Indigenous Peoples' Day - Dr. Noelani Goodyear-Kaʻōpua

KSPC 88.7FM

Dr. Noelani Goodyear-Kaʻōpua (she/her) is a Kanaka Maoli from O‘ahu, Hawaiʻi. She is professor and chair of the political science department at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, where she teaches Hawaiian and Indigenous politics. Noe has published articles and books on Hawaiian social movements, Indigenous education and decolonial future-making, including The Seeds We Planted: Portraits of a Native Hawaiian Charter School (2013), A Nation Rising: Hawaiian Movements for Life, Land and Sovereignty (2014), The Value of Hawaiʻi, 2: Ancestral Roots, Oceanic Visions (2014), and Nā Wāhine Koa: Hawaiian Women for Sovereignty and Demilitarization (2019). She is a co-founder of Hālau Kū Māna public charter school and an active board member for the Kānehūnāmoku Voyaging Academy and Hui o Kuapā Keawanui, both of which use Native Hawaiian ocean-based technologies and practices to help create resilient Indigenous futures. Her academic and activist work are part of a lifetime commitment to aloha ‘aina. Her most treasured role is being a mom to her three children. In this interview, Priya Prabhakar and Dr. Goodyear-Kaʻōpua talk about Dr. Goodyear-Kaʻōpua’s ancestral lineage of Hawai’ian freedom fighters that caused her to do what she does today, Indigenous futurisms and inspirations from Afrofuturisms and Octavia Butler, the struggle against the building of the TMT telescope on the sacred mountain of Mauna a Wākea, her various books that focus on the struggle for Hawai’ian sovereignty, and the Indigenous concept of “ea."