` Dr. Noelani Arista is an Associate Professor at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, and the incoming history professor and Director of the Indigenous Studies program at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Arista studies Hawaiian history through its governance and law, intellectual history, historiography, and the state’s colonialism and missionization.

Arista was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii, and received both her BA and MA in Hawaiian religion at University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Arista returned to her alma mater as an assistant professor in 2008, and in 2010, she received her PhD from Brandeis University. Arista was promoted to associate professor at the University of Hawaiʻi in 2018.

Arista’s dissertation Histories of Unequal Measure: Euro-American Encounters With Hawaiian Governance and Law, 1793-1827 received the 2010 Allan Nevins prize from the Society of American Historians for “best-written doctoral dissertation on a significant subject in American history.” Arista focuses on the involvement of New England missionaries in Hawaiian governance, and how the political landscape of Hawai’i was altered in the decades after Euro-American contact and settlement.

Her book The Kingdom and the Republic: Sovereign Hawai'i and the Early United States, Arista investigates Hawai’i’s transition from oral law to codified written law in the nineteenth century. In her first book, Arista utilizes previously untapped Hawaiian language documents to create a better understanding of Hawaiian actions in this time period. Arista argues that it is not possible to fully understand the decisions made by Hawaiian natives at that time without taking into account their perspectives, and emphasizes how the understanding of history in this time period was mobilized to influence the present. Arista’s book was the winner of the 2020 Best First Book Prize in Native American and Indigenous Studies from the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association.

In 2015, Arista created the Facebook group 365 days of aloha to provide accurate representations of Hawaiian culture beyond the current pop culture understanding. Arista advocates for the preservation of Hawaiian culture through public digital media. She has appeared on The Design Talk Hawai’i Podcast with Matt Gilbertson, and co-authored the award-winning essay Making Kin with the Machines in 2018.

Written by Devin Allard-Neptune, Class of 2022

Dr. Philip Deloria is the highly respected and esteemed Leverett Saltonstall Professor of History at Harvard University, where he also chairs the Committee on Degrees in History and Literature. While his scholarship has focused on the intricate social and political history of American Indians in the United States, he has also researched critical connections and comparisons between the histories of indigenous peoples on a global scale. A winner of the 1999 Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award for his book Playing Indian, Deloria is truly an expert in his field of indigenous study.

Playing Indian (1998) examines how white Americans have crafted a national identity for American Indians using their own preconceived and often ignorant notions of indigenous life. Deloria also highlighted the often-obscured perspective of the American Indians themselves in reaction to the imitations of their native culture. In doing so, Deloria masterfully dissects interpretations of native rituals, language, and dress, from as early as the Boston Tea Party to present day, all the while suggesting that constructed images of Indians have helped generations of white Americans mask the paradox of simultaneous construction and destruction of native peoples.

His 2004 book Indians in Unexpected Places investigates common characterizations surrounding American Indians in the early twentieth century while also exploring the methods in which Indians challenged them through film, art, and musical performance. Furthering his expertise regarding native cultural prominence, Deloria most recently, in 2019, completed his book Becoming Mary Sully: Toward an American Indian Abstract which brings forth the groundbreaking work of Dakota Sioux artist Mary Sully and her use of traditional Indian visual traditions, such as beadwork, in her interpretation of early twentieth-century modernist art.

Deloria received his Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University in 1994. He has taught an impressive array of courses throughout his career including American Indian History, U.S. Environmental History, the American West, as well as Food Studies and Songwriting. Deloria is currently the Chair of the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian’s Repatriation Committee. He is also the former President of the American Studies Association and current Vice President and President-Elect of the Organization of American Historians.

Written by Rowan Mally, Class of 2022