Interviews have been lightly edited for clarity.
Translation Note: ‘Ōlelo Hawaiʻi—the Native Hawaiian language—is a multivalent language in which meaning cannot be captured wholly by a single definition in English. The Yale Herald has decided not to italicize words in ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi and instead to italicize translations in English, following the translation policies of Kanaka Maoli scholar Noenoe Silva. Silva writes in the introduction of her seminal text Aloha Betrayed that she does not italicize Hawaiian words in text “to resist making the native tongue appear foreign in writing produced in and about a native land and people.”
The author has provided translations for the sake of clarity.
The goddess Hiʻiaka pauses.
Her eyes travel over her shoulder, squinting under furrowed brows at Lohiʻau and Wahineʻomaʻo. They are companions on her journey through Mānoa Valley on the island of O‘ahu. Thick underbrush and towering niu / coconut trees shield the rift in the mountain range ahead. Puddles from yesterday’s rain pool in the patches of dirt where green has yet to spring. But between the tangle of branches and leaves, the three travelers know powerful, shape-shifting moʻo / dragons lie in wait.
As the group trudges through the forest, Lohiʻau and Wahineʻomaʻo feel a tug at their ears. They pivot instinctively and swat behind their heads. Their swings hit empty space.
Hiʻiaka pauses, uneasy. “There is a moʻo with us,” she whispers, her eyes darting along the tree line. A gust of wind billows behind them; the grip on Lohiʻau and Wahineʻomaʻo’s ears tightens. “Show yourself!” Hiʻiaka demands. The forest falls silent, leaning in to hear her call. To watch her response.
A moʻo bursts through the treeline. Niu fronds hurl toward the traveling companions. Kamōʻiliʻili, with olive scales and a spine blooming with orange pauldrons, charges at Hiʻiaka. Bolts of lightning whip from the fluttering folds of Hi‘iaka’s pāʻū / outer skirt and crackle across the forest floor. Hiʻiaka braces for collision.
***
Silence cuts through the air as Māhea takes a breath between the beats of her moʻolelo / story. At home in New Haven, I lean forward in my seat, waiting in suspense for the outcome of Hiʻiaka and Kamōʻiliʻili’s clash.
With a grin creeping across her face, Māhea continues. “Hiʻiaka used her lightning to slash up the moʻo,” she says, “and Kamōʻiliʻili was spread in a thousand pieces; each of those little pieces became its moʻo. So now, instead of one, there’s thousands of moʻo running around.”
This story is one of many Māhea carries, but still a favorite she remembers fondly. The last time I remember being told a moʻolelo like this, I was a middle schooler at Kamehameha Schools, an all-Native Hawaiian educational institution, on the island of Oʻahu. From tales of Keanakamanō, the secret cave in Kalihi where the king of sharks, Kamohoaliʻi, rested, to the skirmishes between sisters Pelehonuamea and Nāmakaokahaʻi on the hills near Hāna, moʻolelo molded my conceptions of the world. Through Hiʻiaka and Kamōʻiliʻili, Māhea kindles memories of my childhood in our shared homeland, Hawai’i. Though we are virtually connected through Zoom in this storytelling session, her moʻolelo is a gift—one of many that she brings with her to Yale.
***
Māhealani Ahia (Kanaka Maoli), known to many as Māhea, left Hawaiʻi for New Haven in the waning heat of August. The first time I met her at Yale, I was huddled among a group of Pasifika students at the Native American Cultural Center’s (NACC) Welcome Back Mixer, in the Center’s parking lot on Crown Street. Māhea arrived with Hiʻilei Hobart (Kanaka Maoli), assistant professor of Native and Indigenous Studies in Yale’s Ethnicity, Race, and Migration program, and joined us with a familiar warmth, even though this was our first encounter. Our growing Pasifika circle asked her over slices of pizza about her jet lag, her preparation for New Haven winters, and her excitement for the year ahead. Conversations I’d lived through before—but ones that never get old.
Māhea’s arrival marks the beginning of a yearlong position she was selected to fill—the Henry Roe Cloud Dissertation Writing Fellowship, a program that funds one graduate student in the final year of their Ph.D to complete their dissertation in Native and Indigenous studies. The fellowship operates out of the Yale Group for the Study of Native America, a consortium of faculty and graduate students dedicated to developing Native and Indigenous Studies at Yale. The faculty coordinator of the group, Ned Blackhawk (Western Shoshone), Howard R. Lamar Professor of History, describes the fellowship as a revolving door that stewards graduate students in the field of Native and Indigenous Studies through Yale, which, in turn, expands the field in the academy. “We’re helping, in a sense, build the field of Native and Indigenous Studies one graduate, one fellowship, one dissertation at a time,” Blackhawk remarks.
Founded in 2010, the fellowship honors the legacy of Henry Roe Cloud (Ho-Chunk), the first Native American graduate of Yale College. Roe Cloud was a fierce critic of federal American Indian assimilation policies after graduating in 1910, and a renowned advocate for increasing educational opportunities across Indian Country. Roe Cloud and his wife, Elizabeth Bender Cloud (Ojibwe), founded one of the first college preparatory schools for Native Americans in the country. Named the American Indian Institute, it marked a groundbreaking leap in the fight for Native education rights.
Following in Roe Cloud’s footsteps, over 14 scholars, primarily from public universities, have completed their dissertations and graduated from their respective Ph.D. programs in Native and Indigenous studies. This program, as Professor Blackhawk puts it, gifts time and resources to Ph.D. students, offering an opportunity to “finish their dissertations and get their career going.” Pursuing these degrees is a costly endeavor. In February 2024, the Education Data Initiative reported that the average cost of a Ph.D. was $81,900, not accounting for living, transportation, and other personal expenses. At the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, where Māhea attends, the estimated cost of attendance for Hawaiʻi residents pursuing their Ph.D. is $34,984 annually. Applying for grants and working as a teaching assistant are the primary mechanisms to offset costs—though, in combination with personal and familial obligations, these require siphoning significant time from completing the actual doctoral program. Adam Ruben, in an article for Science, describes this cycle as the “never-ending Ph.D.”—which programs like the Henry Roe Cloud Fellowship, with the support of an Ivy League endowment, seek to alleviate.
The high price of entry into academia makes Indigenous scholars a rarity at any university across the country, let alone at Yale. With all three of Yale’s Indigenous tenured or tenure-track scholars in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences currently on leave, the addition of a new scholar to the university’s Native community is monumental. This year, Māhea is not the only one. Dominic Leong (Kanaka Maoli) joins the Yale School of Architecture as a Louis I. Kahn Visiting Assistant Professor, alongside Summer Sutton (Lumbee), who serves as a visiting fellow for the architectural firm, KPF. James Campbell (CHamoru) begins his time as an adjunct professor at Yale Law School, focusing his scholarship on Indigenous self-governance in U.S. constitutional thought; Noah Ramage (Cherokee) joins the History Department as a Cassius Marcellus Clay Postdoctoral Associate.
This rapid expansion of Native and Indigenous faculty in visiting university positions mirrors the growth of Native and Indigenous Studies from just the contiguous U.S. to regions and Native communities across the globe. Professor Blackhawk points to the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) as evidence of this expansion. At the time of NAISA’s formal founding in 2009, the association held a global perspective on Native and Indigenous studies and continued to expand Indigenous scholarship beyond Native American and Native Alaskan tribal nations, to Indigenous scholarship and scholars in Canada, Hawaiʻi, Aotearoa, Australia, and the broader Pacific. Within Yale, the recent hiring of Professor Hobart in the Ethnicity, Race, and Migration Program and Pat Gonzales-Rogers (Sāmoan) in the Yale School of the Environment; the opening of the Pacific Wing at the Yale Peabody Museum; and the founding of the Indigenous Peoples of Oceania (IPO) at Yale student group represent a growing investment in the Pacific within the university’s broader Native community. Māhea Ahia, the first Pasifika scholar ever chosen for the Henry Roe Cloud Fellowship, is a continuation of that trend. “This global vision of Indigenous Studies that includes what is not centered on the U.S. sphere of Indigeneity, but is, in fact, transnational and comparative, is a real clear sign of development,” Professor Blackhawk says. “This year’s selection really highlights the depth of that growth.”
***
The inclusion of Pasifika scholars represents not only new regions of study in the broadening vision of Native and Indigenous Studies but also new epistemologies and pedagogies blooming from Moananuiākea / the Pacific Ocean. For Māhea, the ʻupena / web of knowledge she brings to the university space is grounded in her familial genealogy. Her moʻolelo begins in the realm of the gods.
Hawaiʻi was birthed from the powers of a cosmological pantheon. While Kānaka Maoli / Native Hawaiians memorialize the male deities of Kū, Lono, Kāne, and Kanaloa as the four tenants of Hawaiian society, female deities—like Papahānaumoku, Pele, and Kihawahine—were central in the creation of the Hawaiian world. Māhea tells me that, in her lineage, Kihawahine is “actually an ancestress,” a “family deity” that has protected her bloodline across time and space.
Born in Lāhainā on the island of Maui in the 16th century, Kihawahine was a descendant of a powerful family line, daughter of the aliʻi / nobility Piʻilani and Lāʻieloheloheikawai. “When she passed away,” Māhea recounts, “her bones were wrapped in yellow kapa / barkcloth, she was placed into Mokuhinia—the sacred pond [surrounding] Mokuʻula—and was deified.” Kihawahine was reborn as a powerful moʻo, now a goddess that protects freshwater ponds and the royal residence, with the ability to also take the kino / physical forms of a spider, white dog, and a shapeshifting, seducing woman. Her primary residence is Mokuʻula—an island embedded in Lāhainā’s landscape, but in the 20th century, sugar companies drained the sacred pond to irrigate cane fields.
Māhea, like Kihawahine, traces her family roots to Maui, though she was born 2,500 miles from the island’s shores, on Tongva lands in present-day Los Angeles. Her family later moved to Acjachemen lands in present-day Dana Point, California. “I grew up doing music and clubs, and was lucky enough to dance,” she tells me. Despite living in a thriving hub of Hawaiian cultural activity, diasporic longing pulled at Māhea’s heart. It manifested in conversations with her father. “My dad was always like, ‘We’re going to move home this year. We’re going to move home’,” she recalls, “but there was always this sense of longing.” For Māhea, a looming homeland gazed from the shoal offshore, swept in ʻaumiki / outgoing currents that obscured the navigation back.
For Māhea, a looming homeland gazed from the shoal offshore, swept in ʻaumiki / outgoing currents that obscured the navigation back.
After receiving her B.A. in Theatre Arts from the University of California, Berkeley, she began a career that led her further from Hawaiʻi. “I performed theater in Los Angeles and San Francisco and New York,” she says, “I made a living as a freelance writer.” However, a sudden illness would end her journey in the theater and writing world. Forced to leave her performance career behind, she turned back to academia.
While pursuing her M.A. in Mythological Studies & Depth Psychology at the Pacifica Graduate Institute, Māhea began to have dreams. When her eyes would close in the evenings, her dreams would bloom into new worlds where ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi / Hawaiian language danced from her lips. Oli / chant trilled in her throat, reverberating in her nāʻau / gut. For Kānaka Maoli, dreams are hōʻailona: signs that demystify the shoal offshore; a call that awaits a response. “I took it as a hōʻailona that I needed to come home to Maui and learn,” Māhea says. “The kūpuna have been leading me.”
And in 2008, she returned to Maui. She returned to Kihawahine.
***
Touching down on the tarmac of Kahului Airport was a moment of reconnection for Māhea—of retying a tether to Hawaiʻi. Following the path lit by the embers of her recurring dreams, Māhea began her time at the University of Hawaiʻi Maui College, studying Hawaiian Language and Studies. “We had fantastic professors there, like the very dynamic Kaleikoa Kaʻeo and Kahele Dukelow,” Māhea says, smiling. Kaʻeo, associate professor of Hawaiian Studies at UH Maui College, and Dukelow, UH Maui College Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs, are deeply involved in the community movement to defend Haleakalā—home to the highest peak on Maui—from State-sponsored construction efforts. Māhea, a kiaʻi / protector of Haleakalā herself, credits both of them for her thorough training and grounding in Hawaiian activist movements.
Hawaiian politics, however, are inextricably linked with Hawaiian culture. Māhea dedicated years to learning hula and oli under revered practitioners during her time on Maui. She trained under kumu hula / hula teacher Kealiʻi Reichel, a master of Hawaiian music and a founding director of the Hawaiian language immersion preschool, Pūnana Leo O Maui. She joined Hawaiian women’s circles and continued her study of oli under Kaponoʻai Molitau, kahuna nui / high priest of Puʻukoholā, a sacred monument on Hawaiʻi Island’s Kohala coast.
In August 2017, Māhea moved to Oʻahu in pursuit of an advanced degree at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She is now a Ph.D. candidate in the English Department’s Indigenous Pacific Literature track and is simultaneously completing a graduate certificate in Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies. As a graduate student in these programs, Māhea taught courses including Island Feminisms and Indigenous Feminisms, Women & Revolution, and Intro to LGBTQ+ Studies. Her investments in Hawaiian literature and feminism are also deeply intertwined. “I go back and I look at gender and sexuality, disabilities in those stories,” she says. “I look at different kinds of relationality and how to help contemporary problems by using our ancestral stories as models.”
Hawaiian language, politics, literature, and arts are the pōhaku / stones foundational to her academic trajectory. These constructions of identity help her articulate the nuances of a Hawaiian universe that is beginning to carve a space in the university. Professor Hobart believes that Māhea’s work can be understood to represent the direction of Hawaiian Studies as a whole. “Her command of language and her access to the language archives are so important,” she says.“And I think that’s where scholarship is going to go.”
Māhea’s dissertation, now ten years in the making, charts the evolution of moʻolelo and oli about Kihawahine: how she is received and perceived across the slips and sutures of time. Drawing on troves of Hawaiian language archives and community-based oral histories, the project works to re-story Kihawahine and rehabilitate her place in the Hawaiian consciousness. Methodologically, Māhea’s work pushes the boundaries of Western understandings of the biography, centering on a deity that is constantly evolving. “My subject is human and non-human, alive and, some would say, no longer living,” she explains. “She has all these forms simultaneously.”
For Professor Hobart, who has been following Māhea’s work and trajectory for several years, these contemplations are proof of Māhea’s academic prowess. “Her understanding of Hawaiian history is really impressive and grounded,” Hobart remarks. “The bar’s getting set really high in this next generation of scholars. And I’m really happy to see the bar set the way that it is, knowing, of course, that it would take me [another] whole career to get there.”
***
Māhea’s journey through the academy, however, paused after moving to Oʻahu. She met her partner, Kahala Johnson, on Maui and became a mother: “We had a little girl, Hinaʻaiināmeleonālani. She was a joy,” she says. Hina was born with disabilities, which allowed Māhea to deeply learn how to mālama / care for. Before her third birthday, Hina returned to Papahānaumoku / earth mother. In her honor, Māhea became invested in Indigenous disability studies—and the language of healing.
At the same time Māhea arrived at UH Mānoa in 2017, the State of Hawaiʻi recommenced construction of the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope on the summit of Haleakalā—despite fierce backlash from the Hawaiian community. When convoys of trucks carrying construction equipment began scaling the mountain, Māhea and Kahala laid their bodies on the cold pavement before the trailers’ tires, arms linked by PVC pipes. For both of them, defending Haleakalā was not a choice, but a kuleana / responsibility to their ancestors, and to their daughter Hina.
Standing in defense of sacred ʻāina did not end on Haleakalā. In 2019, she traveled to Mauna Kea in the wake of the State of Hawaiʻi’s renewed threats to commence construction of the Thirty-Meter Telescope on the mountain’s summit. A struggle between Kānaka Maoli and the State that has persisted for nearly a decade, the construction of a puʻuhonua / sanctuary—or encampment, as others have framed it—by protectors garnered international attention. For Māhea, coming to Mauna Kea was also an act of reciprocity. Atop Haleakalā, protectors of Mauna Kea stood in solidarity with protectors on Maui. “We knew that when they called for the Mauna / mountain, we would go,” she says. “So I did.”
At the base of the summit, under the malu / shade of its icy caps, Māhea co-founded Puʻuhonua o Puʻuhuluhulu University—an alternative model to the university encamped on the mountain’s access road—in collaboration with Kahala, ʻIlima Long, and Presley Keʻalaanuhea Ah Mook Sang. Over the course of eight months, hundreds of educators offered around 1,000 different classes to the community for free, teaching Hawaiian history, natural sciences, music, and politics. The Mauna Kea Syllabus Project sprang from the university’s pedagogy. The syllabus is a living document of thematic categories and guiding questions, readings and resources, built from the contributions of Kānaka Maoli, Native Americans, Palestinians, and Indigenous organizers from across the globe. “That kind of work allowed me to make a wider Native network,” Māhea reflects, “and start to see how Native peoples navigate universities.”
Entangling and embedding Hawaiian culture into her academic work, Māhea’s drive remains rooted in her connection to, and protection of, ʻāina—particularly against the realities of settler militarism, colonialism, and imperialism in Hawaiʻi. For Kānaka Maoli, as Māhea articulates, “we feel the bombing of Mākua, or when Kahoʻolawe was still being bombed, you could feel the earth underneath you shake. When they still do that on Hawaiʻi Island, when they’re practicing in Pōhakuloa, our bodies also shake with that.”
From Haleakalā to Mauna Kea, from Mākua to Kahoʻolawe, from Pōhakuloa to Mokuʻula, building the method to heal is essential for the survival of Hawaiʻi and its people. To Māhea, moʻolelo, like those that trace the body and shape of Kihawahine, become a potent response. “I look at different forms of ancestral Hawaiian moʻolelo and their power for healing,” she says. “Our ancestral stories [are] models for pono / cosmologically balanced behavior and pono relations to the ʻāina.”
In the wake of wildfires that devastated Lāhainā and other parts of West Maui last August, Māhea’s work is critical. Like the draining of Mokuhinia in the 20th century, decades of stream diversion by sugar plantations dried the lands of Lāhainā, turning wetlands into a tinderbox. When a powerline was downed by gusts of an offshore storm, sparks turned into flames, and flames into a wildfire. The deadliest fire in Hawaiʻi’s history—and a rupturing of the islands’ settler history—the Lāhainā fires claimed the lives of 102 residents and left countless others missing. Relics of the Hawaiian Kingdom’s former capital vanished up in smoke.
13 months later, Lāhainā is still recovering. State officials predict that rebuilding will take years. But from the rubble, trees grow. And in Lāhainā, the moʻolelo of Kihawahine, the protector of fresh water, has grown from whispers to conversations. “People have been calling on her name again, new chants and new hula are being composed,” Māhea says.
At the time of our conversation, Māhea is back home in Maui, collecting these stories. She sees a direction for the future in this community resurgence of Kihawahine. For her, old and new moʻolelo and oli “opens up space for people to start to bring her in different life forms again, calling on her as a water protector, to bring back the lands of Maui, to restore the diverted water and to regrow Maui in a way that’s pono and restores our sense of humanity and dignity.” Māhea’s restoring and restorying of Kihawahine is not only about honoring her kūpuna / elders, but honoring Papahānaumoku, the earth mother from whom we grow. In her protection of Kihawahine, Māhea articulates the body and shape of hope for generations she will never meet.
“We’re not doing it just for ourselves,” she tells me. “I don’t do this work just for me. I do it for all of my kūpuna. I do it for my family.”
***
I take a moment to breathe, as Māhea finishes charting her personal and academic genealogy. She speaks poems and lives multitudes, all pointed in a direction homeward. Decolonizing methodologies—rearticulating the value of Indigenous knowledge production in the university—is a quest that many Native Hawaiian and Pasifika students at Yale have yet to answer.
Yet, Māhea brings to New Haven the epistemologies, pedagogies, and forms of knowledge production rooted in ʻāina, rooted in Hawaiʻi. She not only hopes to leave these with the university’s Native community but to expand it with the help of the institution’s resources. Professor Hobart, looking forward to Māhea’s time here, hopes to “push all of what Yale can do in her direction.” Professor Blackhawk, reflecting on the growing number of scholars selected for the Henry Roe Cloud Fellowship, believes opportunities like these are “deeply transformative,” especially for communities underrepresented in higher education. Dissertation fellowships at Yale not only platform, but uplift voices that introduce new and exciting ways of knowing and being. Their creations reverberate in communities across the globe and begin a dialogue in those places, transforming the university from a dream to a possibility.
Within the university, these dialogues have begun. “Being welcomed by the NACC and IPO, that is automatically where I felt most at home,” she recalls. “I think that that’s beautiful that our relationality is what allows us to stay in places like this, that aren’t necessarily built for us.” As our conversation deepens, I reflect on my own journey to Yale—the pangs of homesickness that nearly broke my sense of self. It was the rapid growth and gradual cohesion of other Pasifika students that reminded me why I chose to come here. As Māhea puts it, like moʻo, “the more of us that are here, the more we start to shapeshift around that.”
Māhea’s arrival at Yale and returning tales of the university’s Pasifika community have sparked the curiosity of Kānaka Maoli at home in Hawaiʻi. “I’ve been telling everyone,” she says through laughs, “and they’re like, wow, there’s that many Kānaka and Pacific Islanders? Maybe I would actually want to apply to Yale.” Māhea’s selection as the Henry Roe Cloud Fellow, beyond recognizing her academic prowess, opens new doors, new futures, for Indigenous peoples across the Pacific. And in our Pasifika student community here, Māhea represents a hope that, while she is one of the first visiting Pasifika scholars to our university, she will not be the last—that Yale can and should invest in more programs like the Henry Roe Cloud Fellowship.
And in our Pasifika student community here, Māhea represents a hope that, while she is one of the first visiting Pasifika scholars to our university, she will not be the last—that Yale can and should invest in more programs like the Henry Roe Cloud Fellowship.
As night descends along the walls of the NACC, I sit with Emma Slagle (Kanaka Maoli), BF ’26, in the first floor’s conference room. The evenings we’ve spent here, as members of IPO and the NACC House Staff, are uncountable. Emma, who had recently discovered that she’s related to Māhea, recognizes her arrival at the university as “powerful and wonderful.” Looking to the year ahead, Emma seeks to deepen her pilina / intimacies with Māhea. “I hope to hear her perspective and moʻolelo, to hear her life experience, and to keep learning from her.”
***
When Kamōʻiliʻili was diced into thousands of tiny moʻo, each of them scattered to different places across Mānoa Valley and Hawaiʻi. Māhea reveals why it’s her favorite moʻolelo: “I think of us as these moʻo. And moʻo are also short stories. So each one of us who ventures to Yale has our own little moʻo, our own moʻolelo.” She pauses. “I feel like putting all of the parts of the moʻo body back together when we’re all together makes all the mana / spiritual power that much stronger.”
Coming to Yale, and bringing Kihawahine with her, Māhea does more than just restory her legacy—she articulates the unspoken, and often undervalued, kuleana of protection to the entire Hawaiian diaspora. “There need to be people,” Māhea says, “like those moʻo protecting small water ponds.” These moʻo, she continues, “hold this wellspring of Hawaiian manaʻo / thought and ʻike / knowledge in these random universities and places.” They are “holding open those spaces for our people to go and find those kīpuka / oases.” Though only at Yale for a year, Māhea is building, strengthening, and protecting kīpuka. In her footsteps, more moʻo will voyage to New Haven, perpetuating the legacy of Kihawahine.
Kanaka Maoli scholar Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio, in her book Remembering Our Intimacies, writes that “instead of being frozen in time or ink, moʻolelo move and shape-shift.” In Culture and Imperialism, Palestinian scholar Edward Said argues that stories are “the method colonized people use to assert their own identity and the existence of their own history.” For Māhea, moʻolelo are measures of repair. They heal a person and mend a community—they are the connective tissue between our past, present, and future.
“Every time we tell the story,” Māhea says, “we’re bringing Kihawahine back to life.”
