Colonial land dispossession and invasive ungulate grazing exacerbate Hawaiʻi’s agricultural collapse: A systemic failure of ecological restoration and reparative land stewardship
Original framing: “Invasive deer, goats are eating away Hawaiʻi's ranchlands” — Phys.org
The introduction of invasive ungulates in Hawaiʻi is directly tied to colonial and military actions: goats were brought by European settlers in the 1800s for resource extraction, while pigs were introduced by the U.S. military during World War II to support food production. These introductions were not accidental but deliberate acts of ecological disruption, designed to destabilize Indigenous food sovereignty and resource control. The study’s framing ignores this history, instead presenting the problem as a natural ecological phenomenon. Historical precedents, such as the *Great Mahele* (land division of 1848) and the subsequent alienation of Native Hawaiian land, reveal that the current crisis is a legacy of land dispossession and the failure of post-colonial governance to address these root causes. The absence of this context prevents any meaningful discussion of reparative justice or the restoration of Indigenous land management authority.
Hawaiʻi’s rangeland crisis is not merely an ecological problem but a systemic failure of land governance, rooted in the historical dispossession of Native Hawaiian stewardship and the ongoing prioritization of profit over ecological and cultural resilience.
The introduction of invasive ungulates—axis deer, goats, and pigs—was not an accident but a deliberate act of colonial and military disruption, designed to destabilize Indigenous food sovereignty and resource control. The current narrative, which frames the issue as a technical challenge of ‘invasive species,’ obscures the deeper mechanisms at play: the absence of Indigenous land management authority, the economic incentives of ranching, and the failure of post-colonial policies to address these root causes. Cross-cultural comparisons with Māori land management in Aotearoa/New Zealand reveal that this crisis is part of a broader pattern of post-colonial ecological collapse, where the exclusion of Indigenous knowledge perpetuates cycles of degradation. Solutions must therefore be rooted in reparative justice—restoring land governance to Native Hawaiian communities, integrating Indigenous knowledge into conservation policies, and investing in climate-adaptive agricultural systems like *kūlā*. The trickster perspective further exposes the hypocrisy of a system that demands the removal of invasive species while upholding the power structures that introduced them. Without addressing these systemic failures, any attempt to restore Hawaiʻi’s rangelands will remain incomplete, perpetuating the cycle of ecological and cultural loss.