Indigenous Peoples' Day - Dr. David Uahikeaikaleiʻohu Maile

KSPC 88.7FM

Dr. Uahikea Maile (he/him) is a Kanaka Maoli scholar, activist, and practitioner from Maunawili, Oʻahu. He is an Assistant Professor of Indigenous Politics in the Department of Political Science and Affiliate Faculty in the Centre for Indigenous Studies at the University of Toronto. He has published in the journals of Native American and Indigenous Studies and Cultural Studies <-> Critical Methodologies, and has forthcoming articles in Hūlili: Multidisciplinary Research on Hawaiian Well-Being and American Indian Culture and Research Journal. He also has contributed chapters in the recently published edited collections Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawaiʻi and Standing With Standing Rock: Voices From the #NoDAPL Movement, with another chapter forthcoming in the edited collection Biopolitics, Geopolitics, and Life: Settler States and Indigenous Presences. Maile’s research interests include: history, law, and activism on Hawaiian sovereignty; Indigenous critical theory; settler colonialism; political economy; feminist and queer theories; and decolonization. His book manuscript, Nā Makana Ea: Settler Colonial Capitalism and the Gifts of Sovereignty, examines the historical development and contemporary formation of settler colonial capitalism in Hawai‘i and gifts of sovereignty that seek to overturn it by issuing responsibilities for balancing relationships with ‘āina, the land and that which feeds. In this interview, Priya Prabhakar and Dr. Maile talk about his piece "Precarious Performances: The Thirty Meter Telescope and Settler State Policing of Kānaka Maoli” in the magazine Abolition, the struggle against the building of the TMT telescope, his theoretical framework of capitalist-colonialism, media representation of Indigenous Hawai’ian folks, transnational solidarity between Palestine and Hawai’i in divestment work from the settler-states of the United States and Israel, and more.