Research Projects
Makana Kushi is a PhD candidate in Brown's American Studies program and has taught at Brown and the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo. After coursework and teaching (and learning from) awesome undergraduates in the precursor to "Learning Our Native Languages" and "Indigenous Resurgence: Roots, Reclamations, and Relations" at Brown, Makana moved to Hilo to research and teach from her beloved hometown. There, she has been teaching "Introduction to Women's and Gender Studies" and "Kuleana and Community," a place-based learning course orienting UH Hilo students to the Native place names, storied histories, environmental rhythms, and value systems of Hawaiʻi Island.
Her dissertation, "Sharing ʻĀina in the Occupied Territory: Public Land and Environmental Intimacies in Windward Hawaiʻi," examines the history and perception of public land use on windward Hawaiʻi Island between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Each chapter highlights a site where local and Indigenous communities contested the state's declaration of the land's purpose, revealing divergent philosophies about conservation and ancestral connection to land, economic interests and the sanctity of sacred land, and settler and Indigenous belonging. In the historical moments immediately following the forceful and illegal annexation of the Hawaiian Kingdom, how did everyday people "share" the occupied land in public spaces? Her dissertation research has involved Hawaiian language newspapers, moʻolelo (storied histories), community organization ephemera, oral histories, and family records.