'Āina Hānau / Birth Land is a powerful collection of new poems by Kanaka ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiian) poet Brandy Nālani McDougall. These poems cycle through sacred and personal narratives while exposing and fighting ongoing American imperialism, settler colonialism, militarism, and social and environmental injustice to protect the ʻāina and its people.

Waimea I Ka La’i is an autobiography. A collection of personal memories growing up in Waimea, a little cattle town, on the Island of Hawai’i, nestled in a crease at the foothills of the Kohala Mountain. Waimea I Ka La’i is a cornucopia of personal lessons learned and a life lived which I am bequeathing to our four precious grandsons through Story. Lessons of Love for my parents. Who sacrificed, went without for me and my ‘little brother’ so we could have ‘life’ better than they had. Love for the people who made a difference in my life. A host of teachers, preachers, employers, and outliers. Even two folks, a Sunday school teacher and high school counselor who said I didn’t have the ‘brains’ necessary to succeed in school. In their perverse way, they too helped and inspired me. Love for Place. For Waimea, the town I grew up in. A beautiful slice of Heaven on Earth. I share my recollections of family and friends I had a connection with. Waimea I Ka La’i is my Story. What is your Story? It will differ from mine in substance. But in our humanity, they will intersect.

In 1897, as a white oligarchy made plans to allow the United States to annex Hawai'i, native Hawaiians organized a massive petition drive to protest. Ninety-five percent of the native population signed the petition, causing the annexation treaty to fail in the U.S. Senate. This event was unknown to many contemporary Hawaiians until Noenoe K. Silva rediscovered the petition in the process of researching this book. With few exceptions, histories of Hawai'i have been based exclusively on English-language sources. They have not taken into account the thousands of pages of newspapers, books, and letters written in the mother tongue of native Hawaiians. By rigorously analyzing many of these documents, Silva fills a crucial gap in the historical record. In so doing, she refutes the long-held idea that native Hawaiians passively accepted the erosion of their culture and loss of their nation, showing that they actively resisted political, economic, linguistic, and cultural domination. Drawing on Hawaiian-language texts, primarily newspapers produced in the nineteenth century and early twentieth, Silva demonstrates that print media was central to social communication, political organizing, and the perpetuation of Hawaiian language and culture. A powerful critique of colonial historiography, Aloha Betrayed provides a much-needed history of native Hawaiian resistance to American imperialism.

In Kalaupapa Place Names, John Clark presents a unique history of the leprosy settlement on Moloka‘i, based on his meticulous research of more than three hundred Hawaiian-language newspaper articles. He first assembled an extensive list of familiar and long-forgotten place names associated with the Kalaupapa peninsula and then searched for them in the online repository of Hawaiian-language newspapers. With translation assistance by Iāsona Ellinwood and Keao NeSmith, he discovered articles that show a community of Hawaiians from every island except uninhabited Kaho‘olawe. Their stories reveal an active community with its members trying to live their lives as normally as possible in the face of a debilitating disease. The first section of the book contains newspaper articles arranged under an alphabetical listing of place names. The second section organizes the material into chronological segments, from before the establishment of the Kalaupapa Settlement to the death of Mother Marianne Cope in 1918. These two sections are followed by a collection of kanikau or lamentations, interviews with Kalaupapa residents, and a list of Hawaiian language newspapers. Introductory paragraphs for groupings of newspaper articles assist the reader in visualizing the physical landscape and understanding the history and significance of a particular location. The poetry of the Hawaiian language is evident throughout the translations, especially in the kanikau.

Winner of the Native American Literature Symposium's Beatrice Medicine Award for Published Monograph The first extensive study of contemporary Hawaiian literature, Finding Meaning examines kaona, the practice of hiding and finding meaning, for its profound connectivity. Through kaona, author Brandy Nalani McDougall affirms the tremendous power of Indigenous stories and genealogies to give lasting meaning to decolonization movements.

Asian and Pacific Islander Americans constitute the fastest-growing racial group in the United States. They are also one of the most religiously diverse. Through them Asian traditions such as Hinduism, Sikhism, Confucianism, and Buddhism have been introduced into every major city and across a wide swath of Middle America. The contributors to this volume provide an essential inter-disciplinary resource for the study of Asian and Pacific Islander American religion.

Reclaiming Kalākaua: Nineteenth-Century Perspectives on a Hawaiian Sovereign examines the American, international, and Hawaiian representations of David La‘amea Kamananakapu Mahinulani Nalaiaehuokalani Lumialani Kalākaua in English- and Hawaiian-language newspapers, books, travelogues, and other materials published during his reign as Hawai‘i’s mō‘ī (sovereign) from 1874 to 1891. Beginning with an overview of Kalākaua’s literary genealogy of misrepresentation, Tiffany Lani Ing surveys the negative, even slanderous, portraits of him that have been inherited from his enemies, who first sought to curtail his authority as mō‘ī through such acts as the 1887 Bayonet Constitution and who later tried to justify their parts in overthrowing the Hawaiian kingdom in 1893 and annexing it to the United States in 1898. A close study of contemporary international and American newspaper accounts and other narratives about Kalākaua, many highly favorable, results in a more nuanced and wide-ranging characterization of the mō‘ī as a public figure. Most importantly, virtually none of the existing nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century texts about Kalākaua consults contemporary Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) sentiment for him. Offering examples drawn from hundreds of nineteenth-century Hawaiian-language newspaper articles, mele (songs), and mo‘olelo (histories, stories) about the mō‘ī, Reclaiming Kalākaua restores balance to our understanding of how he was viewed at the time—by his own people and the world. This important work shows that for those who did not have reasons for injuring or trivializing Kalākaua’s reputation as mō‘ī, he often appeared to be the antithesis of our inherited understanding. The mō‘ī struck many, and above all his own people, as an intelligent, eloquent, compassionate, and effective Hawaiian leader.