Campus Directory

Pronouns he/him

Division Humanities Division

Department/College/Unit Critical Race and Ethnic Studies

Title Associate Professor

Affiliation Faculty

Faculty Type Regular Faculty

Mail Stop Critical Race and Ethnic Studies

Biography, Education and Training

I'm a diasporan Kanaka Maoli scholar artist, activist, and educator born and raised in California's Central Coast by a loving, working-class family.  My mother is white, her adoptive parents coming to Santa Maria from Oklahoma in the 1940s.  My father is mixed-race, his father's parents coming to the U.S. from Mexico in the 1920s and his mother from Hawaiʻi after meeting and marrying my grandpa in 1952.  After high school, I moved to Honolulu and spent my 20s and 30s on O'ahu, where I was college educated, found community and chosen family, 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 just that, and in 1996 began immersing myself in the study of our culture, history, and language.  I received 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 studied political philosophy, critical theory, social movements, postcolonial studies, feminist theories, and Indigenous politics. 

Some of my mentors included Noenoe Silva, Kanalu Young, Jon Goldberg-Hiller, Mike Shapiro, Sankaran Krishna, S. Charusheela, Jodi Byrd, and Ty Kāwika Tengan, and I'll always cherish having studied with Jon Osorio, Haunani-Kay Trask, April Drexel, Ibrahim Aoude, Ulla Hasager, Jonathan Okamura, Keawe Lopes, Kahikina de Silva, Lalepa Koga, Katerina Teaiwa, and Levon Ohai among others.  Over the years, I've been fortunate to recieve support for my education from the Ford Foundation, the Kohala Center-Mellon Foundation, and the University of California President's Postdoctoral Fellowship Program.  Before coming to UCSC, I held positions at the University of Texas at Austin in Anthropology and at Ithaca College in the Center for the Study of Culture, Race, and Ethnicity and Anthropology.  

I'm a life-long learner, and will always be a student.  This is what I love most about this work.

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 Moananuiākea.  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. 

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 was published by the University of Minnesota Press in November of 2025.  I'm honored to be among the voices advocating for Kanaka futurity on our terms.