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This book is a literary analysis of Pele and Hiʻiaka literature from an indigenous, specifically Hawaiian perspective, one inspired by the larger discussions of Indigenous Literary Nationalism by Native American scholars that seeks to add a Hawaiian voice to the conversation. It is also grounded in the Pacific and our continuing efforts within our own Indigenous Studies programs to negotiate our experiences and histories with settler colonialism and the misappropriations of our literatures that have been relegated to the realms of folklore, mythology, ethnography, and the postcolonial. Thus, this work also seeks to reweave the literary lei of Hawaiian traditions with the voices of our ancestors, unburdened by the often demeaning rhetoric of settler colonialism, articulating an understanding of Hawaiian Literary Nationalism through the analysis of one narrative and the application of complimentary indigenous approaches. Thus, basic questions that underlie this study are: what can an indigenous literary analysis of traditional literature look like? How is it different from what has been previously written within the context of disciplines closely associated with projects of settler colonialism, such as folklore studies, anthropology, and literary studies? What kind of positive effect can the recovery of our indigenous intellectual heritage have in understanding Hawaiian literary nationalism of the past, and its application for Hawaiian nationalism for today and the future?

“My Brooks ancestors were among the earliest waves of emigrants to leave England and settle in North America. Once arrived, for centuries, they lived difficult and hard-bitten lives, eking out survival in place after place after place, and moving ever westward—from Virginia, to the Carolinas, Alabama, Arkansas, Texas, Arizona—in search of land they could hold on to and belong to once again,” writes early American literature scholar Joanna Brooks. “I have always wondered why my ancestors and thousands upon thousands of poor English abandoned their homelands to settle in the Americas.” This book is the product of a years-long scholarly search for answers. Brooks uses her own family history of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century working-class English emigration as a point of departure for a searching investigation of an untold dimension of American history. She locates in American folk ballads a treasure trove of clues to the catastrophic contexts that propelled early English emigration to the Americas, and she follows the songs back across the Atlantic to find histories of economic displacement, environmental destruction, and social betrayal at the heart of the early Anglo-American migrant experience. Why We Left offers an unprecedented glimpse into the way common English migrants understood and narrated their own place in history and the hard-bitten memories and sensibilities they passed down to their Anglo-American descendants.