It wasn’t until middle school, when their family moved back to Hawaii, that Kalāhiki started to understand their identity better. The teen met others with mixed ancestry and dug into Hawaiian history. They learned that a majority of the Native Hawaiian population died in the 19th century due to disease, starvation and other causes related to colonization by Europeans and Americans. Indigenous peoples’ economic and health challenges persist generations later, Kalāhiki said, in part because their colonizers seized control of much of the land they once cultivated.

“In the old times, before colonization, people lived off the land: They grew and traded everything they needed to survive,” Kalāhiki said. “Now, about 85% of the goods we buy are imported — which doesn’t make any sense, because our history demonstrates that this is a perfect place to grow so many different foods that allow us to be self-sustaining.”

Strengthening Brown’s Native community

Kalāhiki’s interest in sustainable land cultivation led them to Brown, where they discovered that kānaka maoli, or Native Hawaiians, weren’t the only Indigenous people who wanted to reclaim their health by tapping into ancestral farming wisdom.

“I took a class called Contemporary Indigenous Education with Adrienne Keene” — an assistant professor of American studies — “and it demonstrated to me how, even though every Native community has different challenges, we’re all fighting the same system,” Kalāhiki said.

They thought: Why not join forces and fight as one? Kalāhiki took on leadership roles across campus, intent on knitting Brown’s Indigenous communities closer together in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which temporarily scattered students across the country and world. As student coordinator of Natives at Brown, Kalāhiki and several peers successfully lobbied to revive House of Ninnuog, a residential space on campus for those who identify as Indigenous. And as a student programmer for Brown’s Native American Heritage Series, they have helped organize beloved campus gatherings such as the Spring Thaw Powwow and the Indigenous Peoples Day celebration.

“A lot of my work is around community-building and making fun, engaging, loving, supportive [and] caring spaces for people to exist within,” Kalāhiki said.

The senior said they’re carrying on the work of students who have since graduated — students whose openness gave Kalāhiki the confidence to come out as māhū, the term used in Native Hawaiian and Tahitian cultures to describe people who “embody both kāne (male) and wahine (female) energy,” Kalāhiki said.

With funding from a Royce Fellowship granted by Brown’s Swearer Center, Kalāhiki spent part of Summer 2023 speaking with queer Indigenous Hawaiians about their experiences, part of a larger aim to increase LGBTQ+ representation in the Hawaiian land sovereignty movement.

Some of Kalāhiki’s interviewees were workers at the Oahu kalo farm, the place where Kalāhiki first found a way to unite those three passions. They plan to return there after graduation, if only as a part-time volunteer.

“What my work will do, I hope, is bring all these disparate conversations into the same space,” Kalāhiki said. “As Native Hawaiians, our traditional values center on community, love and care. I think that is the focus of all of my work, whether it’s in environmental advocacy, Indigenous sovereignty or queer visibility. Community is everything to me: I am less myself and so much more my people.”