teaching

An Indigenous People’s History of Hawaiʻi:
What you know about Hawai‘i is most likely untrue. An archipelago in Oceania’s sea of islands, Hawai‘i has been locally constructed and globally consumed as a tropical paradise for pleasure and play, attracting tourists, settlers, corporations, and military forces to its shores. It is a fantasized paradise produced through the dispossession, elimination, appropriation, and exploitation of Indigenous people, institutions, worldviews, and practices. This course tells a truer story about Hawai‘i. Because ideas and narratives crafted about the history, politics, economics, law, ecology, and society of Hawai‘i are dominated and often distorted by non-Indigenous writers, we turn to Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) scholars to learn from their subjugated knowledge. The course examines interdisciplinary research, from the 19th century to the present, and excavates the truths advanced through it: the development of the Hawaiian Kingdom and its government, political order, economy, and society; the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian government and US military occupation and annexation of its territory; legal constructions of race and techniques of gender and sexuality in the territorial period; the creation of the State of Hawaii amid World War II and the Cold War; the birth and evolution of the modern Hawaiian sovereignty movement; and contemporary Kanaka Maoli struggles with federal recognition, militourism, and technoscientific development.

Land and Indigenous Politics:
This course examines Indigenous politics through land. Specifically, the course explores transnational Indigenous politics by focusing on material struggles over land. The course further considers how global Indigenous land struggles are constituted through and cultivate relationships between Indigenous peoples, environmental elements, and more-than-human subjects. As a seminar, we discuss Indigenous politics through geontologies of land, water, and air. Our content is oriented around material struggles over and relationalities with a sacred mountain, lakes and rivers, shoals, the atmosphere, and more. In this course, we track fresh, groundbreaking scholarship in Indigenous Studies that intersects with other fields like Latin American Studies, Pacific Island Studies, and Black Studies.

Indigenous Feminist and Queer Theories:
This course explores Indigenous feminist and queer theories, tracing theories about race, class, gender, sexuality, and Indigeneity as identity formations and categories of power in relation to imperialism and settler colonialism. Looking at political theory in the field of Indigenous, gender, and feminist studies, the course tracks two important genealogies. First, we examine how Indigenous feminisms expand the discipline of Indigenous Studies and intervene into feminist thought. Second, we investigate how queer Indigenous studies extend Indigenous feminist ideals and contribute to queer theory. Along the way, the course mines a myriad of Indigenous feminist and queer theories on affect, decolonization, demilitarization, erotics, utopia, and much more.

Settler Colonialism and Enduring Indigeneity:
This First-Year Foundations Seminar explores the politics of representation in Indigenous multimedia. We examine Indigenous cultural productions of memoir, documentary, graphic novel, film, poetry, music, and video games to discuss representations of settler colonialism and Indigeneity. Through multiple forms of media, students investigate how Indigenous people endure colonialism. While Indigenous peoples have endured settler colonization, Indigeneity endures despite it. As a system of power structured upon dispossession, elimination, and genocide, settler colonialism nonetheless is a failing project. Indigenous multimedia illustrates this failure by signifying the survival and endurance of Indigenous peoples, political thought, legal orders, and social ecologies. In addition to reading, watching, listening, playing, and creating multimedia content, students engage with new research by Indigenous scholars on the politics of knowledge production in textual, visual, sonic, and virtual representation.