Theoretical Connections

Donald Winnicott, Transitional Objects

Through Winnicott's ideas on transitional objects, Queen Kapi’olani’s canoe functions as one, bridging the memory and identity of Hawaiian history into the present day. The canoe can be interpreted as a connector to Hawaiian royal history, cultural identity, and its unique heritage. Additionally, relating to Winnicott’s statements regarding transitional objects, the canoe mediates between the queen’s legacy and the collective identity of Hawaii, including the people, traditions, and their struggles with sovereignty. It ultimately embodies continuity through history, acting as an anchor that links Hawaii’s past cultural practices to the efforts of modern-day society to preserve and honor its history. Yet, Winnicott notes that transitional objects are often associated with detachment. This correlates with the canoe as it holds a tragic dimension that emphasizes the displacement of the Hawaiian royal family and its sovereignty, even though the artifact keeps their legacy alive. 

Karl Marx, Commodification and Alienation

Traditional Hawaiian canoes can become commodified, being converted to attractions or symbols for outsiders to buy or see. Inside Hawaii, the canoes were produced within a hierarchy where chiefs relied on commoner labor, meaning the object already reflects internal commodization. This detaches Hawaiians from their history of labor and lineage, as Marx states that workers can become alienated from their labor. In a similar fashion, Hawaiians have been alienated from crafting canoes due to colonial economies. Commodification resulted in a distance between Hawaiians and their cultural practices, as canoes are now artifacts for display rather than living vessels. Despite the fact that canoes used to exist in a shared labor and stewardship system, they were replaced with commercial usage. However, the canoe was believed to be fully commodified once it entered the United States museum system, as the social relations that produced it are severed. This ultimately mirrors the critiques of Marx regarding property relations. 

Sidney Mintz, Sweetness and Power

Queen Kapiʻolani’s canoe illustrates what Sidney Mintz describes in Sweetness and Power: objects that circulate across cultures often carry a veneer of goodwill while obscuring the unequal political forces that shape their movement. The Queen gifted her outrigger canoe to the Smithsonian in 1887 (catalogued on January 25, 1888), at a time when Hawaiʻi remained an independent kingdom engaged in careful diplomatic performances of sovereignty. Yet the United States would annex Hawaiʻi more than a decade later, in 1898, through the Newlands Resolution. On the surface, the gift appeared as an expression of reciprocity, cross-cultural respect, and Hawaiian pride. Through Mintz’s lens, however, the canoe also reflects how material exchanges can mask deeper power imbalances: while Hawaiʻi offered a symbol of cultural richness, American economic and strategic interests already entrenched through mechanisms like the 1875 Reciprocity Treaty were tightening their grip. That treaty allowed Hawaiian sugar to enter the U.S. duty-free, giving American plantation owners leverage over Hawaiian politics and linking the islands’ economy to U.S. markets. The canoe, then, becomes both a proud assertion of Hawaiian identity and a subtle emblem of a political relationship in which American power was expanding, illustrating how objects in circulation can temporarily smooth over, or hide, the inequalities that shape historical trajectories.

Ruth Benedict, Patterns of Culture 

Queen Kapiʻolani’s canoe reflects what Ruth Benedict describes as the profound role of custom in shaping cultural identity. Benedict argues that no person “looks at the world with pristine eyes”; instead, we inherit our ways of knowing, valuing, and relating to others through the traditions of our communities. The canoe embodies these inherited Hawaiian cultural patterns, not only the voyaging knowledge and craftsmanship it represents, but also the protocols of gift exchange that give objects their social meaning. When Queen Kapiʻolani gifted this canoe to the Smithsonian, the act was far more than a simple diplomatic gesture. It followed deeply rooted Hawaiian practices of reciprocity, hospitality, and relationship-building, where gifts serve to establish ongoing ties between groups. In Pacific societies, gifts are vessels of connection, obligation, and prestige, and this canoe functioned in the same way: it became a bridge between the Hawaiian Kingdom and the United States, carrying cultural identity across oceans. Through Benedict’s lens, the canoe illustrates how custom travels and how symbolic acts and exchanged objects transmit culture, assert identity, and maintain continuity even amid political and colonial pressures.

Marcel Mauss, The Gift

In a Hawaiian context, it is widely believed that a notable gift from a high authority is not merely an economic exchange; rather, it maintains social order, as Mauss describes for various other indigenous groups. Marcel Mauss argues in The Gift that gifts are never "free" and that they bind people or groups together. This correlates to Queen Kapi'olani's wa'a, as traditional canoes in Hawaiian culture can be interpreted as charged gift-objects holding social value. Ultimately, it exemplifies the concept that gifts can establish relationships, reinforce hierarchy, and carry the giver's identity and mana. As a result, the canoe fosters reciprocal obligations, loyalty, service, and respect, mirroring Mauss' ideas regarding the gift cycle. In the final analysis, the concepts established by Marcel Mauss contribute to the understanding of the canoe as not just an artifact, but a physical representation of political power, reciprocation, and sacred responsibility.   

Marshall Sahlins, Cosmologies of Capitalism

Sahlins argues that when capitalism entered Hawai‘i, it did not simply replace Indigenous systems; it was reinterpreted through Hawaiian cosmology, especially through ideas of mana, hierarchy, and divine power. Applying this to Queen Kapiʻolani’s canoe reveals how the artifact sits at the crossroads of Indigenous authority and colonial economic transformation. In Hawaiian political theology, material objects associated with aliʻi were imbued with sacred power; they were extensions of chiefly presence and the social order. Under colonial influence, however, these sacred objects began to circulate within capitalist logics, where value became tied to exchange, spectacle, and Western notions of property. Sahlins notes that Hawaiians often reframed foreign institutions within their own symbolic order, yet the canoe’s movement into museum collections marks a point where capitalist meanings overshadowed Indigenous cosmological ones. The canoe thus becomes evidence of Sahlins’ claim that colonial capitalism operated not just as an economic system but as a political religion that reshaped the meanings of Hawaiian artifacts, transforming a vessel of mana into an object of Western heritage display, even as its original cosmological significance persists beneath that new layer of value.

Harri Siikala, The House and the Canoe: Mobility and Rootedness in Polynesia

Siikala’s analysis of Polynesian political symbolism offers a direct way to interpret Queen Kapiʻolani’s canoe. He argues that Hawaiian chiefs were understood as “sharks who walk on land,” figures whose authority depended on their ability to move, conquer, and reshape the world. In this framework, the canoe becomes an extension of the chief’s violent capacity to remake social and cosmic order. It was the vessel through which chiefs enacted power, conducting warfare, forging alliances, migrating, and asserting mana across the ocean. At the same time, Siikala explains that the canoe exists in a complementary relationship with the house: while the house symbolizes rootedness, continuity, and genealogical legitimacy tied to land, the canoe represents mobility, the expansion of chiefly influence, and the creation of new political worlds. Applying this to Kapiʻolani’s canoe shows that the artifact is not merely a cultural object but a materialization of chiefly authority. It reflects both the stability of royal lineage (house symbolism) and the expansive, world-making power of aliʻi (canoe symbolism). Even in a museum, the canoe carries the deeper cosmological meaning Siikala identifies, embodying how Hawaiian chiefs fused rootedness and mobility to sustain sovereignty and reshape the world around them.