Madame Pele Snapped Captain Cook’s Head Off

Abstract

"Madame Pele Snapped Captain Cook’s Head Off” is a poem that rests in a reality where the islands of Hawai’i were never colonized. The arrival of Captain Cook on the Hawaiian Islands was the start of a brutal colonial history for the kingdom of Hawai’i that is still being experienced today through practices like exploitative tourism and agriculture, so it imagines a world where the goddess of volcanoes and the creator of the islands, Pele, sensed that future in some way and stopped the colonial movement before it could grow.