Book Launch for Noenoe Silva

ʻElua Maka Kila: How Joseph Kānepuʻu and Joseph Poepoe Contributed to the Life of ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi
Co-sponsored by the Indigenous Politics Program
Book Launch Event! Books for sale by UH Press

In The Power of the Steel-tipped Pen (May 2017, Duke UP) Noenoe K. Silva examines the work of Joseph Hoʻona‘auao Kānepu‘u (1824–ca. 1885) and Joseph Moku‘ōhai Poepoe (1852–1913) to show how the rich intellectual history preserved in Hawaiian-language newspapers is key to understanding Native Hawaiian epistemology and ontology. In their newspaper articles, geographical surveys, biographies, historical narratives, translations, literatures, political and economic analyses, and poetic works, Kānepu‘u and Poepoe created a record of Hawaiian cultural history and thought in order to transmit ancestral knowledge to future generations. Celebrating indigenous intellectual agency in the midst of US imperialism, The Power of the Steel-tipped Pen is a call for the further restoration of native Hawaiian intellectual history to help ground contemporary Hawaiian thought, culture, and governance.

Noenoe K. Silva is Professor of Indigenous Politics and Hawaiian language at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa and author of Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism, also published by Duke University Press.

Event Sponsor
Center for Biographical Research, Mānoa Campus

More Information
(808) 956-3774, biograph@hawaii.edu, http://www.facebook.com/CBRHawaii

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