Everything is everything. Similar to how a spider might weave its web, you must bring together seemingly disparate threads and connect them to create something new, to create something useful. The thread that I have been pulling on, trying to unravel the mess that it holds, is reckoning the bridge between having an Indigenous identity and growing up in the diaspora.

Though the story exists and has been told long before I came about it, I have been struggling to define my own understanding of indigeneity and migration. The former feels defined by a sort of stability, the roots of different peoples who are connected by their resilient staying power over the centuries. The latter feels counter and almost incompatible, defined by the transitory nature of similarly diverse peoples. This isn’t to say that individuals cannot hold both truths together, but that these populations felt diametrically opposed in the core premise of place. And yet, I found a solemn similarity at our crossroads: a loss of culture. One that happens to a community, the loss of home to colonization, to displacement, to genocide, but retains its people. Another that happens perhaps for similar reasons, but ends with a more isolated fracture from home.

I come to this narrative as a kanaka maoli wahine, a Native Hawaiian woman, who grew up in Seattle with glimpses of my ancestral homeland during summer trips to visit everyone who had stayed. I’ve spent my life and dedicated my ongoing academic career to understanding what that means, a broad and vague question that doesn’t seem to have an easy answer. The journey thus far has been significantly more expensive than therapy and brought me even more questions.

But after years of classwork and dozens of essays, I’ve at least relearned how to tell my own story. In this piece, I choose to focus on my own cultural experience because that is what I know best, but I encourage the reader to find more narratives from other Indigenous people and from other migrants, particularly ones local to your area. You can find a growing map of different Indigenous communities around the world here and more Indigenous stories, movements, and actions here.

The Shared History of Indigenous Peoples

As is true with most essays, legal analyses, and last-minute wedding toasts, I believe that it is important to start with definitions. It creates a common foundation between the reader and the author, as well as benefits from being an easy hook.

For example, the word “decimation” should be defined as it is a favorite among pedants. Colloquially, we know it to mean elimination, eradication, extermination. But the actual root of the word is more humble: a mere killing of a tenth of the subject at-hand (that’s where the prefix “deci-” comes from). I propose a new definition as a compromise between the two. 

Decimation: The eradication of a population to a tenth of what it used to be.

Decimation, this new definition, is more apt to capture the true devastation of the Hawaiian people. It was not a full extinction, but a near one.

The colonization of Hawaiʻi came late in comparison to other places throughout the world, but it happened rapidly. Prior to 1778, Kānaka Maoli had crafted a thriving language, culture, and way of being. Each of the islands operated independent from one another, with each ahupuaʻa functioning as a self-sufficient and complex ecosystem. Though centuries of near isolation had birthed an extraordinary society, we were vulnerable to the outside world; within the first hundred years after European contact, there was a 90 percent decrease in the Hawaiian population directly at the fault of new diseases.

The decimation of the population was coupled with an influx of missionaries, who displaced generations of cultural traditions for their own beliefs, and incoming wealthy plantation businessmen, who created significant economic disparities and a racial divide with Native Hawaiians at the bottom of the ladder. In 1896, the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi was illegally annexed by the United States. By 1920, the population declined to just under 24,000; some estimate this to be 3 percent of the total population pre-contact. And yet, despite a near cultural and physical genocide, Native Hawaiians persevered. The ʻāina was still our home, even if we could not speak it with our native tongue.

Though heartbreaking, the broad strokes of this history are not exclusive to Hawaiʻi. Every Native culture is unique in its respective traditions and history, but this sort of near-cultural genocide is often a shared burden that we all carry. One study found that upwards of twenty percent of North American Indigenous adolescents think about their loss of land daily or even several times per day.

In continuing to write about sorrow, about the atrocities committed against my people generations ago and today still, we must also hold on to it stressed against the resilience we have developed as well. It can be dangerous to dwell in the what ifs and what should have been; it is necessary to remember that you are still here now.

The Lose-Lose in Choosing to Leave or Remain 

The promise of the American Dream is the myth that anyone can make it, so long as you work hard enough. This hyper-individualism has created a culture in which there are no bad systems, only bad people who make bad choices. It also creates a hostile environment for marginalized populations who cannot win with any choice they have. Those who stay are left with few ways to change the world around them; those who leave to seek out different opportunities are told to go back to where they came from.

When Hawaiʻi became a part of the United States, it adopted the American Dream through no want of its own. The violence of American capitalism is a deep wound; the State shifted from Hawaiian sovereignty to being controlled by the Dole Plantation. And yet, American attitudes have not managed to take root with the same hold it has in the continental United States. For example, the traditional nuclear family structure has never been prevalent among locals; instead, the Hawaiian concept of hānai relationships has won legal recognition and codification in certain state laws. The aloha spirit is steadfast and strong. But the influence of imperialism is not to be underestimated.

Given Hawaiʻi’s isolated nature and the rapidly increasing unaffordability, outmigration of its Indigenous people is a growing problem. As of 2010, approximately half of all Native Hawaiians live outside of Hawaiʻi and outmigration is expected to increase. A recent survey from Kamehameha Schools found that nearly two-fifths of Native Hawaiians surveyed who still live locally have thought about or are planning to move away from Hawaiʻi. The top reasons cited for Native Hawaiians leaving Hawaiʻi are cost of living, unaffordable housing, and lack of employment. These problems have only been exacerbated by an influx of wealthy remote workers and the dominance of the tourism industry and the military-industrial complex in the Hawaiʻi economy.

We live with an impossible choice looming overhead: stay and endure or leave in hope of something better.

The choice of migration is an individual one that has no wrong answer. However, personal choice should not be conflated with the overall trend of Indigenous people being pushed off of their homeland for reasons out of their control.

Indigeneity in the Diaspora

Indigenous groups in North America have been living through displacement for much longer than Native Hawaiians. Just 22 percent of American Indians and Alaska Natives live on reservations or other trust land. This is largely a consequence of the termination era of federal Indian policy abolishing trust status from lands as well as the career and educational opportunities located elsewhere that pull Native people away from their community. We can learn so much from our brethren on the continent about the ramifications that we might expect from migration and living away from our home. For example, Indian Health Services recognizes that Native Americans who live in urban areas “not only share the same health problems as the general Indian population,” but “their health problems are exacerbated in terms of mental and physical hardships because of the lack of family and traditional cultural environments.” 

One study on Native Hawaiian elders who had left the ʻāina found that the primary reasons for leaving were college, work, and to expand their own horizons. There were benefits to living away from Hawaiʻi, with a majority of participants mentioning greater affordability, increased opportunities for home ownership, and better circumstances for work. However, a significant portion of the interviews also reported unique cultural challenges that came with living away from Hawaiʻi, including missing family, Hawaiian food, the land, the music, the aloha spirit, and experiencing disenfranchisement, loss, and racism. 

And yet, there was little desire to return to Hawaiʻi. In fact, ten of the respondents had returned to Hawaiʻi at some point, but eight of them left again. When asked, nearly all participants felt that they would remain on the continent as they aged, but two-thirds still wanted their ashes scattered in Hawaiʻi. I think about my parents, who now have both lived away from Hawaiʻi for much longer than they ever lived here. They, too, talk about moving back as if it was a pipe dream, as if it will never happen again. They, too, visit home only to find it no longer feels like home. They, too, tell me that they still want their ashes in the warm waters off of Oʻahu.

When the elders in this study asked what advice they would give other Native Hawaiians migrating to the U.S. continent, nearly every single participant said to “create community where you are.”

A Home Beyond Place

Where do we go from here, both metaphorically and physically?

Ambelin Kwaymullina, from the Bailgu and Njamal people of the Pilbara region of Western Australia, explains that “Country is family, culture, identity. Country is self […] Country is the beginning, the middle, and the end […] This country is a living story.” But what happens when Indigenous peoples are away from their land?

“Home” is a complex concept and living in the diaspora is proof. I reflect often on that age-old question: “Where are you from? No, where really?” I think about whether the answer is my ancestral homeland, the place that birthed my community and my culture. I wonder if the answer might be where I grew up, the place that molded me over the years. I even consider if it’s the places that I have called home temporarily and question how long I must be in a place to call it home.

It’s a question that I have sought to answer for years and still haven’t been able to narrow in on any single solution that feels just right. It’s all of them, it’s none of them, it’s some combination of them that’s always changing and shifting just out of grasp. I am writing this now back in Hawaiʻi, perhaps in a hope to merge my ancestral home, my current home, and the home that continues to shape me. I thought I had moved to reconnect with the land, but that verb is not quite right; to reconnect implies I had ever lost that connection in the first place. So, instead, maybe I came here to restore, to renew, to refresh. For all I know, I came home because I felt like it was my responsibility.

It is clichéd, but true, that home is where the heart is. But it is so much more than that too. Home is not just a place, but a memory. Home is lightning in a bottle. Home is a special, singular, fleeting, passing happenstance, where everything comes together just perfectly to create you and shape you and make you who you are today, wherever you may be. It can’t ever be recaptured, but you are the living memory of a place that once was and a time that will never be again. 

Native Hawaiians regard the land as an ancestor. The Kumulipo, our story of creation, begins with Papa (Earth Mother), Wakea (Sky Father), and Haloa (the personification of the taro or kalo plant); our lineage stretches back to here: to the land, to the sky, and to the kalo. We know ʻāina to be home, but we know the ʻāina is in our blood as well.

It can be lonely, leaving the place you called home. And yet, so long as you are here with us, home is with you too.