Pidgin, the Creole identified with “Local” culture in Hawaii, is seldom discussed in terms of its connection to the Hawaiian language and the ways it affirms Native identity.—Using Indigenous rhetorics and language politics as frames, I articulate Native Hawaiians’ adoption of Pidgin as acts of Ellen Cushman’s cultural perseverance and Scott Richard—Lyons’s rhetorical sovereignty. Using the poem “The Question,” written in Pidgin by Hawaiian poet Noelle Kahanu as an example of Indigenous rhetoric, I discuss how teaching—it through this lens, compared to a minority rhetoric lens, captures different histories and experiences and engenders critical awareness of the identities students perform.

Drawing on Malea Powell’s “rhetorics of survivance” and Scott Richard Lyons’s “rhetorical sovereignty” as a framework, we examine how kaona, a Hawaiian rhetorical device, is employed within Queen Lili‘uokalani’s autobiography and Haunani-Kay Trask’s poetry as a call for Hawaiian resistance against American colonialism through allusions to Pele-Hi'iaka stories.