Indigeneity and nation, sovereignty and self-determination, ethnicity and race are abstract concepts that gain significance in the political field, where they take shape through the positions that parties, groups, or individual entrepreneurs promote. Political actors pin their hopes on their ability to affect the political discourses about Hawaiian indigeneity and nationalism, self-determination and sovereignty, and to shape the way Hawaiians (native and local) think about themselves and the way Hawai'i should be governed. Cultural anthropologists, because they study ordinary people, families, kinship networks, and communities, are interested in the further-reaching and more complicated questions of the extent and manner in which concepts like indigeneity or sovereignty, and selfdetermination retain any meaning in the social field of Native Hawaiians. Does a concept like indigeneity reflect and unify the ways (native) Hawaiians identify themselves and understand themselves as being Hawaiian?Keywords: Hawaiian indigeneity; Native Hawaiians; national sovereignty; indigenous political movements.In the mid-1980s, when Judith began to plan a project in Hawai'i, she phoned a US foundation that promised grants for 'work with indigenous peoples'. She explained her plans to a person who, when she finished, said with some embarrassment, 'we never thought of Hawaiians as indigenous people'. The foundation representative promised to consult with her board about the possibility of including Hawaiians in their category, and ended up informing Judith that the foundation would continue to focus on 'Native Americans', the indigenous people of their 'mission'.The external story Á the US mainland view of Hawaiians as not indigenous to the United States Á has an internal counterpart. In the early 1990s, our friend John frequently talked with us (in person and in letters) about the sovereignty movement in Hawai'i. 'We are not like the American Indian', he said, in one way or another. His sister Eleanor made much the same comment in her discussions of the pleas for sovereignty that were gaining audience in the state. Neither John nor Eleanor used the word 'indigenous' though each had a strong feeling of being kanaka maoli, that is Native Hawaiian. The fact that Eleanor and John did identify themselves as native Hawaiians, based on genealogy/ancestry and a shared culture, does not translate for them Á nor for many other native Hawaiians Á into an overarching identity as indigenous people or nationalist Hawaiian. 1
