Third Annual Symposium on the Future Imaginary: Dr. Noelani Arista and Kauwila Mahi

Hello again! Only six weeks until the Symposium. We hope you’ve started to pack 🙂  This week we’re introducing two guest speakers, Dr. Noelani Arista and Kauwila Mahi! Both also took part in He Au Hou, the fifth Skins Workshop in Aboriginal Storytelling and Video Game Design which took place in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi last summer. One of the outcomes of the workshop was that the participants formed the Nā ʻAnae Mahiki Collective. They will creating more games, hosting game jams, and contributing to intergenerational Indigenous digital media projects.

Dr. Noelani Arista is assistant professor of Hawaiian and U.S. History at University of Hawai‘i-Mānoa. Her research and writing centers on translation and research in Hawaiian language archives focusing on governance, the practice of history and a more recent focus on mele (songs). Above all she finds peace in practice, using the search engines of online digital archives to refine methods of approach to bringing order and organization to Hawaiian systems of knowledge. She is the founder of the Facebook group 365 Days of Aloha which seeks to reconfigure our approaches to a subject that is overused yet little understood and foster healing and a sense of completion back to community.

Her dissertation, “Histories of Unequal Measure: Euro-American Encounters With Hawaiian Governance and Law, 1793-1827,” won the Allan Nevins Prize from the Society of American Historians for the best dissertation written on an American subject in 2010, and will be published by Penn Press. In 2013-14, Professor Arista was a postdoctoral fellow in English at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research has been supported by fellowships from the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the Mellon Foundation, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and Native American Studies at Dartmouth College.

Here is a link to her website at the University of Hawai‘i-Mānoa http://manoa.hawaii.edu/history/people/faculty/arista/.

Kauwila Mahi is a graduate student in Hawaiian Studies at University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. He is from Kamiloiki, Waimānalo, Koʻolaupoko, Oʻahu. He attended Pūnana Leo o Kawaiahaʻo and Ke Kula Kaiapuni ʻo Ānuenue, both Hawaiian Language Immersion programs here on Oʻahu. However, he graduated from Lincoln High School in San Jose, California. He has worked for two local brands as a cultural consultant, FITTED HAWAIʻI, and Paradise Soccer Club. Currently, he is focused on finishing his thesis which uses ludology, the experience of a gamer, as it pertains to video games that depict Hawaiʻi.