Noho Hewa: Awards, Interviews & Quotes

Grand Festival Award
Berkeley Video and Film Festival, 2011

Special Jury Prize
Tahiti’s Festival International du Film Documentaire de Oceanien, 2010

Best Documentary Award
Hawaii International Film Festival, 2008

Noho Hewa is a brilliant, incisive, and complex expose of colonialism (American and other) and its devastating effects on Kanaka Maoli, the indigenous people of Hawaii, and their land.

Albert Wendt, author, poet, scholar and painter

Deftly combining a powerful critique of militarism, environmental degradation, tourism and cultural annihilation, Noho Hewa should be required viewing at every school, university, and military academy.

Gayatri Gopinath, professor at New York […]

2022-06-10T13:39:59-10:00September 2nd, 2009|Updates|

The Journal of Pacific History’s review of Noho Hewa by Tina Ngata

The Journal of Pacific History 

Published online: 24 Oct 2017

Review of Noho Hewa: The Wrongful Occupation of Hawai‘i

By Tina Ngata

At a time of growing tensions around the Pacific, the world nervously eyes both the United States and North Korea, and every move being made by either side draws a sharp, collective breath. With military strikes threatened against the US military base established on Guåhan, it seems that the Pacific basin is indeed poised to be the playground within which these global tensions play themselves out. For those of us living within or coming from the Pacific, this situation is as terrifying as it is infuriating, for it is precisely this targeting of our islands that underpins many of our calls to demilitarize the Pacific. With this backdrop in mind, it has never been more important or timelier to consider the potent messages within Anne Keala Kelly’s documentary Noho Hewa.

Noho Hewa provides a vital Indigenous lens on militarization in the Pacific. Although the film’s initial […]

2022-06-10T12:40:15-10:00October 24th, 2017|Updates|

Making Sense of Disney’s Moana ~ Indian Country Media Network

I wrote this last fall, but it’s worth sharing here, given the overall horror of cultural appropriation being aided and abetted by plenty of natives. Anywayz… You can go to this link for the complete commentary.

Our hopes, dreams and struggles are inconvenient to what Disney has chosen to produce about us. Worse yet, we’re expected to shut up and enjoy the ride everyone’s taking on our back. Yes, some of our own people, grateful for any acknowledgment, don’t recognize an insult or culture theft when they see it. Others will happily join in with the massive, commodifying monstrosity of “Moana” and buy Moana-gear and computer games. (I heard that the Ala Moana Disney Store is already well-stocked.) One Maori writer, who likes the Maui-Skin-Suit, said it’s like dressing up as Santa Claus. He’s not far off, seeing as how we’re the ones doing all the giving. He reminded me of something funny that Haunani-Kay Trask, one of our […]

2022-06-10T12:37:48-10:00June 22nd, 2017|Updates|

From “A Nation Rising”

Screen Shot 2017-06-13 at 8.00.01 PMLately, the selling out of Hawaiian culture, and silence of Hawaiians who literally fly around the world posing as Hawaiian “leaders,” compels me to share this essay. Why? Because, in part, it’s about them and their state sanctioned privilege. If I were to write it now I would use stronger language. Here’s to hoping they stop using a broken compass.

http://www.annekealakelly.com/uploads/3/5/9/1/3591542/resistance_pdf.pdf

The now normalized American social order and economy requires Hawaiians to assimilate or disappear. One common form of the vanishing Hawaiian is evidenced by the ongoing mass desecrations of Hawaiian graves.

2022-06-10T12:41:57-10:00June 13th, 2017|Updates|

2017 EPELI HAU’OFA ANNUAL LECTURE ~ BYU’s Tevita O. Ka’ili

Screen Shot 2017-04-04 at 11.13.10 AMThe Australian Association for Pacific Studies Annual Lecture in memory of Epeli Hau’ofa will be presented by Tevita O. Ka’ili.

“In the beginning was the ocean” is the opening line of the Tongan creation story. Tongan deep history states that people originated in the moana (deep sea), and that Limu (seaweed) and Kele (sea sediment) are our primordial parents. Epeli’s Hau’ofa’s concept of Oceania revives an ancient cosmogony that begins with the moana and frames our advocacy for the ocean.

In this paper, Tēvita O. Kaʻili will navigate Hauʻofa’s Oceania by traversing what has now become a sea of ocean pollution, ocean acidification, rising sea levels, overfishing and deep sea mining. He will also critically examine, from an indigenous Tā-Vā (time-space) theory, the “mining” by extractive corporations, like Disney, of cultural heritage, such as stories, symbols, iconographies, objects, motifs, and deities that are associated with the ocean.”

Date: 12th April                           […]

2022-06-10T12:43:36-10:00April 4th, 2017|Updates|

The Passing of One of the Pacific’s Brightest Lights

Screen Shot 2017-03-29 at 6.12.18 PMTeresia Teaiwa has walked on ahead of us, and I am sadder than I can say. She was a brilliant, courageous, beautiful Pacific woman who led the way for so many of us. She was one of the most powerful and articulate voices when it came to colonization and militarization, thinking and speaking in ways that the rest of us had to run to keep up with. She was kind, generous, and an extraordinary poet.

I am heartbroken. There never was and never will be anyone like her. And those of us who were lucky enough to have been on the receiving end of her beautiful smile, or any of the beautiful words she wrote and spoke, or to have stood in her light, were blessed.
Her being gone from us… the void is immeasurable.

God bless her soul, and blessings and prayers for her ohana.

2022-06-10T12:46:13-10:00March 29th, 2017|Updates|

STARBUCKS EULOGY (August 6th marks 5 years since Annie’s death)

annie pauANNIE PAU and I first met at the Farrington Highway Starbucks on the Waianae Coast of Oahu. I was working on a story for Al Jazeera and needed a Hawaiian who was willing to be interviewed about what life is like for thousands who can’t afford rent. Parts of Waianae resemble refugee camps, so it felt wrong, meeting with a homeless person inside the mother ship of gentrification.

But nothing else was open at 6am on Sunday near Lualualei Beach Park, where Annie and her husband, John, were living in a tent with their two dogs.  That beach is nicknamed “Sewers,” for the stench from a sewage treatment facility wafting across the road.

Hawaiian names are often derived from an event or legend. Sometimes they’re metaphors, other times they describe something literal.  But they always have meaning, although many have ended up on the sacrificial altar of tragic irony.  Given its name millennia before the sewage, Lualualei means, “Beloved one spared.”

When I arrived at […]

2022-06-10T12:47:54-10:00August 4th, 2016|Updates|

Screen Shot 2015-09-03 at 2.09.15 PM

A book launch for LIMBO, an environmental novel by Jamaican filmmaker and author, Esther Figueroa, is taking place Friday, September 4th, at UH Manoa’s English Dept, 5:30PM. Figgy, as she’s called by friends, is a brilliant writer and artist whose works are fast becoming the archive of environmental destruction and resistance in Jamaica.

Here’s the event flyer:

Join us for the Hawaii launch of ESTHER FIGUEROA’s novel Limbo, also featuring the powerful poetic voices of RAJIV MOHABIR and RAIN WRIGHT-CANNON, as well as novelist SHAWNA YANG RYAN reading from her forthcoming novel Green Island.

Praise for Limbo:
“In this brave and witty new novel, Esther Figueroa takes us into the dark side of tourism’s uncontrolled development. The work is intelligent, clear-eyed and unforgiving; Figueroa does not avert her gaze – the devastation of land and wildlife is harrowing. Esther’s passionate concern for the future of Jamaica and the Caribbean, and ultimately for the future of our planet makes Limbo a landmark work […]

2022-06-10T12:48:21-10:00September 3rd, 2015|Updates|