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Hello, and welcome to For the Wild Podcast. I'm Ayana Young. Today I'm speaking with Dr. Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio. 

Dr. Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio is a Kanaka Maoli wahine artist, activist, and scholar born and raised in Pālolo Valley to parents Jonathan and Mary Osorio. Heoli earned her Ph.D. in English Hawaiian literature in 2018 from the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. Currently, Heoli is an Assistant Professor of Indigenous and Native Hawaiian Politics at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa. Heoli is a three-time national poetry champion, poetry mentor, and a published author. She is a proud past Kaiāpuni student, Ford fellow, and a graduate of Kamehameha, Stanford University (BA), and New York University (MA). Her book Remembering our Intimacies: Moʻolelo, Aloha ʻĀina, and Ea was published this fall with the University of Minnesota Press.

Well, Jamaica, thank you so much for joining us today. I would just really love for you to introduce yourself a bit further however you see fit or perhaps share a poem if you feel called to.

Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio Aloha Mai kākou ‘O wau nō ‘o Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio. I was born and raised on the island of Oʻahu, in the Pālolo Valley. I'm a Native Hawaiian artist, wahine woman, queer person, poet, professor, scholar, educator, storyteller. I come from a beautiful large family. Most of our family actually grew up on another island, the island of Hawai’i, in the malu of Maunakea. But these days, a lot of us live on Oʻahu. Me and my partner and our newborn child, she's three weeks old yesterday, along with my parents and my two sisters and brother, we all live in Wahiawā. Most people know me outside of my own profession as a poet and a performer. But these days, I spend much more of my time working directly with students at the University of Hawai’i. I teach Native Hawaiian and Indigenous Politics at our university. And I am what I consider to be a longtime Hawaiian activist and kia'i protector. And those things really inform pretty much everything about my life. 

And since you asked, I guess I could share a poem. I know I was asked to prepare if I wanted to share a poem, and I didn't really think about it. But now I want to. And this poem was written in what we say the Malu of Maunakea, in the shade and protection of Maunakea in 2019, July of 2019, when thousands of us Native Hawaiians and our comrades gathered to block the movement of construction vehicles up to the summit of our sacred mountain. And I joined a number of other people who lived there at the semi-permanent encampment committing to not leave until the construction vehicles left. And so this poem is about that time in the Mauna, and this is also about the time when I met my partner and fell in love and now have this beautiful life that I have now. 

Ask me about the mauna / And I will tell you about thirty kānaka huddled shivering in an empty parking lot / Praying / The lāhui would answer the call I will tell you about two nights / Cot sleeping / Directly under a sky scattered in stars / In air so clear / Every inhale is medicine / How every morning / I woke to a lāhui growing / As if we were watching Maui fish us / One by one / From the sea / Ask me about the mauna / And I will tell you / How on the third morning I watched / As 30 became 100 / then 100 became 1000 / then 1000 became us all / Each and every one of our Akua standing beside us / Ask me about the mauna / And I will tell you the mo’olelo of eight / people chained to a cattle grate / And the kōkua that sat beside us / How we were never alone in the malu of our mauna / How no one is ever alone in the malu of our mauna / Ask me / And I will tell you about the hands I held / Through blistering cold / And extreme heat / How I learned love / From the subtle tilt of her temple pressed against mine / Or by the solemn promise of her eyes / How the evening before I braided prayers into her hair hoping they would hold / Ask me / And I will recount their names / All 38 kūpuna / One after the other who showed us mo’opuna how to stand / How I wept / And wept / And wept / As I quietly held their names in my chest / Ask me / And I will sing the song of our mana wahine / Linked arms and unafraid / Who stood in the face of the promise / Of sound cannons and mace / Ask me / And I will tell you / I have been transformed here / But won’t have the words to quite explain / I will say / I do not know who exactly I’ll be when this ends / I do not know who exactly we will be when this ends / But at the very least / I’ll know / This ‘āina / Did everything it could to feed me / And that will be enough to keep me standing.  

That's my poem.

Ayana Young Wow, what a way to start this conversation. I am left very stilled and chilled. And I'm just catching myself. Thank you, thank you for sharing that and hearing your passion behind each word and your inflection was just who left me in a state so I can get myself together enough to keep going.

Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio We’ve got to start with the deep stuff, go right into it, right into, as my people would say, right into the center.

Ayana Young Well, to continue going deep into the center, I'd like to ask you about Pilina, as explored in your most recent book, Remembering Our Intimacies: Mo'olelo, Aloha Āina, and Ea. And for listeners who are unfamiliar, I'm going to share a passage from your dissertation, "(Re)membering ‘Upena of Intimacies: A Kānaka Maoli Mo‘olelo Beyond Queer Theory," wherein you write, "If relationships are about intimacies, then this dissertation is also about considering the many forms intimacy can take, and how certain relationships and intimacies are pursued and practiced. Some intimacies are realized through sex, some through experiencing together a sunrise or a cold rain, some through the simple yet important act of sharing names, especially in the face of a settler-colonial project that has worked towards punishing, mocking, or eliminating certain forms and practices of intimacy. It is important that this project take intimacy seriously, in its many shape-shifting forms." And I'm just particularly struck by this notion of shape-shifting intimacy, intimacy that is expansive. So I'd love it if you could begin by sharing how limiting our colonial understanding of intimacy is, and non-comparable, and the abundant nature of pre-colonial intimacy.

Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio Absolutely such a great question. And really well-timed, because this is exactly what we were talking about in my classes this morning. So I should be fresh. I'll talk a little bit about this from the perspective of a Native Hawaiian wahine, queer person, and scholar who spends a lot of time thinking about how our cultural norms have been transformed, erased, policed via colonialism, and belligerent occupation. And a lot of this can be really easily related to one particular word in Hawai’i, that a lot of people, not even just Hawaiians, but a lot of people seem to have some kind of familiar familiarity with. And that word is Aloha. 

And as you folks might know, Aloha has such a grand audience, right, everyone, almost everyone's heard the word before, but very few people actually know what it means. And so many people are invested in a particular defining of aloha. These days in Hawai’i, that definition is crafted to sell a product. And that product is Hawai’i, right? This place is the product and we and our culture, and our practices are a part of that product. And it generates massive wealth for a small number of people who have no kuleana, no responsibility or authority in Hawai’i. But that's also part of a much larger problem. 

So before, as some might say in kāwā ʻōiwi wale, at the time of just the natives, before the arrival of people like Captain Cook and all his homies and then, of course, the ABCFM mission. My people practice a really, as you say, expansive practice of aloha and intimacy and care. We were not heteronormative by any stretch of the imagination, we did not practice compulsory monogamy or compulsory heteronormativity. We practice what folks like Lilikalā Kame‘elehiwa who's a brilliant Hawaiian scholar, she calls it moe aku moe mai, the sleeping here or there. There were a lot of things about Hawaiian society that were heavily regulated and spiritually regulated. But pleasure was never one of them, there was no expectation for you to have one partner of a particular sex. In fact, the only expectation there was is that you enter into consensual relationships and that you respect those relationships. And you respect whatever boundaries you set up with the people you are in relation to. And that and that's important because those Pilina, those intimacies we shared between people, we shared them in that way because it was also reflected in the ʻāina. Right, in the land, and that which fed us we, we learned how to give each other pleasure through pleasuring the land, or through watching our other than human kin pleasure each other, or the land. 

A great example is watching a Manu `O`ö or a honeycreeper sip the nectar of ʻŌhiʻa Lehua blossom that teaches us about giving pleasure to women, that we see ourselves as a part of ʻāina, a part of land and a part of creation. But of course, a lot of that changes with the coming of foreigners. The first kind of wave of that change, of course, is with Captain Cook, and these early, early arriving, Europeans and their interest in buying sex, essentially, buying women. And of course, that changes the way we think about intimacy, it changes the way we think about consent, and all of that comes with all kinds of problems around disease and death. And so even the early Hawaiian Kingdom is having to reckon with our norms around intimacy are no longer safe for us, because we are dying from these venereal diseases that we never had here because these dirty Haole men are coming here and sleeping with women when they know that they're sick. 

That's the first wave but what becomes actually a much more powerful wave of influence is in the 1820s when the missionaries arrived in Hawai’i and when the early first missionaries arrived in Hawai’i, one of the rules for these missionaries is that they had to be married. So many of these missionaries from Boston went out and found wives so that they could come on this mission. And that's really important because an essential part of what they came to teach was what it means to be in a virtuous relationship, what it means to be a virtuous person, to be close to God, and so on and so forth. And so, when they come to Hawai’i, they start to import really particular ideas about what kinds of intimacy are appropriate, and what needs to be policed out or mocked or removed. And here is where we see this really drastic transformation in the way that we conceive of our 'ohana are what some may call families. 

And we go from these really expensive practices of Pilina multiple partners. No such thing as an illegitimate child, our 'ohana, expands beyond the nuclear, to these very rigid practices of what a family is. And some people may think, Okay, well, this is only having a really small influence. It's just on the family. But if you think about the way that my ancestors used to practice 'ohana, and you think about the fact that we didn't have words for auntie and uncle, that everyone in the generation above us was mākua, was a parent, and everyone in our generation was a sibling. When you look at the way Christian ideas around intimacy and relationships, what they really did is they reduced us into these really isolated households. And that had a really tremendous effect on how we lived with each other, but also how we lived with our land. 

And when we talk about this more expensive practice of Aloha, whether it is to wahine, seeking pleasure from each other, or to kāne to women to men seeking pleasure from each other, or multiple women and men or people who do not fit anywhere near this very strange gender binary, seeking pleasure with each other in ways that are ethical, and then reflecting the intimacy of our land with each other. When we talk about that, we not only make room for so many more of us who have kind of been cast aside by society really intentionally, we also recognize that the way that Hawaiians and other Native people, I'll speak for Hawaiians only, but I know from conversations with other Native people, that there's lots of resonance here, that the way that our People have been removed from our land, displaced from our land, alienated from our land, that happened at the same time that they were removing us from each other, displacing us from each other alienating us from each other. So when we talk about, as Hawaiians, as Native people, when we talk about nation-building, when we talk about governance, when we talk about land back, we also need to be talking about how do we come back to each other, because it is those intimate practices of pleasure and consent and desire, that actually create a different world that we can live in.

So we're not just talking about- a lot of people like this conversation, because they like the sexy stuff. But we're not just talking about who's sleeping with whom. We're talking about the most intimate ways that we all relate to everyone around us, which means we're talking about how we make community, which means we're talking about how we govern, right, which means we're talking about what world we're going to live in. And so, my work and my research take a really close look at some gorgeous and sexy and exciting examples of other ways we've lived before the strange world that said, the only real love is the one that exists in the imagination of the Bible.

And, and it asks us, or reminds us that it hasn't always been like this, which means it doesn't have to be like this forever. And we have so many examples of other ways we can live. So why not just do that instead? Why not topple capitalism? Why not topple patriarchy? Why not burn so much of this to the ground and start again, with something that not only is more authentic to who we are, but will also give life back to the earth, give life back to that which feeds us and give purpose back to our lives. And that is what that is the Aloha that the Hawai’i tourism economy doesn't want you to know about that the state of Hawai’i doesn't want you to know about certainly the United States of America does not want you to know about because that kind of aloha is radical, and will inspire, inter generate and has already inspired intergenerational revolutionary movements for change. And we just need more and more of our people to know these stories and know these songs and believe in them and have faith in themselves once again to change the world

Ayana Young Bringing it again.

Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio Wow. 

Ayana Young This is just such a rich and embodied conversation already. And I'm just so particularly drawn to the way in which you describe nets of intimacy, which shows reverence for our inextricable connections to one another. And I'm thinking back to a recent conversation I had with a dear sis, Nydia, Lucia, who spoke to something similar as well, pointing out that our understanding of self-care is somewhat of a fallacy if it doesn't recognize that our care is actually found in the care of each other, or of others. 

Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio Yeah.

Ayana Young Unfortunately, this past year and a half, almost two years now, I think has shown us how dominant society refuses to acknowledge our collective health, opting to fight for a very hollowed understanding of freedom. So I wonder if you could share any reflections you have right now on nets of intimacy and collective well-being versus individual desire?

Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio For sure, it is such a great and important question, especially right now, but I think always for us to come back to. As a Kānaka Maoli, as a Native Hawaiian, I am constantly reminded that there is no such thing as the individual. That I, as an individual do not ever exist outside of my relationships to those, to everything that is around me. And to pretend that I could exist outside of relation, it's not only really strange, but it also just sounds really lonely. I don't understand why people would want to live that way. And so this is another thing we learned via colonialism, right? This really ingrained, individualistic idea of what it means to move in the world. 

When we think about ‘Upena, these nets, these fishnets of intimacy, that metaphor is really important, because it shows us how every relationship we enter into connects us to other relationships. And in the book, I use the example of this really important moʻolelo, the moʻolelo of wahine, and I talk about this one wahine, this one woman who has multiple female intimate partners, and multiple male intimate partners, and many of these partners, even if they hadn't met each other, refer to each other as intimate partners to themselves. And so this whole new world opens up when you really sit in the truthful understanding that to enter into any relationship means if I love you, I have to love everyone who loves you. I have to love everyone you love. And not only do I have to love them, but I have to be accountable to them. And now my capacity for pleasure is certainly exponentially compounded. But my capacity, my capacity for responsibility and accountability skyrockets, I have to always see myself as a part of this larger collective. And if I fail to do that my actions not only harm myself, they harm the collective. 

And so when we look at something like this very strange understanding of freedom and this individual pursuit of freedom and rights, I have to remind my own people that freedom is not a Hawaiian value. It is not something we ever valued as a people. This idea that you have these natural rights you were born with, that don't come with a responsibility, that doesn’t come with another side of that coin- our language makes this very clear. The word kuleana is the word for right, the word for authority is also our word for responsibility. There is no such thing as one without the other. They're always in relationship to each other. And so I'd like to, from a Hawaiian perspective, remind folks that these western values are the values that brought us to this moment, are the values that put us in the situation, they are not going to be the values that are going to help us survive, let alone help us thrive in life again. 

So when we think about self-care and, and collective care, when we think about our kuleana to the world around us, I like to center that idea that none of us walk on this planet alone, that every step you take has an impact. And that shouldn't deter us from trying to move the world; that shouldn't deter us from trying to change the world. But it should certainly remind us that the things we say, matter, that people are listening, that the actions I take on or don't take on will have a compounding effect. And so when you're living in a time like this, when you're living in the middle of a pandemic, the greatest worst pandemic, any of us living, has seen. And there are people around you who are worried about their rights, and their freedom. There's got to be another part of ourselves that reminds us that, what is the value of rights and freedom if we don't have each other. Because perhaps it is possible for an individual to get out of this situation alive without thinking about others. But it is not possible for all of us to get out of this alive without thinking about each other. And there are too many of us who do not have the power, resources or influence, to protect ourselves for any of us to be taking that lightly.

And so, without me overly scolding the world, I just want to remind us that we need to look a little deeper into ourselves, especially as Kānaka, as Native Hawaiians and as Native people, that when we, when we take on the pride of calling ourselves Native, that that comes with a responsibility. And that means we have to really think critically about the values we bring into the world. And one of the things that I've learned from our stories, from our history, and from my ancestors, both the ones who are still here and the ones who have long returned to the realm of pō, to darkness, is that there's nothing more important than our relationship to each other. No individual desire of mine could be more important than the health and well-being of the lāhui. 

Many of our people have experienced devastating losses like this in the past. In our own history, we lost 90% of our population due to diseases that we didn't have immunities for. Some of those diseases are ones that we didn't have vaccines for at the time but have vaccines for today. And so there's also this other intergenerational trauma around how do we really respect the loss that our ancestors went through and live in this moment, in a way with intention as Native people who recognize that, especially for those of us who believe in protecting the land, that protecting the land means protecting each other, and the two go hand in hand? And so we begin there. I think

Ayana Young I feel the more I learn, the more of what you're speaking to is the priority for climate justice, for environmental justice. We can't get out of being relational. 

Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio Oh yeah.

Ayana Young There's no solution that we're going to stumble upon or invent or some technology that's going to be found that will be more important than relationships. So yeah, I'm so there with you. And I feel like I've just been in a huge process of embodying that knowledge in a way that I didn't know was possible. So I'm just really happy you spoke to that. And yeah, I'm thinking about how you recently shared some reflections on Instagram called, "COVID the End of the World and Finding Ourselves." In this video, you candidly reflect on the way we're talking to each other, specifically sharing, "Our relationships with each other are going to save us or destroy us," and this is an acknowledgment I've been feeling really deeply. And I think many listeners might share this recognition as well, as we become more polarized not only against those who might share opposing views but even in our own circles and movements. So can you expand upon this sentiment and the importance of coming home to relationship?

Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio Yeah, this is something that COVID certainly didn't teach me, but my commitment to this lesson had to be elevated because of the things that were happening that continued to happen around COVID. And, at the center of this idea that our relationships with each other are going to save us or destroy us, at the center of this is a real desire, as a Kanaka, to not forsake any of my people. Because I am a Kanaka who, because of Western ideology that had been imported into my community, had been forsaken. There is, to me, a direct correlation between the ways that many Hawaiians have bought into the idea of heterosexuality as virtue and the only way to be in relation is for a man and a wife to have a child, all that BS. There's a correlation between that, and the way that these other very strange anti-Vax, anti-science, anti-collective care, alt-right centering of American freedom and rights have gotten also strangely imported into my community. 

And so as a queer person, I recognize that violence and I recognize the impact of that violence. And it's not just in the example of being queer or living in the pandemic, but it's also in the example of looking at the impact of the US military on my community, and how there are many people in my community who are not critical of the US military, who serve in the US military and celebrate the violence and destruction of the US military. And still, those are people who are a part of my community, those are still Hawaiians, those are still 'ohana. And so that the work, that real work, is not just me standing on my soapbox, saying, the military is not just destroying Hawai’i, but it's destroying the world and the US military-industrial complex cannot stand if we want to live. That's not actually the real work, the real work is being able to still stand and live with and build relationship with my community so that we can heal, and come together to design a world where we will thrive, right? If it's just me, and my radical friends standing in a corner talking about this beautiful world we're gonna build, and so many of our 'ohana are not with us, then what is this world for? 

And so that's what I really was thinking about in that one particular video. And the context around that video is that I kind of stepped all the way into the polarized mud around to vaccinate or not to vaccinate because I was getting so frustrated, not just with what is certainly a large group of new age, strange cross-over white supremacy groups in Hawai’i kind of creating their own misinformation about COVID and the vaccine. But what I was really troubled by was how many Hawaiians were repeating those same narratives. And I got so frustrated, instead of being in conversation and community with lāhui, I just started shaming people who did not think the way that I did. And that was in direct opposition to these larger, more important ideal ideas around how important our relationships are. 

And since then, I think I've learned a lot, and the people that I'm in community with, we've learned a lot and we're struggling a lot with that work. There is no more valuable work than building relationships and there is no more difficult work than maintaining them. But the impact of that is tremendous. I mean, you talked about climate activism and the work of climate justice, and you look at what was happening at COP 26 or whatever the number is now, and all the amazing work happening outside of the building, all of the amazing organizing and activism and leadership coming from young people from the Pacific, from all parts of the world. All of that is possible because of relationship building. You look at Black Lives Matter, how Black Lives Matter in 2020/ 2021, gained so much more attention and had such a wider impact across the world, and especially across what we consider to be the United States of America, so much of that is about relationship building. You look at what happened on Maunakea in 2019, so much of that is about relationship building we did in our lāhui, but also solidarity and relationship building we did with other native people from Standing Rock to Line Three, and across Turtle Island. And so that's really what that means, right? Our relationships with each other are going to save us or destroy us. 

If we don't center Pilina in the process, and also in what we hope to be the product of our work, we have set a very low ceiling for what we will achieve. And what we are also saying by that is that we are okay with getting to the finish line with only some of us. And I just can't think of a world, I can't think of a universe wherein the values I've been taught by my ancestors and our Moʻolelo, where that would be appropriate. All that, to me, sounds like our people creating institutions that look like the same institutions that violate us, it looks like the military-industrial complex, it looks like the medical-industrial complex, it looks like the prison and police industrial complexes. And I don't want to do that, I don't want to be a part of that work. And so a part of that video, too, is recognizing, oh, it's really easy to fall into that trap. So the work isn't just about being perfect. The work is about recognizing when you are, as Leanne Simpson would say, "siding with the colonizer," recognize it, own it, take accountability for it, and then change your behavior. And see if that change of behavior will inspire others to do the same and see what you can build on that fertile soil.

Ayana Young So deep and meaningful. And I find myself in a community, a small community now, with loggers and miners and just getting firewood. And thinking about conversations with old-growth loggers. Here, I have been a fierce defender of old-growth logging for over a decade and still the humanity in relationship. And still, we're humans. And I think that for the most part, people are doing their best. I actually think that people who are making different decisions than me, when I might think to myself, What are you doing? How? How, how, why are you not seeing this? I actually don't think they're thinking it's wrong, whether they've been conditioned, trained, taught, traumatized into, we don't live in a vacuum from each other. And so I yeah, I can't imagine a world where everybody who somehow thinks differently than me, even if they're being violent towards the Earth somehow just disappears. And then a whole new society is created. I don't see that happening. So if that isn't going to happen, then how are we going to move through this together? How are we going to find ways of relating and changing each other because we're being vulnerable? Not because we're demanding it of one another? So, yeah, just the practice of humbling oneself, becoming more vulnerable and more connected to even the folks who feel so far from us. Yeah, completely challenging. 

Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio I think you're right that most of the people in the world are doing our best and everything about the society we live in has worked to alienate us from each other. It's not an accident that we have problems connecting, right? It's not an accident that we don't have generative relationships. All of that is intentional from the political polarization to the relationship polarization. We're not going to change each other by me saying, Oh, you're stupid because you believe these things if we can't actually sit at a table and build a relationship. I mean, I do believe that there are some just evil, greedy people. But by and large, most of us are doing our best. And almost all of us are making decisions impacted by fear. And fear is such a powerful, powerful emotion. And we can't address fear if we can't look each other in the eyes, right? We can't address fear if we can't talk to each other. 

And that's where that idea of Pilina, that idea of intimacy, you say vulnerability, same thing. I can't address why both of our responses to fear are opposite. Unless I can actually see the fear in you. And when I see the fear in you, I see the fear in me. And we are both giving back our humanity. Right, we're both humbled by that. And that , I think, is such difficult work. But such important work, especially in the COVID world where some of us haven't seen each other in two years. Even the people we feel closest to we haven't seen in two years. We haven't made new connections with people in two years. I thought this before COVID happened, that we were starving for intimacy, and I think now we're in a crisis of intimacy that we really need to attend to.

Ayana Young Absolutely, yeah. And, again, there is no way around this intimacy for healing.

Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio Yeah. 

Ayana Young There's no shortcut. There is no carbon sequestering technology.

Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio You can pay it off, right. It doesn't work like that for it. There's no net zero. You're either doing it or you're not.

Ayana Young Yeah, yeah. Gosh, well, I could literally have an hours-long conversation with you just on this alone. 

Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio Yeah.

Ayana Young I do want to transition our conversation. And now look at the concepts of Aloha, which you started to mention at the beginning of our conversation. And I'm particularly interested in asking you this in the context of the ways that this idea of Aloha has been not only appropriated but transmuted into some sort of unrecognizable, saccharin selling point. In a plenary address with your father, Jonathan Osorio wrote, you share, "I'm not speaking of Aloha, as it has been watered down and evoked by the tourist industry as passivity. I'm speaking of Aloha as a radical form of activism and healing. And it is also a form of resistance. In a world full of violence, hate, and oppression. What could be more radical than choosing love over hate? Choosing love over fear, choosing inclusion over exclusion? Nothing." So please share what it means to embody aloha and to reclaim it amidst its commodification. What sort of world is reopened when this happens?

Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio Yeah, this is a great question. And I that quote, I remember that plenary address with my father, you told me just you totally just took me back, however, many years ago that was, I feel young all over again. What is Aloha? As I said a little bit earlier. And as you gestured to just now, there are so many people invested in what Aloha means. And there's that whole tourist industry trying to sell Aloha. Aloha sells everything from Hawai’i, the destination, to pest control, to food products, to lotions to sexually transmitted disease apps, and so on and so forth. Everyone has a vested interest in Aloha because what they've seen is that it's been used in the greatest marketing scheme of all time, right? The selling of Hawai’i as a destination, as a product. 

But Aloha hasn't just been misappropriated for that purpose. Aloha has also been used against us Native Hawaiians in policing our behavior. So in that larger scheme of Aloha, selling Hawai’i, there's this idea that Aloha means hospitality. Aloha means you're always welcome here. Aloha means I am submissive and accepting of whatever you bring to my shores. Anything outside of that is not aloha and therefore, if Hawaiians are all about Aloha, anything outside of that is a behavior not becoming of a Hawaiian. So we see this really strange, strange policing, kind of similar to the way that women are told that's not very ladylike, that's not how a woman behaves. 

We see this very similar policing of behavior, as you would see with women, right? Women need to behave in a particular way Hawaiians need to be even a particular way and they create, there's the state of Hawai’i, this magic institution, created the idea of the aloha spirit, right, and the aloha spirit is not this thing that my Kūpuna talked about, not this thing that we read about in our Moʻolelo and sing about in our songs. It's this heavily crafted list of behaviors, norms of behaviors, right? Aloha never raises its voice. Aloha never pushes back, aloha head never protests. Aloha never says fuck. Aloha never steps outside of the church. And so somehow these ideas, a lot of them have been internalized in our own community and we use them to police ourselves so that when nine Kānaka Maoli Native Hawaiians in the 1970s, they land on Kaho'olawe, an island that had been bombed, continuously bombed as target practice by the US military since World War Two. When they land on that island, saying you're not going to bomb this island anymore. Other Hawaiians call those Hawaiians bad Hawaiians, and they aren't practicing Aloha. It's crazy, like a beautiful magic trick, right? 

Where we turn our people against each other, using a word, completely misusing a word, but also forcing us all to participate in the state in a particular way. And we see the same thing over and over from Kaho'olawe to protesting the H3, to protesting Mauna Kea. There's always this contest over whether or not we are acting with aloha. When you stand in front of a line of police officers and you refuse to move, are you acting with aloha? Well, the state of Hawai’i would say no, the state of Hawai’i will say that we are criminals, that we are vagrants, that we are violent, even though we're singing and chanting and crying. But my Kūpuna, my ancestors, and our Moʻolelo will tell us there is no greater act of Aloha than to protect each other and to protect our land. So that is the work of kind of re-embodying and reclaiming Aloha from this unrecognizable idea. And a part of that is returning the word aloha to this sort of longer phrase, alohaʻāina, which means to love the land, which means I learn to love from the land. Which means I will do anything I can to protect the land and each other. That work is about insisting that no one understands Aloha like we do. And that we as Hawaiians have the authority to say what is and isn't aloha, and the state will never have that kind of authority. 

When we do that work, when we look at the BS that is the marketing scheme to sell the aloha spirit when people are trying to sell the aloha spirit by telling you to drive with aloha or act with aloha. We look all that in the eyes and say, someone is benefiting from this very narrow vision of aloha in the same way that someone has benefited from this very narrow vision of ‘ohana, of community, of nation. What do we have to gain and learn and return to if we just open that up again? If we say you need to check your sources you don't know what you're talking about. Here are all these examples of what aloha is. What kind of world do we open up? 

Well, we open up a world beyond the military. We open up a world beyond prisons because there's nothing about the prison industrial complex that is in alignment with aloha. There's nothing about a system that says some of us are not worthy of being honored as human that is represented in aloha. You open up a world beyond the police because there's nothing about aloha that says some of us should walk around with unquestioned authority and weaponry that we use to harm others. So you asked, what do we create? We create possibilities. We create answers to some of the most pressing and challenging needs of our time.

In the same way that aloha asks us to recognize each other, it also asks us to recognize our relationship to the ʻāina, to the land, to that which feeds us, that which is around us. We're also talking about opening up a universe in which nothing is more important, not your economy, not your global military force, not your own ego is more important than figuring out how to honor the earth. And not just for the selfish reasons of the earth, we only live if the Earth lives. But for the real, intentional, and intimate understanding that the Earth is our ancestor, and we are still in relationship to her. And she deserves as much life and thriving as we do. And so those are just a few things that open up with aloha. And the reason this space is so contested is because there are still so many people benefiting from this watered-down policed version of Aloha, it continues to fuel the tourist economy. It continues to fuel the state of Hawai’i, it continues still to this day, to successfully convince many Hawaiians to not stand up and use their voices because they are afraid that they will be seen as un-Hawaiian. What a crazy magic trick.

Ayana Young Yeah, I can only imagine the feeling that it would invoke in you to see being used in so many ridiculous ways to sell things that have nothing to do with the spirit of your people. That's really disturbing. And I'm grateful that you have had the grace to stick with it and express how wrong that is, and what truth is around aloha. Because I think many people who have heard that word have no understanding of the depth. 

Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio Yeah, it's the word that everyone's heard. But nobody knows. Aloha means hello, it means goodbye. It doesn't mean those things. Right? And, you ask most people what makes Hawai’i special? They'll either say the beach, or they'll say aloha. And when they say aloha, they are in their minds repeating this very intentional, crafted version of Aloha, which means everything about us is a misnomer. Everything the world thinks about us, even what we think about us, has been crafted by the Hawai’i Tourism Authority, by Disney movies, by Lilo and Stitch, by every single TV show that ever did a Hawai’i episode. That's how people come to understand what Hawai’i is and who Hawai’i is. So to me, in centering this idea of Polina, and relationships, because of course, aloha is all about relationality and relationships. 

There is no more critical question for our people to constantly be interrogating, and building around and loving around, then what is Aloha, and how do we reclaim the Aloha that our ancestors promised for us and wished for us? And how will reclaiming that - If we can't do that, we can't get our country back. If we can't do that, we can't get our land back. Maybe we get our land back, but then we just reproduce the same violence if we can't do that. So a lot of that has to do with the same thing that folks in other places will say. We're talking about going beyond inclusion, we're talking about transformation. And that transformation, just as we said, the getting there has to begin at the piko, at the center. Otherwise, we would say "poho," waste time.

Ayana Young Yeah, I'm right there with you. On every word, I'm nodding. Well, I'd like to ask you about what your work has reminded you about intergenerational wisdom. You shared that you are "concerned with how these teachings of Moʻolelo of our ancestors are instructive in our modern movement building and organizing." I'm curious to hear your reflections on this, as well as the ways in which younger generations are filling in the gaps created by settler colonialism?

Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio Yeah, this is a great question. And it's a complicated question because as you probably know, and maybe many of the listeners know, the movement to assimilate Native Hawaiians into a western civilization was in many ways very successful. And so there are whole generations, my father's generation, but certainly my grandfather's generation, he's the prime example, his generation is the prime example, didn't learn their language, didn't learn our stories. Many still learned our songs, because that was one thing that was seen by missionaries and kind of the larger oligarchy that were harmless, which they were wrong about the songs carried a lot of 'ike, a lot of knowledge, but anyway, didn't learn a lot of these things that we know today. 

When we talk about intergenerational wisdom, there's a lot of complications in the way that we organize together. Because there is this older knowledge. And this older knowledge is held in our Hawaiian language newspapers, we have over a million pages of writing by our ancestors from 1834, till the 1950s in our own language; stories, songs, political commentary, news, all in our language. There's this older knowledge there. There's also this older knowledge that's still held within our music, within our hula, and practitioners who have been entrusted to guard that knowledge. We're talking about Kumu hula, the simplest way for me to translate that is as hula teachers, but really they are guardians of knowledge, of a certain knowledge. They hold that older knowledge. There are some other people who practice other ancient Hawaiian practices that were passed down for generations, and they hold that older knowledge. But there's also this whole new generation, maybe last two generations of Hawaiians, who have been alive during the most recent Renaissance, and in particular, a revival of Hawaiian language, right, so folks in my generation who went to Hawaiian language immersion school, who learned these stories as children, who learned our language as children. 

When we sing our songs, we know what the songs actually mean, as children, who went back and studied from those older sources of Hawaiian 'ike, who, as you say, are filling in the gaps that were created by settler colonialism are those big caverns that were created by settler colonialism. And there is an understanding, I think, as respectful humans, but also as Native Hawaiians that we always honor the generations before us, right? We honor our parents, we honor our grandparents, and we honor the ancestors before them. And when we do work, when we, especially when we're organizing today, that's critical to the work that we do, that young people don't just go off and do any kind as we would say, we don't go off and just make any kind and not listen to the teachings of our kūpuna. 

At the same time, there are some pretty big political differences between some of the folks in my generation and the younger generations, and the generation of my father and the generation of my grandfather. A lot of that is shifting, a lot of that is directly correlated to the trauma of colonialism; of my grandfather living in a time where you weren't allowed to speak Hawaiian, where, being Hawaiian, there was no value seen in anything Hawaiian, which is the exact opposite of what it's meant to grow up in my time. And so, we have had to be more dexterous, more intentional. We've had to come from a place of healing, we've had to really take the time to listen and speak and see each other in the organizing that we do. 

Because inevitably, the vision of the future from some folks and older generations is very different from the vision of the future of my generation and those younger, and a lot of that, not all of it, but a lot of it has everything to do with growing up with your language or not. And I tell this to my students, there is no greater thing you can do to not just change the world but to change the way you see the world than to learn your native tongue. 100% no greater thing you can do. When you learn, as a Hawaiian, when you learn the Hawaiian language, not only do you see the world differently because the language creates the world in a different way, but you open up yourself to, as I said, those million pages of writing by your ancestors that you never could have read before. And in those million pages are examples of different worlds that we could live in, are examples of worlds we've lived in before. 

The way I think about it now, as someone who's been really blessed to be involved in different movements from the movement to protect Maunakea or other movements is that the honoring of intergenerational wisdom is always there, and the honoring of our kūpuna, of our elders, is always there. But respect and compliance are not the same things. And there will be times in the work that we do because this work requires us to trudge through all kinds of trauma and violence and fear, and ideas around scarcity and possibility. It's going to, at times, require young people and I'm aging out of the young people category now, right, I'm a parent, I'm a makua. So I'm not an ʻōpio, I'm not a young person anymore. And that sense in terms of our generations, young people are going to have to stand by the beliefs that they have, they're gonna have to be open to the teachings of their ancestors and their elders. But they're also going to need to trust those teachings and trust where those teachings lead them. 

And this really reminds me of something that Noelani Goodyear-Kaʻōpua

wrote in a blog post when she said, there's no shame in being the grandparents of the seventh generation. And she talks about how the older generations are herself, she didn't learn about the why and overthrow or speak her language until she was out of high school. But that her children had those lessons from birth, her children had the language of our ancestors on their tongue since birth. So our elders prepared young people to take us into a more expansive future. And the hard work then is, those of us who are older and aging, we have to trust that foundation that was built. And we have to trust that these Keiki, these ‘ōpio, these young folks, they know where to take us because we prepared them to take us there. And to me that trust in that even when that perhaps creates conflict, even when that means that young people have a different idea of what should happen, then, maybe the elders in the room. Trusting in that is actually trusting intergenerational wisdom. It's trusting an intergenerational process that brought us to this moment. 

But again, that's hard work, especially in a time where settler-colonialism, as we know,  is not an event. It's systems and structures around us all the time. And it's constantly trying to get in between us. And it's constantly trying to face us with limits, write ideas around scarcity, ideas around what's possible, what isn't possible. And who better than our young people to see through that BS. We need to trust them. That wisdom, the intergenerational wisdom, which I think we don't think about as much goes both ways. It doesn't just mean heed all the words of the elders, it means. Trust the foundation the elders built in you, trust the vision and center good relations, and we'll be okay.

Ayana Young Yes, the word trust is also something that I've been practicing a lot lately. And I'm really grateful that you brought that up because I think there's something around intimacy and trust and gender relationship building that's all woven into the same tapestry. And I also see youth knowing so much they're popping out already with so much knowledge and wisdom and a really deep knowing and kind of almost a No BS type of understanding of things. I'm constantly amazed when I talk to young children and kids and teenagers. They’re so present with what is and it does give me a lot of relief and acceptance. And, and yeah, trusting that they got this. Not to walk away. Of course, support them to step into their lives. 

There's so much that I came across while preparing for our conversation. But there was this interview where you shared the ways in which after a certain period of time, and great success, writing poetry felt like a burden when you're expected to create content for others, but you felt you had run out of things to say, I imagine you no longer feel like this. But I think so many listeners might be struggling with this sort of personal and artistic burnout, while also feeling guilty that the mediums wherein we can feel beyond thought become stagnant. So, can you revisit these sentiments and how you emerged from it?

Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio Well, I think capitalism's really messed with us all, in terms of how we think about productivity. Or how we conceive of ourselves in relationship to our productivity. I remember people telling me, and me really believing this, that a poet is someone who wrote today. And I get the sentiment, these days, I look back and I get the sentiment, to be a poet is to practice, to be a poet is to make beauty and make real of the world around you. But the way that those ideas have been really deeply ingrained in our manao, in our thoughts around, my value comes from what I can produce is really, really harmful. And so I think a part of a lot of our burnout is so much of our lives around production, whether it's in our jobs, we have to produce in a particular way, or it's even in the things that we do because we love them. 

And for me, that was poetry was never supposed to be a job, it was never supposed to be something that paid the bills and I got kind of lucky/ unlucky that I had a lot of opportunity as a poet, and it did end up paying for me to go to college, and it did all these great things. And so I started to see it as an occupation. And I started to see it as an occupation, I started to see it as connected to my value. And I don't think there's any way to go through life like that without burning out eventually. If we connect the things we do to who we are in terms of our value, again, that's a pretty low ceiling we're sending or setting for ourselves. And these days, I wouldn't say that I have nothing to say in those moments before, I felt I'd run out of things to say, or run out of new ways to say old things, because that's really what poetry is, right? Nobody's actually saying anything new. You're saying something old in a new way, in a way that will capture someone else that will create resonance with someone else. This is why poetry is so amazing because it's something that can be put out into the world and connect to people who have never seen each other, never met each other, and never touched each other. And yet, for that moment, they're touching, they are reverberating off of each other, gorgeous. 

I no longer feel like I have nothing to say. But I do feel the world that I live in, the reality I live under makes it very difficult to find space to connect enough with myself and the environment around me to say something worthwhile. Which is to say, I spent too much time on my computer teaching. I love teaching my class, but doing all the things around teaching my class, tied to my job, so that I can keep my job, so that I can pay my mortgage, so that I can buy food for my family, so that I can put money away from my kid to go to college. All of these pressures that we're all living under to differing degrees, depending on our privilege, and I'll recognize that I have a great amount of privilege in terms of the job that I hold, that I am able to survive under capitalism when so many of our people are certainly barely surviving under the weight of this ridiculous system. But capitalism doesn't have space for creativity. In fact, creativity is dangerous to capitalism. Creativity will lead us to a place that'll tell us there's another way to live beyond capitalism. 

And I think when a lot of people talk about burnout, or they talk about how they're just tired creatively, I don't think people are tired creatively. I think people are tired of living under these unlivable conditions that we have convinced ourselves are livable because we have also convinced ourselves that there's no other way to live. And so, if people are wanting my advice, I don't know why anyone would want my advice, but if people are wanting my advice on that, then it's not that we need to think of new ways to create, it's that we need to find more ways to tumble and tackle and destroy or burn down capitalism. I think about, as an example, the work we did and continue to do at Maunakea to protect that mountain. And I think about how difficult that work is, how people left their jobs, how people left their families and lived on the foot of a mountain, for some people for nine months, not me. I was there for maybe three months.

And they lived in one of the most unforgiving climates in the world, right? You can go from danger of frostbite to danger of heat exhaustion in less than an hour. And people did that. Because they love this, they love our ʻāina, and they love each other. But they also did it because the system we live in has been devised so the people whose job it was to protect that mountain, our leadership, weren't doing their job. So the na makaainana, the common people, the everyday people, we had to do their job and our job and that creates burnout when we're living in unlivable situations. 

And yet, we refuse to just comply and die, we say no, we're going to take on the beast. And I think about what is really the job of the common person, the job of people like us is to attend to our gardens, it is to grow food, it is to write poems, it is to compose music, it is to surf and enjoy the ʻāina and the environment around you, it is to spend time with your family. But none of those things are possible. If the world is telling you, you need to at the very least work a nine to five job in order to keep a roof over your heads. And so capitalism is the death of creativity. Capitalism is the death of creation. And, and vice versa. Creation and creativity are the death of capitalism. So if you feel burnt out, take a rest, take a sleep, practice community care, but then come back to it because as Mari Matsuda says, artists are going to save the world. And if the artist dies, the world dies. And I don't know, I think there are better things waiting for us that we should keep fighting.

Ayana Young That was honey for my heart. Though I hear that personally. I think it's easy for us, especially those of us who find joy in creating, to feel the pressure and the overwhelm of just trying to navigate through this time, and create things that feel inspiring and meaningful. While sometimes the world burns, it's really intense, and then all the pressure of figuring out how to survive and how to take care of ourselves and our families and each other. That was really, really, really good for me to hear. And I'm sure so many others will feel relieved too.

Jamaica, this has been so amazing. And I really don't want this to come to a close. But as we are starting to come to the end of this moment that will hopefully never fully end, I’d just like to ask you about this idea of an abundance of realities. Remembering our Intimacies calls readers to recognize the future is in ancestral pasts. And I've heard you speak about how many alternatives there are to capitalism in the history of your people alone, a sentiment shared by almost all Indigenous peoples across the globe. And I think what this reminds me of is, yes, there are other visions, but so many will never see those visions. And I wonder if you could just respond to that, this recognition that the vast majority of society refuses to open themselves to possibility.

Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio That's a great question. And I think it goes back to something we talked about a little bit earlier in the power of fear, and the real success of the evils of the world. As we said, most people are doing their best. And there are a few kind of evil folks, evil greedy folks pulling the strings who are benefiting from the destruction of the planet, who are benefiting from the destruction of our people and the death of our people and destitution of our people. I think one of the biggest lies that's ever been sold, even just in Hawai’i, and perhaps around the world, is this idea of scarcity, this idea that there isn't enough. I don't know who came up with that lie, they must have been a really great marketer because it's spread across the world like wildfire, this idea that there's not enough for all of us. And that idea has been used as justification for hoarding of resources, whether it's minerals or water, and any other kind of resources that give or take life. 

And so many of us believe it. I mean, good-hearted, beautiful, even activists, we believe that there's a scarcity of resources, there's a scarcity of time. The more I think about it, and the more I read about our histories and the more I even look, if you spend time with the ʻāina, with the land, the more you realize that there is no scarcity that has not been created by greed. Scarcity is not a natural phenomenon in the way that we've been taught, there is more than enough, there is abundance. And you think about what is the greatest threat to capitalism, the greatest threat to capitalism is abundance, this idea that we don't need to hoard that we don't need to maximize what we can draw in profit from the earth, in labor, from people through violence upon both. 

And I think, if anything I wish more of us could see, it's how much abundance is really around them, how much abundance is within us, right? Because even though we have been told as people that we lack, we lack what it takes to be productive in society to contribute to society in a particular way to change society, we don't have the answers. All of that is BS marketing, from the guys holding the capitalist strings. And the more we can get people to see, even in Hawai’i, I think of examples in our own small communities, can you see the abundance in your own community where society has said there was none? Right. Can you see that Kahoʻolawe, the island we talked about before that was bombed for a number of decades by the US military as target practice, can you see that place as something more than barren? Can you see that place of something that still has life, that still has something to teach us? Can you see Maunakea, the highest peak in the Pacific, the largest mountain in the world, when measured from its base, can you see it as a sanctuary? Can you see it as a holy land, even though there are already 13 telescopes upon it? Can you see its abundance? Can you see what it will teach you? 

Because if you can, then the only logical next step to that is to ask how do we open our eyes to all the other abundance around us? And how do we come to recognize the way capitalism itself, the way that we've organized our society around capitalism as the central, most important value to Americans and certainly to the Western world, how can we use the abundance around us to see the lie of capitalism, to look it in the face, and to see the way that our fear is keeping us from living beyond it? There are enough forces in the world that will tell us capitalism cannot fall, we do not need to be one of those forces. We need to be the voices that remind all of us, our parents, ourselves, our children, our grandchildren, that not only is another world possible later, so many other worlds were happening before capitalism. In fact, in the grand scheme of things when you look at the age of our Indigenous communities, some of us have been here, our stories go back to darkness. We are much, much older, much much more sophisticated than the strange society we live in.

And the only way we get to live in that beauty again is if we have the courage to see beyond now, if we have the faith in the teachings of our ancestors, to see beyond and create beyond now. As kind of a final thought, that I've been thinking about a lot these days, is there's a lot of us who some of this fear is compounded by the climate catastrophe that we're living in. And we are living in a climate catastrophe. And there are people around the world who are suffering greatly already at the hands of climate change, well, not at the hands of climate change at the hands of those who have created climate change out of greed. But in Hawai’i, last spring, when Hawai’i was closed for a number of months to tourists. There were places that had not seen sharks, or fishes or certain plants in decades, because of our impact on the land, those places, those sharks came back, the fishes came back the ʻāina was transformed in a matter of months, which I want to remind people of this, to tell them that even the things that we think are far gone are not far gone. And that the land we live on is so incredible, and not just Hawai’i, all the lands we live on are so resilient, that they will come back if we do our part to get out of the way. 

And when we get out of the way, we can imagine a great beyond capitalism, again, that there will be abundance again, the fish will come back. And we don't need to ship in all of our food from around the world in Hawai’i so that we don't produce any food of our own. The fish are here, they will feed us. The ʻāina can be restored, we can feed ourselves. There is really, and this is hard to say sometimes because we do live in a scary dark world, there is really so much to look forward to, so much within our control. We just have to have, like we said, a little trust in each other, a little faith, and commit to doing it together.

Ayana Young Yes, I'm with you. And I am committed to doing it. And I feel that those listening are also dedicated to that commitment. So thank you so much. I'm really moved and inspired by this conversation. I really hope to have another one because I just can't let my mind rest thinking that we're not going to have another conversation in the future. So yeah, this is just a pause. So listeners, don't worry. This is a pause. We’ll come back to you.

Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio I can't wait. Thank you so much for having me. It's been really wonderful. Everyone says Aloha means goodbye. Aloha doesn’t mean goodbye. We say a hui hou, until we meet again because we know we will meet again. And we will build beautiful futures in that meeting.

Emily Guerra Thank you for listening to For The Wild Podcast. The music you heard today was by Justin Crawmer, Rising Appalachia, and Pura Fé. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Allie Constantine, Erica Ekrem, Emily Guerra, Julia Jackson, and Priya Subberwal.