Login with your Reed credentials to view all events.
Thursday, February 16, 2023 5pm
About this Event
3203 Southeast Woodstock Boulevard, Portland, Oregon 97202-8199
The 2022-23 Vine Deloria Lecture and Sex, Gender, and Sexuality Symposium will feature Dr. Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio. Dr. Osorio is Assistant Professor of Indigenous and Native Hawaiian Politics at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
Our story begins at the base of a sacred mountain, Mauna a Wākea. She is a beacon for navigators, dreamers, and philosophers. She is a gathering place for visionaries in the realm of the gods. She is the piko (summit and convergence) of our ea (sovereignty and liberation). And she is under constant threat of desecration by the State of Hawaiʻi. But this is not simply a story detailing the violences of the state, racial capitalism, and the ongoing removal of Indigenous peoples from our lands. This is an ʻŌiwi moʻolelo that honors the stories and teachings of our ancestors and the relational systems they developed to teach us to live in balance and justice with our people and environments. This is a Hawaiian moʻolelo that takes seriously the counter hegemonic and counter heteropatriarchal practices of aloha ʻāina that root us in the land and create abundance for generations to come. This is an abolitionist moʻolelo that centers genuine security and celebrates what we continue to build in the face and aftermath of all the colonial violences that have come for our lands, our bodies, and our dreams.
Dr. Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio is a Kanaka Maoli wahine artist, activist, and scholar. She earned her Ph.D. in English (Hawaiian literature) in 2018 from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Dr. Osorio is a three-time national poetry champion, poetry mentor and a published author. In 2020 her poetry and activism were the subject of an award-winning film, This is the Way We Rise which premiered at Sundance Film Festival in 2021. In 2022 she was a lead artist and co-writer of the revolutionary VR documentary, On the Morning You Wake (To the end of the world), that premiered at Sundance Film Festival 2022 and won the XR experience Jury award at SXSW 2022. She is a proud past Kaiāpuni student, Ford Dissertation (2017) and Post Doctoral (2022) Fellow, and a graduate of Kamehameha, Stanford University (BA) and New York University (MA). She is the author of the award winning book Remembering our Intimacies: Moʻolelo, Aloha ʻĀina, and Ea which was published in 2021 by The University of Minnesota Press.
This event is co-sponsored by the Sex, Gender, and Sexuality Committee, the Vine Deloria Lecture Fund, and the Office for Institutional Diversity.
Free and open to the public.