Keynote Speakers

Kumu Kuʻulei Keakealani 

Hawaiʻi Keynote

Born and raised in the uplands of Pu‘uanahulu in North Kona, Kumu Ku‘ulei Keakealani comes from a family of hard working men and women. Her grandmother fished for ‘opelu alongside her father in Ki‘ilae in South Kona, and her grandfather was a paniolo for over 65 years at the Pu‘uwa‘awa‘a Ranch in Kona Hema (North Kona). Kuʻuleiʻs mother, a native of the Northern Cree people, and her father followed in the footsteps of his father and are the primary people who raised her to become the person she is today.

Kuʻulei has been in cultural education since the early 1990’s and was part of the team who opened Pūnana Leo o Waimea, a Hawaiian language "nest" for children. Members of that team found their paths intersecting once again as they went on to create and develop Kanu o Ka ‘Āina New Century Public Charter School’s Early Childhood Program Mālamapōki‘i.

Learning from what she deems “the two greatest teachers,” Kuʻulei continues to learn from the kūpuna (elders) in her family and community, as well as from the landscapes and seascapes, who are also kūpuna. Kuʻulei is privileged to care for wahi pana (legendary places), in the ancestral homelands of Kona Hema and Waimea in her life’s work. You may find her one day on the upper slopes of Hualālai restoring tomorrow’s native forests or being waist deep in the fishpond at Kīholo restoring the ancient Hawaiian system of growing fish the very next day. No matter where you may find Kuʻulei, you may hear a story or two being conveyed or the significance of place names being spoken. She is happy to share her knowledge that stems from a long line of heritage keepers and she considers her work a hereditary kuleana, responsibility. Her three daughters will someday assume their places in this succession that they are honored to uphold.  Along with her husband and children, they continue to live the ways of their people, close to the lands they so love, cultivating and growing much of the food to sustain their lives. This ʻohana lives the ‘ōlelo no’eau (proverb/poetical saying): He ali‘i ka ‘āina, he kauwā ke kanaka ~ land is chief, served by the people.

Dr. Kuʻulei Kanahele

Hawaiʻi Interactive Keynote

For centuries, Native Hawaiians have tracked, mapped, and recorded the formation and evolution of the Hawaiian archipelago through mele oli (chants). Far from being merely metaphorical or literary, these chants function as spatial and temporal primary source documents, encoding precise Indigenous scientific observations of volcanism, sea-level dynamics, and island geomorphology.

Let’s explore how analyzing and interpreting mele oli enriches geography by validating Indigenous ways of knowing alongside modern spatial and geological science. We will examine practical methodologies for engaging with traditional Hawaiian literature today—demonstrating how Indigenous spatial knowledge can inform contemporary physical geography, environmental stewardship, and place-based field science.  This will be an interactive keynote!

Kuʻulei Kanahele

Kuʻulei Kanahele is an academic and cultural practitioner who bridges traditional Hawaiian knowledge with Western science. Raised in the ahupuaʻa of Waipiʻo, Oʻahu, and a 1994 graduate of Kamehameha Schools Kapālama, her foundation is deeply rooted in ʻāina (land).

For fifteen years (1997–2012), Dr. Kanahele trained intensely as an ʻōlapa with Hālau o Kekuhi, immersing herself in hula, oli (chant), and ceremony, which directly informs her unique scholarly approach. She currently serves as an Associate Professor and Humanities Department Chair at Hawaiʻi Community College and conducts research for the Edith Kanakaʻole Foundation, focusing on Papahulihonua, the Native Hawaiian study of the earth sciences, encompassing geology, hydrology, petrology, oceanography, soil science, and volcanology. By analyzing and interpreting mele oli as primary source documents, her work reveals the deep indigenous scientific knowledge encoded within traditional Hawaiian literature.

Dr. Kanahele has presented her research to diverse audiences, including Native Hawaiian practitioners, educators, the County of Hawaiʻi, Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park, and leading technology organizations such as Google X.

Dr. Sara Smith (AAG President)

AAG Presidential Keynote

Grounding our relations & repair for the future

This is a challenging time for all of us in education. As president, I want to call us in to support one another, and also to encourage us not to concede anything to the current political climate but rather to be in solidarity, learn what our core values are, and lean hard into those values. We cannot afford to give up the gains we have made in the discipline or in academic work. Geographers work for justice, they work for healthy and beautiful and equitable urban spaces, they work for climate justice and environmental protection. We are increasingly a diverse and inclusive discipline. In this moment, we need more strength, more solidarity, more communication with one another. I have centered my presidential taskforce on Grounded Relations and Repair, asking how as educators we can be more accountable to those we are in relation to – whether that is the Indigenous nations whose dispossession made our universities possible, or the enslaved people who built our buildings, or the workers who clean them today. In our time together at this conference, I would like us to consider what kind of political and social relations are needed in this current moment. As geographers, we are well-positioned to be asking: Who are the people that our institutions and research are grounded among and who do our institutions and research agendas serve? How can we be in better ethical relations to the land and people upon whom we are dependent as scholars, practitioners, educators, learners, and simply as people? We sometimes operate as though we were untethered to the places that support our work and existence, whether that is the cleaning and maintenance labor that makes our university or organization function or the places and people we engage with through research. I would love to learn from folks at this conference how you take up these questions at your institution.

Sara Smith

I am a feminist political geographer and professor of Geography and Environment at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. My work is animated by a desire to understand how our ordinary lives put the work of territorialization in motion, to change how we operate as scholars and teachers in academic spaces, and to think our discipline’s core ideas more capaciously to engage with Black, Indigenous, anticolonial, and queer of color theorization.

I teach in global environmental justice, political geography, qualitative methods, South Asia, and regular graduate seminars on territory and decolonizing methodologies. I am involved in numerous collaborations, from research groups with colleagues from across institutions and disciplines to partnerships with local artist collectives in Leh, Ladakh.

Dr. Lily House-Peters (APCG President)

APCG Presidential Keynote (Banquet)

Digging Deep: Critical Mineral Exploration & Local Sovereignty Struggles through a GeoFeminist Lens of Emplacement

Worldwide, demand for critical and rare earth metals and minerals is surging to supply the global green energy transitions, AI-related infrastructure, such as the data center boom, military weapon manufacturing expansion, and the space race. Forecasts of increasing demand for these minerals and metals is driving new government policies and investments and shaping current and future articulations and alignments between governments and mining and extraction companies. Recent headlines warn “Demand for copper will be staggering as we look into the future”, “A.I. needs copper. It just helped to find millions of tons of it”, and “Mineral demand for clean energy technologies expected to quadruple by the end of the decade to meet climate targets”. In their attempt to meet this insatiable demand, established mining giants and emerging startups alike are investing heavily in autonomous technology, digitization, and artificial intelligence to identify and extract new deposits and restart extraction in once shuttered mines.

In extraction-dominated landscapes, mining companies hold immense and growing political and economic power, which is expected to further increase as government policies and investments magnify the centrality of resource extraction in national politics. Tensions and conflicts are also surging as local communities organize to protect ecologically sensitive and culturally significant areas from the threats of extractive expansion. This APCG Presidential Keynote address will examine these conflicts through a geofeminist lens of emplacement that refuses the obfuscations and abstractions that serve to elide and displace grounded relations of community, sovereignty, territorial defense, labor, and ecology. Instead, following Andrea Marston (2024), this work takes seriously the premise that “human bodies and ore bodies come into entangled and stratified being through material intra-actions” that are emplaced in particular socio-environmental contexts.

Dr. Lily House-Peters

Dr. Lily House-Peters is President of the current Association of Pacific Coast Geographers and an Associate Professor of Geography and Director of the Environmental Science & Policy (ESP) Program at California State University, Long Beach (CSULB). Lily holds a PhD in Geography from the University of Arizona. As a broadly trained human-environment geographer and political ecologist, Lily’s research and activism has focused on climate justice, biodiversity conservation, and the human dimensions of global environmental change. Lily’s research has been published in a wide range of academic journals, including Geoforum, The Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Progress in Human Geography, Antipode, Global Sustainability, Environmental Science and Policy, Water Resources Research, and Landscape and Urban Planning.