Background
I am a Kanaka Maoli feminist scholar, and am excited to be returning to Oʻahu after living on the continent for nearly twenty years. I entered graduate school in Ethnic Studies after working at community non-profits. Ethnic Studies provided the methods and community for me to analyze race in Hawaiʻi and beyond, in ways I often found lacking in celebrations of Hawaiʻi as an American “melting pot.” My research and teaching has since come to center Indigenous relationships to land within historically-grounded analyses of race and settler colonialism in Hawaiʻi, Oceania and the United States. I was previously faculty in History and Gender Studies at the University of Utah, where I was also the founding director of the Center for Pasifika Indigenous Knowledges.
Education
- PhD, Ethnic Studies, University of California San Diego, 2013
- MA, Ethnic Studies, University of California San Diego, 2009
- BA, English, Swarthmore College, 2005
Courses
- ES 392: Change in Pacific – Polynesia
- PUBA 627: Managing Workplace Diversity and Inclusion
Specializations
Indigeneity, settler colonialism, race, gender and sexuality, Indigenous Feminisms, U.S. history, and incarceration.
Research
My research is grounded in histories of race, gender, and settler colonialism in Hawaiʻi and the broader region of Oceania. My first book, Possessing Polynesians: The Science of Settler Colonial Whiteness in Hawaiʻi and Oceania (2019), considers the colonial history of the construction of Polynesians as an “almost white race” in social scientific accounts of the late 1800s through the mid-1900s. My current research analyzes the history of incarceration of children in government-run institutions in Hawaiʻi, from the first reformatory which opened in 1865, to industrial schools and a home for the so-called “feeble-minded” that operated through the 1960s. Throughout this period, Native Hawaiian children were disproportionately over-represented in these institutions.
Community Engagement
I direct the research project Nā Lei Poina ʻOle (Beloved Children Never Forgotten), a community-engaged history project about reformatories and industrial schools in Hawaiʻi. In collaboration with Kawela Farrant and the North Shore Community Land Trust, who are the stewards of land at Waialeʻe that was formerly part of a boys’ industrial school, Nā Lei Poina ʻOle was awarded an NEH chair’s grant. That grant has supported community meetings around the boys’ school history and its memorialization. The project was also awarded an ACLS Digital Justice Seed Grant to support the development of a digital database about the history of industrial schools in Hawaiʻi.