he/him
Humanities Division
Associate Professor
Faculty
Critical Race and Ethnic Studies
I'm a mixed-race Kanaka Maoli artist, activist, and educator born and raised in the Central Coast by a loving, working-class family. My mother is white and my father is mixed-race; his father's parents from Mexico and mother from Hawaiʻi. I laso came up during my 20s and 30s in Honolulu, O'ahu, where I got educated, found community, and raised our lovely child with some amazing co-parents. Following my grandma's advice to "go Hawaiʻi and apply for Kamehameha Schools," I did and quickly became immersed in the study of our culture, history, and language. I received first an A.A. from Kapiʻolani Community College and eventually a B.A., an M.A., and a Ph.D. from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. My doctorate is in Political Science, where I was trained in political philosophy, critical theory, social movements, postcolonial studies, feminist theory, and Indigenous politics. Over the years, I've been fortunate to recieve fellowships to partiallypay for my education; funding came from the Ford Foundation, the Kohala Center-Mellon Foundation, and the UC President's Postdoctoral Fellowship Program. Before coming to UCSC, I held positions in Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin and the Center for the Study of Culture, Race, and Ethnicity at Ithaca College.
I'm a life-long learner, and will always be a student.
In CRES, I teach courses on Indigenous politics, settler colonialism, popular culture, imperialism, militarism, tourism, and decolonial methodologies. My teaching and research are intersectional, comparative, and relational, focusing mainly on Kanaka Maoli political thought and praxis as well as Indigenous and anticolonial and decolonial social movements beyond Hawaiʻi and Oceania. I published an article in NAIS Journal in 2017, a chapter in the volume Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawaiʻi in 2019, an essay in Abuseable Past (a digital venue of the Radical History Review) in 2020, and a short contribution to the updated introduction to Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 3rd Edition in 2022. I should write more, I know.
My first book, entitled First Light: Kanaka ʻŌiwi Resistance to Settler Science at Mauna a Wākea, is a site-specific interdisciplinary study of the Kanaka-led struggle to defend Maunakea from telescope development on the remote summit region of Hawaiʻi’s tallest mountain. Drawing on oral history interviews and participant observation of touristic, scientific, and Indigenous cultural practices of various rights holders and stakeholders, I analyze both the movement against the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) and the campaign to build the $2.4 billion dollar observatory. While the legitimacy of astronomers and their cultural imperative to build bigger telescopes are never called into question, Native Hawaiians who oppose telescope expansion are cast off as anti-science and dismissed as irrational for clinging onto ancient superstitions and petty resentments over irretrievable pasts. So, to understand the ways in which the terms of legitimacy and authority over Mauna a Wākea are reproduced, my book asks, “How did astronomers become stewards of Maunakea and Kānaka ʻŌiwi obstructions to progress?” I argue the myriad layered meanings of Kanaka-led efforts to defend this unique and fragile ecosystem and ancestral place become legible only when the broader story of decolonial struggle in Hawaiʻi is understood through a sustained critical analysis of power with specific attention given to the voices of kiaʻi ʻāina (land defenders). An examination of the last 60 years of Hawaiian movements for life, land, and ea (independence, sovereignty), my book explores how Native Hawaiian subjectivities are forged and foreclosed through discursive practices by which law reifies science as the voice of reason to reproduce the settler state’s authority over land use and resource management decisions, as well as Indigenous lives and futures. To this end, I provide analyses of historically situated relations of power structured in dominance to stage a critique of ways in which neoliberal environmental policy, settler multiculturalism, and military occupation in violation of international law condition the very possibility of astronomy at Maunakea. Illustrating the stakes of this struggle, I unpack how the articulation of ritual and ceremony to civil disobedience direct action, which has stalled TMT construction since 2015, is not anomalous, but instead consistent within the long history of Indigenous resistance to foreign rule and settler cultural hegemony in Hawaiʻi since the United States invaded our country in 1893. First Light will be published by the University of Minnesota Press in Fall 2025. I'm excited, nervous, and relieved about it's publication, but also honored to be among the voices advocating for Kanaka futurity on our terms.