My research is grounded in the belief that Kanaka Maoli knowledge is not only culturally vital, but also theoretically generative and methodologically robust. I approach research not as an objective exercise in data gathering or critique, but as a genealogical, place-based, and accountable practice. Research, for me, is not separate from lived relations—it is a form of kuleana. I understand my work as participating in the intellectual continuities and survivance of Kanaka Maoli people, responding to histories of erasure not through recovery alone, but through regeneration and activation.

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The core of my methodological approach is the concept of pūkuʻi—a Hawaiian term signifying binding, anchoring, and protection. As I theorize it, pūkuʻi offers a framework for how knowledge is gathered, held, and shared across time, genealogies, and contexts. It is not only a metaphor but a methodological ethic: research as a gathering practice that weaves the past into the present, shelters intellectual lineages, and serves as a site of both continuity and resistance. Through pūkuʻi, I commit to thinking and writing from within Hawaiian epistemologies—not simply about them—and to structuring my work in ways that reflect Hawaiian modes of relation and composition.

In practice, this means engaging Hawaiian-language archives, oral histories, and literary forms not as static “data,” but as living repositories of theory. I approach the nūpepa (Hawaiian-language newspapers), moʻolelo (historical narratives), ʻōlelo noʻeau (proverbs), mele (poetic texts), and kinolau (embodied knowledge) with attentiveness to their embedded epistemologies and their enduring political life. Rather than extract meaning to fit settler academic categories, I work to listen to how these forms theorize: how they make claims about sovereignty, ethics, futurity, and relation on their own terms.

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My methodology also entails refusal—a refusal of settler academic expectations around clarity, citation, productivity, and proof. This does not mean my work is not rigorous; it means that its rigor is aligned with Kanaka Maoli values, not with extractive or disembodied epistemologies. I choose not to translate all terms or concepts into English, recognizing that some knowledge must remain opaque, ceremonial, or context-bound. I refuse to treat Hawaiian knowledge as an object of study rather than a method of study. I resist the linearity of Western chronologies, instead embracing polychronistic forms of narrative and analysis that reflect moʻokūʻauhau and the continued presence of ancestors in our work.

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This approach is necessarily interdisciplinary—but not in the sense of bridging separate academic fields. It is interdisciplinary in the way Kanaka Maoli thinking has always been: integrating law, story, ecology, spirituality, and governance into a coherent and lived intellectual system. My work brings Indigenous political theory, decolonial thought, and literary studies into conversation with Kanaka Maoli methodologies, but it does so from a center that is distinctly Hawaiian, not comparative.

 

Ultimately, I understand research as a practice of intellectual survivance: not only preserving Hawaiian thought, but living it forward. To research through pūkuʻi is to move with care, with patience (hoʻomanawanui), and with an unwavering commitment to the continued flourishing of our people and our knowledge systems.

 

My research and teaching are grounded in a commitment to radical, community-engaged scholarship and praxis that centers Indigenous epistemologies, language, and self-determination. I approach scholarship as a relational and accountable practice—one that emerges from and returns to the communities and intellectual genealogies that sustain it. Drawing on the deep importance of Indigenous languages and archives, I understand fluency—not only linguistic, but also cultural and philosophical—as a vital practice of engagement. Such fluency enables us to see and think beyond the boundaries imposed by settler colonial institutions and epistemologies of power.

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My work is rooted in the belief that Hawaiian knowledge systems are not only enduring but world-building. I am particularly invested in understanding mele (Hawaiian poetry) and moʻolelo (narrative practices) of the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries as sophisticated vehicles of Hawaiian philosophy, ethics, and political thought. These genres are not merely cultural expressions but forms of theory and critique, capable of articulating complex responses to historical and ongoing forms of dispossession, governance, and resistance.

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My current PhD research examines Hawaiʻi’s territorial period to trace how Kānaka Maoli writers exercised intellectual sovereignty in the face of U.S. settler colonialism. Focusing on Hawaiian-language newspaper literature, I explore how these writers challenged colonial structures—especially in the realms of education, land tenure, health, labor, and gender and sexuality regulation—by advancing alternative visions grounded in Kanaka Maoli thought, spirituality, and governance. I read these texts not as passive records of a bygone era, but as living archives and theoretical interventions that continue to inform Indigenous futures.

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Ultimately, I seek to further conversations about how Indigenous intellectuals of the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries did not merely survive colonial violence, but re-built their worlds using intellectual, spiritual, and material foundations centuries in the making. Their work offers not only insight into the past but a philosophical inheritance and political compass for the work we must do today.