Reclaiming aloha – the Hawaiian poet rewriting the story of her home
For many outsiders, Hawai‘i is still imagined as a postcard paradise: beaches, cocktails, resorts and an easy word, “aloha,” stripped of its history and sold as a mood. The poet, activist and scholar Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio works against that flattening. A Kānaka Maoli, or Native Hawaiian, artist, she uses spoken-word poetry as both performance and historical reckoning, exposing the distance between the Hawai‘i marketed to tourists and the Hawai‘i shaped by Indigenous memory, cultural survival and the long violence of colonisation since European contact in 1778.
In their portrait of Osorio, the California-based filmmakers Adam Loften and Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee follow an artist whose activism began in teenage poetry and continues in the struggle against the proposed Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea, Hawai‘i’s most sacred mountain. The film presents Osorio’s work as an act of reclamation: of language, land, history and belonging. At its centre is the Hawaiian concept of aloha ʻāina, a love of land that is also a responsibility to community, reminding viewers that care for people and care for place cannot be separated.
Directors: Adam Loften, Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee
Producers: Devin Tellatin
Website: Emergence Magazine
