Ty Kawika Tengan

I have conducted research on Hawaiian masculinities, sovereignty, land, militarism, identity, museums, heritage, football, and Native Pacific culture and politics. A secondary project has been to rethink the academic disciplines I have most engaged with: anthropology, ethnic studies, and Indigenous studies.  I am presently conducting research on the experiences of Native Hawaiian veterans.  I am author of Native Men Remade: Gender and Nation in Contemporary Hawai‘i (Duke U Press, 2008), and coeditor of the special issues Genealogies: Articulating Indigenous Anthropology in/of Oceania (Pacific Studies, 2010, with Tēvita O. Ka‘ili and Rochelle T. Fonoti) and Pacific Currents (American Quarterly, 2015, with Paul Lyons) and the volume New Mana: Transformations of a Classic Concept in Pacific Languages and Cultures (ANU Press, 2016, with Matt Tomlinson).

I teach generally on both precolonial and contemporary Hawaiian society, especially as it has been and continues to be transformed by Native Pacific and US imperial histories. I have run two separate community based oral history field schools on the North Shore of O‘ahu–one in Waialua (2017-2021) in collaboration with Kamehameha Schools and the Waialua Hawaiian Civic Club, and another in Waiale‘e (2023) with the North Shore Community Land Trust and other units at UHM, including our Center for Oral History.