President's Dream Colloquium on Returning to the Teachings

Justice, Identity and Belonging

About the Speaker

Manulani Aluli Meyer is the fifth daughter of Emma Aluli and Harry Meyer.  Her family hails from Mokapu, Kailua, Wailuku, Hilo and Kohala on the islands of Oahu, Maui and Moku O Keawe. 

The Aluli ohana is a large and diverse group of scholar-activists who have spent their lives in Hawaiian education, justice, land reclamation, law, health, cultural revitalization, arts education, prison reform, transformational economics, food sovereignty, Hawaiian philosophy and most of all, music. 

Manu works in the field of indigenous epistemology and its role in world-wide awakening.  Professor Aluli-Meyer obtained her doctorate from Harvard (Ed.D. 1998) by studying Hawaiian epistemology via language, history, and the clear insights of Hawaiian mentors.  She is a world-wide keynote speaker and has published extensively on the topic of native intelligence and its synergistic linkages to quantum sciences, transformational and whole thinking, and to liberating pedagogy. 

Her book: Ho’oulu: Our Time of Becoming – Hawaiian Epistemology and Early Writings, is in its third printing.  Her background is in wilderness education, experiential learning and ecological literacy, and she has been an Instructor for the Outward Bound schools, Wilderness Hawaii, Hawaii Bound, and other alternative learning programs. 

Dr. Aluli-Meyer championed the Hawaiian Charter School movement in Hawaii, worked within the prisons, and developed Hoea Ea and Kaiao Garden for the Hawaii Island Food Sovereignty movement.  Professor Aluli-Meyer was the International Indigenous Scholar in 2005-06 at Ngā Pae o te Māramatanga, the Center for Māori Research Excellence at the University of Auckland. 

She is an international evaluator of Indigenous PhDs and is mentored with the lessons learned.  Manulani has been an Associate Professor of Education at the University of Hawaii in Hilo and host to many creative community transformational education projects within/outside the university.  She has lived 5 years in New Zealand working for Te Wānanga o Aotearoa as lead developer/teacher for their innovative Masters of Applied Indigenous Knowledge, He Waka Hiringa. 

She is currently the Director of Indigenous Education at UH West Oahu and working with many community initiatives in educational reform, food security, and prison transformation. Mau ke aloha no Hawaii.