American Indian Culture and Research Journal

This article is from a Native daughter’s Native daughter. Interspersing poetry and prose, I share some of the lessons I learned from Kumu Haunani-Kay. I also discuss how her activism, teaching, and written work have served as contributions to her role not only as Kumu but also as a Native daughter, who essentially mothered other Native daughters of Oceania—such as myself, a Chamoru woman from Guåhan—who now continue the work that she so bravely and so fiercely started. Her life and contributions taught us of our responsibility to our respective communities and homelands as well as to our other siblings across Oceania.

Adding to her profound legacy of resistance to colonization and activism for Hawai‘i and Kānaka Maoli, this essay pays tribute to Haunani-Kay Trask and explores the ways in which her various creative and scholarly publications can be used as theories and methodologies in a growing area of study called Indigenous Pacific feminisms. This paper acknowledges that, though Trask disavowed herself from feminism toward the latter part of her life, it is critical to share the significance of her contributions to Indigenous Pacific feminisms as shaping “baskets of resilience” for students, organizers, and decolonial dreamers in the Pacific and diaspora.

In 1985, Haunani-Kay Trask visited Aotearoa contributing critical perspectives to a Pacific studies conference at the University of Auckland. Observing the disturbing absence of Indigenous women speakers at the conference, Dr. Trask finished her keynote early, giving her remaining time to two Māori women, Atareta Poananga and Titewhai Harawira. As a group of Indigenous Pacific women negotiating our own place in the academy, this conscious political act is one of many forms of Haunani-Kay Trask’s activism that has inspired us. From various parts of Te Moana Nui a Kiwa, we come together to weave stories of our engagements in the intellectual and activist work of Haunani-Kay Trask. In distinctive ways, we acknowledge Dr. Trask’s legacy and reflect on the inspiration and insight that her work has provided for us as Native daughters of the Pacific and as emerging scholars. Drawing on our own unique sea, land, and skyscapes, our histories of colonialism and resistance, and our creative and intellectual journeys, we share the multiplicity of ways in which Haunani-Kay Trask’s work speaks to our hearts and minds. Reflecting on her work as a scholar, poet, and activist, we weave together our words of respect, love, and admiration, and we consider the ways in which her scholarship continues to have ongoing relevance to us all.

Haunani-Kay Trask’s scholarship and poetry grew out of her profound understanding that the moʻolelo, chants, and songs about the akua, the deities who are the elemental energies, recorded ancestral knowledges that would inspire the lāhui to move forward into the decolonial future. Her poetry moved to decenter a history of settler colonialism, instead articulating a Kānaka Maoli worldview that recognizes that the akua are still here, even if their names had been forgotten by many. Dr. Trask’s own aloha ʻāina activism informs her poetry as she stood to protect her home on the edge of the Heʻeia wetlands from the development of a golf course, and the fishpond stands today, feeding the people physically, spiritually, and imaginatively.

Haunani-Kay Trask’s theorizations of settler colonialism, Indigenous feminisms, and community-grounded political work produces scholars, thinkers, and activists, including many Hawaiians, other Pacific Islanders, and Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island. Her teachings and work with Ka Lāhui Hawai‘i emphasized the need to build relationalities among Indigenous communities. This essay builds on Trask’s critical interventions and theorizations of settler colonialism, to ask how Hawaiians at home and in the diaspora can further Trask’s scholarship and political organizing, incorporating trans-Indigenous recognitions. I document these relationalities among Native nations and other Pacific Islanders as an embodiment of the legacies of Haunani-Kay Trask, including her theorization of settler colonialism and the groundwork she laid for Indigenous feminism. In this way, I link her teachings as slyly reproductive at creating generative futures beyond the settler state.

For Indigenous Pacific peoples, including those from islands and from coastal regions, it is the ocean that carries our stories through the currents. This article centers Haunani-Kay Trask’s work and the Pacific not as a place of separation but as a place of connection among Indigenous people using Kānaka Maoli and Coastal Chumash people as examples. Trask’s poetry and other literary work is discussed as a form of Indigenous resistance alongside personal narrative to thread the stories together, highlighting the ways in which militarization and other settler colonial practices have been used to limit the sovereign rights of Indigenous people.