I was born and raised in Hawai'i, the descendant of Filipino-Chinese laborers, former farmers & fishermen who survived and resisted centuries of occupation & colonization, whose arrival here is inseparable from the US imperial history that shaped the Pacific.
That history — of land and community-based relational identity in the face of displacement, survival — is not background for me. It is the lens.
For over a decade I have worked in advocacy, communications, and systems change across Hawai'i, building coalitions, supporting movement infrastructure, and asking the harder question underneath every campaign: what would governance look like if it actually reflected the people and places it's supposed to serve?
I am not an academic, though I think rigorously.
I am not native Hawaiian, though this is my home and I am accountable to it.
I am someone who lives inside the histories I analyze — and who is learning, with each year, what that responsibility asks of me.
I write about what happens when people and land are separated by empire — and how they find their way back to each other.
My work sits at the intersection of Pacific indigenous politics, biocultural land restoration, and governance. I'm interested in how communities severed from land and knowledge by colonial rupture are rebuilding those relationships — not through Western institutions, but laterally, through each other. The navigation knowledge that returned to Hawai'i came from Micronesia. The tattoo lineage came from Samoa and the Philippines. The cousins kept what empire tried to bury.
I think and write about what that means for land stewardship, policy, and the kind of governance systems that could actually hold a different relationship to place.
