My research and teaching are rooted in radical community-grounded and engaged scholarship and praxis. Rooted in the importance of Indigenous languages and archives, I believe fluency (cultural, linguistic, and philosophical) is an engaged practice that allows us to see beyond settler colonial-imposed boundaries and institutions of power. Through theoretical and material engagements upon which many Indigenous intellectuals stand, I hope to further conversations about how Indigenous intellectuals of the past (18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries) built and re-built their worlds grounded on the intellectual, spiritual, and physical foundations of centuries prior, and how their work interfaces, is in conversation with, and provides a foundation for us today.

I am especially interested, invested, and committed to understanding mele (Hawaiian poetry) and moʻolelo (Hawaiiian narrative practices) of the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries as vehicles for Hawaiian philosophy and thought. My current PhD research investigates Hawaiʻi’s territorial period and how Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) writers exercised their intellectual sovereignty through their literary works published in the Hawaiian language newspapers as a mode of counterposing and contending with territorial efforts to disenfranchise Kānaka Maoli via education policy, land tenure laws, health, labor, and gender and sexuality regulation.