UCLA

This project examines the Kalihi Valley Instructional Bicycle Exchange (KVIBE) non-profit youth organization’s mobilization around bicycling, popular education and Indigenous pedagogies. By employing ethnographic community-based research methods, I illustrate how their curriculum connects immigrant and Native boys of color from low-income and working-class backgrounds to their own histories, to each other and to their ancestral homelands and contemporary home in Kalihi. I contend that KVIBE decolonizes urban space in Hawai‘i through their engagement with Kanaka Maoli epistemologies, Nakem pedagogies and youth experiences. In engaging with interdisciplinary scholarship on Asian Settler Colonialism studies, Oceanic Ethnic Studies and Community-Based participatory research, I am able to delineate the significance of KVIBE as a site for exposing the violences of U.S. empire, revealing overlapping stories of place and imagining decolonial futures in Hawai‘i.