Hokowhitu, The Past before Us: Mo'okū'auhau as Methodology looks to mo'okū'auhau-a term that is often "mistakenly oversimplified as 'genealogy'" (2) but rather refers to "a complex web of relationality in which everything in our native island world . .. [is] kin"-as a crucial odological (vii-viii). As a methodology, mo'okū'auhau locates Kanaka 'Öiwi, one of several terms Native Hawaiians use to describe ourselves (vii), in relation to the "vastness of Kanaka 'Öiwi familial relationships that extend well beyond the human realm to include islands, oceans, planets, and the universe" (1). Because mo'okū'auhau "within the Kanaka 'Öiwi worldview. . . extend[s] to the first single-cell organisms," to place mo'okū'auhau at the center of our methodologies is to speak "to the succession of our ancestors and the mana in their bones, buried in the 'āina (land), which establishes our place to stand tall, our place from which to speak, protect, defend, and love" (2). Because mo'okū'auhau grounds the researcher or practitioner in a relationship to the more-than-human world, mo'okū'auhau as methodology allows us to think of "the function of Indigenous, Pacific, and Kanaka 'Öiwi scholarship . . . to be a vehicle for expanding consciousness" (4).
Contributors to The Past before Us, ranging from scholars of Hawaiian literature to cultural practitioners, all place mo'okū'auhau at the center of their methodological reflections. For example, Kanaka 'Öiwi cultural practitioner Kū Kahakalau reflects on the ways in which her methodology of mā'awe pono,...