There’s a moment early in Chief of War when Jason Momoa’s Kaʻiana looks out over the Pacific — a horizon that feels infinite and doomed at once. Behind him, warriors chant; before him, ships appear like omens. The water divides not only nations, but ways of being. It is the line between land and legend, between the indigenous and the imperial, between brown skin and the pale promise of progress.
Apple TV+’s Chief of War doesn’t whisper about race; it breathes it through every frame — in the sweat on a warrior’s chest, in the iron taste of cannon smoke, in the way the camera lingers on brown bodies fighting to define their own humanity before history writes them out of it.
The Arrival of the White Gods
The show’s great irony is that the “foreigners” never believe they are foreign. The sailors who come ashore in Chief of War carry the twin weapons of empire — faith and commerce — both gleaming with moral self-righteousness. To them, Hawai‘i is paradise to be civilized, a jewel to be claimed, its people to be baptized or broken.
Race, in this world, is less a difference in skin than in the imagined hierarchy of souls. The colonizers see the islanders not as equals but as evidence — proof of their own divinity. Their gaze flattens, simplifies, sanctifies. Every handshake hides an ownership deed.
Momoa’s Kaʻiana — a warrior caught between the ancient world and the encroaching empire — recognizes this danger long before his peers do. He sees the way whiteness moves, not just as a color but as a contagion. It infects language, custom, and eventually self-perception.
The Brown Body and the Burden of Representation
Chief of War understands something most historical dramas refuse to: that race is not only historical but choreographic. It lives in movement — how a man stands before a missionary, how he speaks when translating his pain into English, how he bows or refuses to.
The brown body, in this show, is both weapon and wound. The Hawaiians’ physical strength is admired by the invaders but never respected; their beauty is fetishized, their discipline rebranded as “noble savagery.” Momoa and director Justin Chon fill the screen with contradictions — the lushness of the islands contrasting the violence of erasure already beginning to bloom beneath it.
Every gesture becomes resistance. Every chant, every tattoo, every scar, an act of racial memory. The show insists: this body remembers what empire wants it to forget.
Whiteness as Storm
If Chief of War has a villain, it is not a person but a worldview. The colonizers bring with them a mythology that turns whiteness into weather — cold, inevitable, cleansing. Their “progress” arrives as flood and famine. The show depicts racial violence not as overt hatred but as a series of polite gestures: trade treaties that rot into occupation, friendship that curdles into control.
Race here is structural, silent, and surgical. The missionaries smile as they dismantle entire cosmologies. Their faith offers salvation by erasure — “God loves you,” they say, “so stop being who you are.”
In these moments, Chief of War does something rare for Western streaming television: it reverses the moral lens. The so-called savages are the ones who honor the land, the ancestors, the body. The “civilized” come to destroy in the name of order. It’s not just colonization of a people, but of meaning itself.
Kaʻiana: The Hybrid Hero
Kaʻiana stands between two worlds, and that makes him both powerful and tragic. He understands the allure of the new — muskets, ships, alliances — but also the cost. He is what theorists like Homi Bhabha would call the hybrid subject: neither fully native nor fully Western, existing in a permanent state of translation.
His dilemma is racial and existential. To survive, he must perform parts of whiteness — diplomacy, Christianity, tactical cruelty — but every adoption of it corrodes something sacred. He becomes a mirror to empire: reflecting its power, revealing its rot.
The show doesn’t redeem him neatly; it lets him fracture. He embodies the paradox of postcolonial identity — that to resist the colonizer, you must understand him too deeply.
The Islands as Body
The cinematography of Chief of War treats Hawai‘i as more than backdrop — it’s flesh. The mountains breathe, the ocean hums, the sky opens like a scar. The islands themselves are racialized: fertile, seductive, dangerous. The Western gaze sees them as feminine, waiting to be possessed.
But the show subverts this gaze. Nature in Chief of War refuses to be conquered. The land watches back. When blood spills into the soil, the camera lingers — as if the earth itself mourns what history will take.
Race here becomes ecological: colonization not only of people but of paradise. The show’s very color palette — sun-warmed browns, oceanic blues, the dull gleam of iron — mirrors this collision between nature and machinery, between indigenous continuity and imported rupture.
The Religion of Race
One of the show’s sharpest motifs is conversion — spiritual and political. Christianity enters as both promise and poison. The missionaries, played with chilling gentleness, offer the Bible as a gift, but what they’re really offering is identity theft.
The Hawaiians who convert are promised equality, yet the hierarchy persists — whiteness still reigns, now sanctified. The cross becomes a racial technology: a way to turn submission into salvation.
But Chief of War does not simply demonize religion. It shows how faith becomes survival for those caught in its machinery. To believe, in this world, is to bargain with annihilation. To pray is to hope that God might recognize a brown face as human.
The Future as Theft
In the show’s later movements, the tragedy becomes cosmic: the realization that the very future has been colonized. The white ships don’t just bring guns — they bring narrative. They rewrite what counts as history, what counts as progress, what counts as civilized.
Kaʻiana’s struggle, then, is not only to defend his people’s bodies but to defend their time — their right to exist outside the empire’s clock.
By its end, Chief of War is less a war epic than a requiem for cultural sovereignty. The show suggests that colonization doesn’t end when the blood dries; it continues in the stories we tell about who was worthy, who was primitive, who was “saved.”
Conclusion: The Brown Future
Chief of War is a spectacle, yes — but beneath its firelight and fury, it’s an elegy for brown survival. It’s a reminder that empire is not only a thing that happens to people of color; it’s a haunting that lives in them, passed through names, songs, scars.
Momoa’s Kaʻiana doesn’t simply fight the invaders — he fights the narrative they bring, the one that says his world was doomed to fade. And in that fight, Chief of War becomes more than a historical drama. It becomes prophecy.
Because every colonized land carries its own apocalypse — and every brown body that endures it becomes scripture.
The Pacific, endless and patient, keeps its memory. And beneath its calm surface, history still burns.