Candace Fujikane
English Professor
Activist, Author
New Release
Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future: Kanaka Maoli and Critical Settler Cartographies in Hawaiʻi (Duke University Press, 2021)
In Mapping Abundance for a Planeatery Future, Candace Fujikane contends that the practice of mapping abundance is a radical act in the face of settler capital's fear of an abundance that feeds. Cartographies of capital enable the seizure of abundant lands by enclosing "wastelands" claimed to be underdeveloped. By contrast, Kanaka Maoli cartographies map the continuities of abundant worlds. Vital to restoration movements is the art of kilo, intergenerational observation of elemental forms encoded in storied histories, chants, and songs. The laws of these elements are now being violated by toxic waste dumping, leaking military jet fuel tanks, and astronomical-industrial complexes. As Kānaka Maoli and their allies stand as land and water protectors, Fujikane calls for a profound attunement to the elemental forms in order to transform climate events into renewed possibilities for abundance.
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"Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future slays settler colonial cartographies that diminish life. The book breathes with the voices of Hawaiian conmmunities, lands, movements, elements, and Candace Fujikane herself, at her best. Saturated in the abundance of Kanaka Maoli mappings and moʻolelo, this book is a spear and a spade, medicine and masterpiece, a diagnosis and a portal, a lei and a hoʻokupu."
—Noelani Goodyear-Kaʻōpua,
author of The Seeds We Planted: Portraits of a Native Hawaiian Charter School
Reviews
"With intellectual verve, analytical agility, and ethnographic gracefulness, Candace Fujikane unpacks the perversity of settler capitalism, which produces scarcity in order to claim its toxic surplus, as she amplifies Kanaka Maoli support of an earth cartography of abundant healing and protection. A groundbreaking work; a must read."
—Elizabeth A. Povinelli,
author of The Inheritance
"To read this bo0k is to be invited into a world of abundance, a world where the practices of ea, of "life, breath, political sovereignty and the rising of the people" can teach love of land, seas, and skies, and cultivate resurgence. . . .There is a deliberate and careful specificity to the abundance that Fujikane maps, with each chapter discussing a particular social movement struggle or set of resurgent practices to conserve, protect and enhance abundance, interwoven with critical discussion and analysis. Through each chapter, then, is interwoven a dual movement—of peeling back some of the toxic processes and imaginaries associated with settler-colonial, capitalist cartographies of occupation, and of supporting some of the many multitemporal, diverse, dynamic, multiscalar abundances of Kanaka Maoli cartographies. . . .Readers are swept "i ka wiliwai a ka makemake" (whirlpool of desire), not for the possessive relations of capitalism, but for a remembering of the moʻo guardians and the places relationally described in the moʻolelo; a whirlpool of desire for wonder, for caring relations, and for the continuities of land, seas, and skies."
—Sarah Wright, review in The Association of American Geographers (AARG) Review of Books
Upcoming Events
Past Events
November 7, 2025
10:00am
São Miguel, Acores
Walk&Talk Biennial of Arts, 2025
"Gestures of Abundance"
September 20, 2025, 2:00pm
Vancouver, BC
Russian Hall
"The Past, Present, and Future of Braided Solidarities: Asian-Indigenous Relations"
Sponsored by Simon Frasier University
June 18, 2025, 11:00am
Geneva, Switzerland
Geneva Graduate Institute and the Hoffman Centre for Global Sustainability
“International Workshop: Troubling
Accounts: The Relations, Politics, and Ethics of Reckoning Climate and Environmental Change"
Candace Fujikane, "Scalar Phallusies and Imagining Otherwise”
October 23, 2025
6:30-8:30pm
Hong Kong University
Division of Landscape Architecture
2025-2026 Lecture Series, "Inquire"
Candace Fujikane, "Landscape Architecture and Elemental Cartographies"
April 30, 2025
UC Davis
Amado Khaya Initiative /
Unsettling Asian America Speaker Series
“Asian Settler Activism in an Era of Climate Change" on Zoom.
June 13, 2025
Paris
Université Paris Cité
LARCA: Le Laboratoire de recherche sur les cultures anglophones
“Mapping Abundance to Restore Waters in a Time of Climate Change.” ,
April 17, 2024.
Honolulu
American Association of Geographers (AAG) conference, Hawaiʻi Convention Center
“Margaret Wickens Pearce, American Association of Geographers Stanley Brunn Awardee, in conversation with Candace Fujikane, author of Mapping Abundance.”
October 15, 2024, 4:00pm
Columbia University
Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation
Candace Fujikane, “Planning in a Time of Disaster Capitalism: Rebuilding Lahaina According to the Laws of the Elements.”
June 10, 2024
Venice
Ca’ Foscari University of Venice
NICHE: The New Centre for Environmental Humanities
“Abundant Futurities: Haumea and the Kānāwai of the Elemental Forms"
March 31, 2023.
University of Wisconsin–Madison
“Living the Land: Global and Local (Trans)Formations Symposium.” Sponsored by the Department of French and Italian, the Department of Geography, Center for European Studies, the Department of Art History, the Center for Culture, History and the Environment
Keynote speaker. “Elemental Cartographies: Academic Activism for Renewed Abundance”
February 7, 2024
Honolulu
University of Hawaiʻi Institute of
Resilience and Sustainability seminar series
“Elemental Cartographies for a Changing Earth”
Community Presentations
August 13, 2025.
National Oceanic and Atmosphere
Administration (NOAA) Building Pilina Workshop, Inouye Regional Center Education and Outreach, Ford Island, Honolulu
Candace Fujikane, “Asian Settlers in US Occupied Hawaiʻi.”
July 15, 2025.
Farm Expansion
Experience (FEʻE Program), MAʻO Organic Farms, Lualualei, Waiʻanae
Candace Fujikane, “Moʻolelo of the Fight for Farmlands in Waiʻanae”
July 18, 2025
Cohort Kaulua, UHM Native
Hawaiian Place of Learning Professional Development Opportunity program, University of Hawaiʻi
Candace Fujikane, “Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future”
November 7, 2021:
Mapping Abundance. Greenhouse Environmental Humanities Book Talk Series, University of Stavanger, Norway.
Zoom, online.
October 25, 2021: Hawaiʻi Book and Music Festival
Panel with Candace Fujikane, Puni Jackson, Program Director of Hoʻoulu ʻĀina, and Hiʻilei Kawelo, Executive Director of Paepae o Heʻeia
November 10, 2021: “Cartographies of Kanaloa: Inundation and Restoration.” Institute for Contemporary Art, Miami, Florida.
Zoom, online.
October 21, 2020: “Elemental Cartography: Kanaka Maoli Restorative Mapping for a Changing Earth.” Barry Ruderman Conference on Cartography: Indigenous Mapping. David Rumsey Map Center at Stanford Libraries. Zoom online, October 21, 2021.
Candace Fujikane was born in Honolulu and grew up in Pukalani, Maui on the slopes of Haleakalā.
She has stood for lands and waters in Hawaiʻi for the past 20 years.
She is an English professor at the University of Hawaiʻi, and she teaches classes on the stand that aloha ʻāina are taking to protect lands, waters, and skies in Hawaiʻi.