Red Dirt: Class and the Contestations of Indigeneity in Hawaiʻi and Beyond

How material conditions and social contradictions remake indigeneity Indigenous studies struggles to analyze class, yet class reshapes the cultural, political, and economic terrain of indigeneity.In Red Dirt, Ikaika Ramones goes beyond the usual conceptual frameworks of resistance and domination to explore the political-economic basis for Native Hawaiian social reproduction and revitalization.By doing so, he casts indigeneity as a contested process rather than reification, encompassing both grassroots revitalization efforts and large, multibillion-dollar Native organizations. Ramones offers a class analysis that shifts the theorization of indigeneity away from the metaphysical and idealist methodologies of the academy to trace social contradictions and material conditions instead.He counters the notion of Native culture as a coherent given, disentangling different strains of “Native Hawaiian culture”-an elite strain that depoliticizes and buttresses the status quo and grassroots strain