Pacific Islanders in diaspora are disproportionately contracting COVID‐19, experience hospitalization and develop complications. In Utah, Pacific Islanders have the highest contraction rate in the state. Pacific Islanders constitute only 2% of the state's population, but represent 4% of the those infected with COVID‐19, begging the question how we might explain the high rates of contraction? As community engaged scholars and practitioners, we offer discussion, insight, and commentary on the COVID‐19 pandemic affecting Pacific Islanders in Utah. Grounding this discussion is a history of the Pacific Islander community as an essential workforce that dates back to the 1850s, before statehood. We argue that historical discrimination against these early Pacific Islanders shaped the way this group is racialized as essential laborers today. The authors offer this assertion along with practices and protocols that honour cultural norms of socialization, which we see is the pathway to provide safe measures that are relevant to the Utah Pasifika community.

No abstract

Haunani-Kay Trask’s theorizations of settler colonialism, Indigenous feminisms, and community-grounded political work produces scholars, thinkers, and activists, including many Hawaiians, other Pacific Islanders, and Indigenous peoples of Turtle Island. Her teachings and work with Ka Lāhui Hawai‘i emphasized the need to build relationalities among Indigenous communities. This essay builds on Trask’s critical interventions and theorizations of settler colonialism, to ask how Hawaiians at home and in the diaspora can further Trask’s scholarship and political organizing, incorporating trans-Indigenous recognitions. I document these relationalities among Native nations and other Pacific Islanders as an embodiment of the legacies of Haunani-Kay Trask, including her theorization of settler colonialism and the groundwork she laid for Indigenous feminism. In this way, I link her teachings as slyly reproductive at creating generative futures beyond the settler state.

No abstract

No abstract