Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio

Background

I am a Kanaka Maoli wahine mākua, artist, activist, scholar, and storyteller born and raised in Pālolo Valley to my parents, Jonathan and Mary Osorio. I earned my PhD in English (Hawaiian literature) in 2018 from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, where I currently work as an Associate Professor of Indigenous and Native Hawaiian Politics. In 2020, my poetry and activism were the subject of an award-winning film, This is the Way We Rise, which premiered at Sundance Film Festival in 2021. In 2022, I was a lead artist and co-writer of the VR documentary On the Morning You Wake (To the End of the World), which premiered at Sundance Film Festival and won the XR Experience Jury Award at SXSW 2022.

I am a proud former Kaiāpuni student, Ford Dissertation (2017) and Postdoctoral (2022) Fellow, and a graduate of Kamehameha Schools, Stanford University (BA), and New York University (MA). I am also the author of the award-winning book Remembering Our Intimacies: Moʻolelo, Aloha ʻĀina, and Ea, published in 2021 by the University of Minnesota Press. I believe in the power of aloha ʻāina and collective action to pursue liberatory, decolonial, and abolitionist futures of abundance.

Education

• PhD, English, University of Hawaiʻi, 2018
• MA, Art and Politics, New York University, 2013
• BA, Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, Stanford University, 2012

Courses

• POLS 140: Introduction to Indigenous Politics 
• POLS 180: Introduction to Hawaiʻi Politics 
• POLS 301: Hawaiʻi Politics
• POLS 302: Native Hawaiian Politics 
• POLS 304: Indigenous Politics 
• POLS 620: Intro to Indigenous Politics
• POLS 621: Politics of Indigenous Representation
• POLS 684: Contemporary Native Hawaiian Politics
• POLS 777: Decolonial Futures

Research

As a scholar who has the great privilege of spending my life devoted to the knowledges of my people, I am not simply interested in bringing the brilliant ʻike (knowledges) of my kūpuna (ancestors/elders) into the academy for a belated recognition of our intellect and ingenuity. I am invested in pursuing my work and sharing it in a way that will disrupt our institutions and transform our assumptions of what the academy can and should do in order to make way for a more just and ethical society. 

My first book, Remembering Our Intimacies, centered on the personal and embodied articulations of aloha ʻāina to detangle it from the effects of colonialism and occupation. Working at the intersections of Hawaiian knowledge, Indigenous queer theory, and Indigenous feminisms, I sought to recuperate Native Hawaiian concepts and ethics around relationality, desire, and belonging grounded in the land, memory, and the body of Native Hawai’i.

My current research has shifted to trace the institutionalization of carceral systems in the Hawaiian Kingdom and Hawaiian territorial history. I trace these transformations into the contemporary period while investigating intergenerational resistance to carceral politics. This research follows resurgence of Puʻuhonua in contemporary Hawaiian movements as a culturally grounded and contemporarily relevant alternative to policing, prisons, and other carceral institutions of state violence. I pursue this work as both a scholar and kiaʻi to support collective action to pursue liberatory, decolonial, and abolitionist futures of abundance.

Community Engagement

I am an Aloha ʻĀina. My work within our university is meant, first and foremost, to serve our lāhui beyond the institution. In order to teach about Hawaiʻi, Hawaiian and Indigenous Politics, it is our kuleana to remain connected and in service, to the communities, these politics affect most.