The Mana of Translation: Translational Flow in Hawaiian History from the Baibala to the Mauna by Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada

In The Mana of Translation: Translational Flow in Hawaiian History from the Baibala to the Mauna, Bryan Kamaoli Kuwada makes visible the often unseen workings of translation in Hawaiʻi from the advent of Hawaiian alphabetic literacy to contemporary struggles over language and land. Translation has had a massive impact on Hawaiian history, both as it unfolded and how it came to be understood, yet it remains understudied in Hawaiian and Indigenous scholarship. In an engaging and wide-ranging analysis, Kuwada examines illuminative instances of translation across the last two centuries through the analytic of mana unuhi: the mana (power/authority/branch/version) attained or given through translation. Translation has long been seen as a tool of colonialism, but examining history through mana unuhi demonstrates how Hawaiians used translation as a powerful tool to assert their own literary, cultural, and political sovereignty, something Hawaiians think of in terms of ea (life/breath/sovereign