Nitasha Tamar Sharma: Akiemi, can you tell me about The Pōpolo Project? What led to its rise, what is its mission, and what does your organization do?

Akiemi Glenn: The Pōpolo Project is a small community organization based here in Hawaiʻi on the island of Oʻahu. We primarily have our programs and community engagement here, but we are also doing things across the islands of Hawaiʻi and increasingly across the Pacific. We are a community organization that is trying to critically engage our larger community in thinking about what it means to be Black in Hawaiʻi. We are called “The Pōpolo Project” because one of the words for Black people in Hawaiʻi is this metaphor or epithet, depending on who you are talking to, that comes from the pōpolo plant. This is a medicinal plant, a canoe plant that voyagers brought to Hawaiʻi. It is a nightshade (Solanum americanum) that produces dark black berries. One of the reasons why we leaned into that word, even though it is an epithet in some people’s experience, is because the plant itself has been traditionally highly valued, not only in Hawaiian culture, but in Pacific cultures more broadly. The plant itself is found around the world and has been recognized for its medicinal properties.

Part of what we are trying to do is intervene in a way that allows us to decolonize the language that has been co-opted by White supremacy because of [Black people’s] presence here. We want to destabilize the idea that pōpolo is a bad word, because there are no bad words in Polynesian languages that match those kinds of pejorative words in the European context. That is just not how the languages work. One of the ways the Pacific languages and Polynesian languages in particular work is through their reference in time and place. This is partly why we style ourselves as a project. We see this as a dynamic engagement. It is not that we have a particular agenda that is generated by our organization, but that we are in dialogue with Indigenous people here in Hawaiʻi, but also across the entire region.

We offer community spaces to think through. We offer conversations. We spend a lot of time considering art and other cultural productions. At the moment, I am working on developing a youth program, particularly for Black kids in Hawaiʻi. Black people are about two percent of the resident population [about four percent including the military] and many Black people who grew up here report not having other people outside of their family to connect with. I often will describe the work that we do as place-making, space-making. Lately, I have been describing it as echo-locating work: seeing what we put out there and what reverberates back, and how people relate to what we are doing.

NTS: Thinking about language makes me think about the terms “mea uli” [a term in Sāmoan that means “black thing” and is sometimes written “Meauli” to refer to Black people] and ʻuliʻuli [a Tongan word for “black”]. Were those terms that were translated from European ideas, or to refer to Black people, or to refer to “dirty” things?

AG: Those are complicated concepts around color. The ways that Pacific languages encode color as proxies for kinds of people is, of course, a European idea. People were not necessarily referred to by terms of color before European intervention in the region. But there is also another layer of complication that comes with a word like “mea” in Polynesian languages, which usually gets translated as “thing.” But things in Polynesian culture do not have the same kind of pejorative or inanimate object or not-human connotation that they do in European languages.

I remember being in Aotearoa (New Zealand) years ago with some Māori colleagues of mine. We were involved in a pōwhiri [a ceremonial welcome] where we were trying to figure out the protocol for us to enter a marae [communal meeting ground]. (I understand Māori enough to have caught this.) One of the leaders was intending to say, “all of the men come to the front.” And he said “mea tāne” [“male thing”]. And it didn’t mean that he was dehumanizing those men. He was saying “the entities that are masculine, that we recognize as masculine, come forward.” I remember that, and I have listened for that in my work as a linguist in other spaces.

There are times—again, this is always relational and context dependent—when “mea uli” is very much dehumanizing and othering, and there are times when it is a descriptive term and it doesn’t have that [sentiment]. I have certainly been in places where people don’t expect me to speak Sāmoan, for example, where I’ve been described as “tenga mea uli,” where someone is very much being derisive. It connotes the question: “who is this Black woman who is in this space?” And then there are a lot of other times when I identify as a Black person and that is the easiest translation that gets that across to people.

I know there are folks, especially in the Sāmoan community, who have tried to use words like “tangata uli,” which is literally “a black person.” It feels awkward, again, because it is still this concept that is being translated. And I think one of the things that is difficult is that race is such a foreign concept in a lot of ways, where in Pacific cultures, genealogy stands in where race does in European cultures for understanding how to situate someone. I have found in my work and traveling through the Pacific that the race question is always really, really fraught. When I can actually explain who my ancestors are and where they are from, there is a different kind of connection that can be made that I don’t think those terms like “mea uli” or even “pōpolo” actually identify for people.

NTS: Have you found in your own work any linguistic genealogies of African languages in the Pacific?

AG: Yes. I think part of what this starts to explode is how we rely on European and White supremacist concepts of Africa and the Pacific. As a linguist, a lot of my work has been in Pacific languages and there is a really interesting contribution that Pacific linguistics, Oceanic linguistics, has made to understanding human population movements over the last 50,000 years. The Austronesian family of languages and the cultural complex of the Pacific and Southeast Asia before colonization was the most widely attested cultural complex that we had in the world—even just referring to the geography that it spans. So that means that to the far west, we have Madagascar, and in the far east is Rapa Nui. Going from Africa to America and everything in between, if we think of the world with a Pacific center. And so absolutely there’s linguistic evidence of the history of that interaction.

We see it in foods. A lot of canoe plants—the things that people brought to Oceania when they voyaged here—came from Africa, from Southeast Asia, and came from the sustained interaction through South Asia, through the Indian Ocean, all of these really complex human interactions for the last 50,000 years. In addition, there is the colonial history of the Pacific, which very much engages Africa and the diaspora. I think about a student I had years ago at [the University of Hawaiʻi] who was from Timor-Leste who is also Angolan. She spoke about how, when the Portuguese were in that area, they brought Angolan slaves and other enslaved people to work alongside their colonial enterprise. So she traces her genealogy not only as an Indigenous person from Timor, but also to Angola as well.

Those are the kinds of histories that get obscured, especially in the ways that anthropology has encountered the Pacific and Indigenous people. They tend to look for these phenotypical markers, or they are looking for these pieces of culture that they flatten as “general primitive culture.” But there is often a more complex story. I know at least in my experience as a Black person doing research in the Pacific, in Hawaiʻi, but also in other places in the Pacific, I have had many very interesting conversations with people because of what I look like. People are curious about me and end up sharing little pieces, like that student, who I don’t think would necessarily have shared that piece of her own genealogy with, say, a White colleague.

NTS: That is so fascinating. It makes me think of the Cape Verdeans that came here [to Hawai‘i] and Black laborers on Hawaiian plantations in the nineteenth century. When did you come to Hawai‘i? And when you founded the Pōpolo Project, was there an absence or a gap that you were trying to fill?

AG: I first came to Hawaiʻi to make it my home in 2003. I moved here from New York City and in almost every way I am like the quintessential Atlantic Black person. My ancestors are all from Africa and North America and Europe and a little bit of southeast and southern China. So my experience with Hawaiʻi in my early life was really through proxy. My father was in the military, so I grew up with a lot of Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders. I found myself in New York City for university, and somehow also found a lot of people from Hawaiʻi there. There were a few things that made this place feel familiar, but when I first came here, my interest, because of my Indigenous background from North Carolina, was really in language and culture revitalization.

That is an important part of the story of the Pōpolo Project, because I found myself as a Black person very invested in those kinds of [Indigenous Pacific Islander] politics and in those spaces. Often being the only Black person—which happens a lot of places—but also meeting people who I saw that I had a natural solidarity with, who have very different perceptions of me because of my Blackness. There was an assumption that I was part of the military occupation that is ongoing here, or that I was an urban person and would not know anything about life in Hawaiʻi, or wouldn’t care about plants, or wouldn’t care about the land here. I was really curious about that because these were very specific ideas about me because of my Blackness. Of course, Black people are stereotyped in a lot of places—that is a product of White supremacy. But I was very curious about where these things were coming from on a personal level.

Over the many years of my work in linguistics and Pacific Island studies, my Blackness was traveling and I was interested in the ways that I was perceived and interacted with in Pacific spaces where I felt people did a lot of work to try to erase my Blackness while my Blackness also made me approachable to them in some other ways.

The Pōpolo Project started as an idea when I was a graduate student at [the University of Hawai‘i at] Mānoa in the linguistics department, in Pacific Island studies, where I would go for weeks, if not months, without interacting with another Black person. And when I would, I was really excited to see them on campus. Graduate students lead these bleak lives anyway, but I wasn’t getting a lot of social interaction. But when I would see Black people, I found that I was starting to adopt these ideas about what they were doing here and who they were and I thought, “Okay, as a researcher, as a human, this is actually not a productive thing for me to do.” I found myself asking the few Black people that I had relationships with here on island, “How did you get here? How did Hawaiʻi become your home?” I was surprised to find that there was a well-established community of people of African descent in Hawaiʻi who still held on to those pieces of their identity. I knew about the history of Afro–Puerto Ricans, Cape Verdeans, and Brazilians here, but also learned that there were many other complex small communities that still organized themselves around an identity that was, yes, Black and African diasporic, but also very local.

The Pōpolo Project started as an entity, as a community organization, in earnest in 2017. It started with us offering our first programs through the vehicle of Black August, which comes out of California anti–prison industrial complex organizing inspired by the events in the early 1970s around George Jackson and the Soledad Prison uprisings. What we were trying to do with starting there was to create a space for us to talk about the specificity and the experiences of Blackness in Hawaiʻi while also drawing in Black people who might be transient or newly arrived to the Islands to think deeply about how Black liberation is tied to Indigenous liberation and decolonization here. We used Black August as the anchor for that. We are really trying to engage people to learn and think deeply about the places where we intersect in our efforts for humanizing ourselves and getting free.

NTS: That is so important, and I don’t think I knew that specific genealogy about the organization. What has been people’s reception to the Pōpolo Project, and is it growing? Can you give an example of an event that signifies the mission of what you are trying to do?

AG: The reception has been interesting. It has certainly changed in even the last several months. When we first showed up on the scene, the name was very much an agitant, and that was part of the point. It was a conversation starter; it was something that allowed us to dig into unpacking the colonial history and the importation of White supremacy to Hawaiʻi, and to talk about that very explicitly. There were some people who, just on the merit of the name, were very much opposed to us at first. I am sure there are still people who feel that way. I have had some really interesting and very important conversations, especially with Native Hawaiians who are also Black, who had family members and community members other them [by] using the word “pōpolo.”

A woman in her fifties attended an event that we hosted in support of Maunakea last year in 2019. She came up to me afterwards and she said, crying, “I almost didn’t come because that word has been so terrible, as a cudgel people have used against me.” At some point in the event, I had mentioned the medicinal history of pōpolo, and she said, “I had never thought of them as the same word, because I used to go and collect pōpolo as medicine with my grandmother. And I’d never thought that they were the same thing because they were used in such different ways.” She had never made the connection. As a Black Hawaiian person, it was an opportunity for her to address that trauma of being othered in her own community.

This is something that we hear regularly. Over the last couple of years, we have been focused on holding a space for deep conversations and education. This includes meaningful community partnerships with art museums and cultural organizations from other ethnic and racial communities here. This year, especially in 2020 in the midst of all the craziness [referring to the Black Lives Matter protests and the rising COVID-19 pandemic] that has been happening, our profile was raised a little bit, for good and for ill, I think. We were first sought out in June to help our local community understand what Black people were doing on the continent, in North America.

NTS: You are talking about the protests that were following the murder of George Floyd in May 2020?

AG: Yes. I should say that, before that happened in Minnesota, there had been a bubbling reckoning with some anti-Blackness here in Hawaiʻi. The week before George Floyd was killed, there was an event that involved some military people staging a big party in the middle of the pandemic, and trashing Waimea Beach at the mouth of Waimea Valley [on the North Shore of O‘ahu], which is a sacred place to [Native Hawaiians]. A number of Native Hawaiian folks were very offended, rightfully so, that people would do that in the middle of the pandemic when we were all being asked to stay home and protect our larger community. Video images of this event circulated on social media. Many of the folks depicted seemed young and probably military affiliated. Certainly not all of them were Black, but there were a few who were Black. That was a small eruption, just a few days before George Floyd was murdered and before the image of his murder traveled around.

In our Black community here, people were also grieving not only George Floyd but also Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, people like Tony McDade. So it had been this compounded tinderbox even here in Hawaiʻi. Part of the issue in our community was that people felt far away from the violence. There is a phenomenon of just being [geographically] removed and having to consume things through social media. Some [fellow Black residents] have expressed to me their feelings of guilt for being safe here [in Hawaiʻi]. Others saw that some people in the Islands did not understand why we are having a reaction to seeing state and vigilante violence against Black people. We feel like we need to explain. So, when George Floyd was murdered and the uprisings happened across the US, a lot of people in the Islands reached out to us to try to understand.

However, one of the things that happened very early in that process was the [development of a narrative] of a tension between [movements for Hawaiian sovereignty and protests against police violence]. Some people saw the Hawaiian sovereignty movement and the mobilization around protecting Maunakea in 2019 as contrasting with what they saw of Black people uprising in North America in the media. There was this contrast made between kapu aloha (an Indigenous value system of nonviolent direct action) and ideas about “whatever these Black people were doing over there” [on the continental United States]. Despite the work some folks were doing to try to draw that contrast, we found that many other people in Hawaiʻi were not buying into that [depiction]. They wanted to know from us, Black people of Hawaiʻi, “Can you help us understand what is happening there in the US?” They did not want to fall into [adopting] the mainstream ideas that “Black people are violent and Hawaiians are peaceful.” Rather, they saw that we were doing something that is a little more complex and real and truthful. In that space, we were able to respond as an organization to our larger community and also hold space for our Black community in the Islands whose members were feeling very aggrieved and who were grieving.

Many of us are also experiencing this interesting ramp-up of anti-Blackness this year with the ways that some people in Hawaiʻi have shifted to supporting the Trump regime in the election. There were rumors that Black people were flying here to abduct children, that [Black Lives Matter] was shipping people in to break windows in Waikīkī—all of these kinds of interesting things circulating in social media. For many of us who are visibly being Black in public spaces, this carries a different weight to it that many of us did not experience in Hawaiʻi prior to this year.

The organization itself has been called in by other entities in Hawaiʻi, including state agencies and community organizations, to talk through their own processing of us in this moment. They want to reflect upon questions such as, “Why have we never thought about Black people in Hawaiʻi?” Or “What’s actually happening with you guys? How are your lives going?” We also have been holding space for the Black community itself to gather and process together in safe spaces, and in intentionally Black spaces as well.

Our organization sits in this place where we are both able to explain and connect with a larger community using a vocabulary that they can access. We can also spend substantial time digging deep in our own community to help our members reckon with what it means to be living here, and in a Black body, and in Black families, and with Black hearts.

NTS: That is a lot for an organization to do and it is a lot for a person to bear. But I recognize the work that the Pōpolo Project does in holding community, and care, and acknowledgment for Black people in Hawaiʻi, while also having to do this liaison work of challenging historic and new emerging stereotypes and experiences with racism. Expanding beyond the organization, how does a consideration of Black people in the Pacific shape our understandings of the Pacific from a Pacific Islands studies perspective and the work that people do on the Pacific? What does Blackness mean in the Pacific?

AG: I think that studying race in the Pacific is crucial. We are in a moment in Pacific Island studies where we cannot just be having anthropological encounters that are politically “neutral.” Attending to Blackness is essential because it helps us understand what racial capitalism and colonialism have brought to the region. There is no way to understand nuclear testing on Pacific Islands and the blatant disregard for the humanity of Indigenous people here without understanding how anti-Blackness has animated the project of White supremacy and racial capitalism for so long. It is hard, because part of the story that White supremacy advances around Blackness is that there is something “intrinsic” to Black people that makes us subject to its predation. It creates this class—not necessarily in that Marxist sense, but class in the sense of this “category”—of human or nonhuman, that then in turn has all these ideas projected onto it.

One of the things that is really important for thinking about race in the Pacific that connects back to all these others—ethnic studies, or African American studies, or African diaspora studies—is that the Pacific is a space where we cannot talk about Blackness without attending to indigeneity because the Black people in the Pacific are always Indigenous people. Whether we are talking about people from the African diaspora who are displaced Indigenous people, or we are talking about so-called Melanesian Islanders who are Indigenous here, who are still represented phenotypically as Black people, drawing on this idea of what African indigeneity looks like. This is very important.

I think about the work of people like Shona Jackson, whose work in the Caribbean analyzes Black indigeneity. Quito Swan’s work has been really interesting, as we have been able to dialogue in the past couple of years about this idea that he has that has really been sitting with me around “becoming island people.” This idea is that Black people—people who became Black leaving Africa through [slave] trafficking, mostly were not from islands, but found themselves in the Caribbean, where Quito’s work was mostly situated—had to rely on relationships with Indigenous people to understand themselves as human. This means that they had to learn about not only the land, but also medicinal plants. They had to find ways to still assert their humanity and they couldn’t do that without relationships with Indigenous people. I find that to be very analogous to how this work is happening in the Pacific, and certainly in places like Hawaiʻi and Aotearoa, as people from the African diaspora find connection and make homes there.

Attending to race is the only way that we can actually explain what we have seen historically throughout the 1960s and the decolonization of the Pacific. There is a lot of cross-fertilization from Africa, the diaspora, the Caribbean, North America, into the Pacific, inspiring a lot of the ways that people have organized themselves. Without a racial analysis, there is not enough to hold it together. It is important, even though race is constructed and we can all agree on that, [to recognize that] kinship is also constructed. How we understand each other—how we understand we are connected to each other—is also a site of liberation for many people.

NTS: Speaking of how Black people in the Pacific are linked to indigeneity, or are twinned with, in conversation with, or are Indigenous, is powerful because I think people are trying to make a similar analytical move in North American studies of Black and Native people. Some scholars are looking for allied approaches of solidarity rather than being at an impasse. In looking at race as an analytic and at Blackness across the Pacific—referring to ideas of Blackness, Black cultural flows, and to Black people—what does that do to the Native/settler paradigm? This dominant paradigm operates in parts of the Pacific as well as in North America. In the Hawaiʻi context, we may think of the settler as including haole [White], but also Asian, as theorized by Asian settler colonialism. Does an attention to Blackness and Black people rupture this binary? Does it add to it? Does it explode it?

AG: I think it can do all of those things and depending on who is working with it, it certainly can and does. Going back to Shona Jackson’s work, one of the things that’s been interesting and important about thinking about the origins of Blackness and the concepts of indigeneity in a colonial White supremacist frame is that those categories are deeply interacting. The things that Blackness has had attributed [to it] are also mostly the kinds of things that indigeneity has had attributed [to it]. So the availability for the human to be extracted from lands, the necessity of the human being extracted from land, the necessity of humans being extracted from kin networks—those are common experiences.

Part of [these ideas] in my work and thinking comes from my own experience, from being someone of Indigenous North American ancestry and also African ancestry. In my own family and in our own genealogy, a lot of the story of why there are so many people like me in North Carolina, where my family is from, is because we were having similar experiences under White supremacy, yes, but also because we already have a lot of cultural values and ways of interacting with land and space and humans that make it a natural relationship—which is not to say that there are no problems. There’s the history of enslavement that some Indigenous people in North America engaged in.

But I think certainly here in Hawaiʻi, this idea of the Native/settler colonial binary is useful. It has been so instructive for helping people understand the dispossession of Indigenous people here and the rise of the East Asian settler class who runs things in Hawaiʻi. At the same time, there are a lot of other complicated things happening. I mentioned that my father was in the military. People of color are overrepresented in the military, especially Black people, especially rural Black people like my dad. I grew up with a lot of Hawaiians and Sāmoans and Chamorros because their families were in the military. I grew up in Virginia, one of my ancestral homelands which is currently occupied, and it has military bases all through it, just like Hawaiʻi does. There are Hawaiians occupying land that my ancestors lived on, in the same way that there are Black people here participating in occupation.

And so one of the things that attending to race helps us do is to be really specific and honest about the ways we have all been conscripted into empire. If we are just focusing on seeing someone who is Black and immediately associate them with the [US] military, that is statistically a pretty good bet. This association [of Black people with the US military] happens in Hawaiʻi because the [military] occupation is very painful and it is very present, and Black people are conspicuous [here] because we do not have a large Black community. But the reality is that even for those folks—and this is not to absolve their participation in upholding empire—there are very few opportunities for people for class mobility, for being able to have basic things like health care and access to higher education. These are options that under empire are offered to Black people from North America, who include many of us who are descendants of enslaved people, who don’t have wealth and don’t have opportunities to take care of our families and communities in exactly the same way that Indigenous people in the Pacific are overrepresented in their military participation.

There is room for us not necessarily to explode the Native/settler binary: the settler/Indigenous binary is there. I think it is important for us to see how that framework has helped us identify some of what is going on. But there is space for more new [frameworks]. Yes: there are settlers and there are Indigenous people. And then there are captives and refugees and all kinds of other people who intervene in the space. I do not think it serves us to ignore those humans passing through in whatever ways they are passing through.

This refers back to thinking of Trans-Pacific studies as if we are just leaping over the largest body of water to look at the poles of empire, when, in fact, it is one of the most complex human ecosystems in the world. There is a lot that emerges in engaging with those aspects that help us start to tease out some of the nuance, such as the people who are living in-between, and not referring to this place as being “at the margins.” This is one of the ways people talk about “people living at the margins.” I have had people ask me in Hawai‘i, “Are Black people at the margins of empire?” It is not necessarily at the margins when you are in a place that is heavily militarized, but to think about the intersections and the multivalence of the human experience is really important. Attending to Blackness, attending to race in the Pacific, offers something critical to larger conversations on how these structures work.

NTS: Finally, can you discuss some upcoming events or a landmark event that the Pōpolo Project hosted that did some of this work that we are discussing? How do the events that you have organized epitomize the mission of the Pōpolo Project?

AG: We do a lot. Sometimes I am amazed at how much we are able to get done in such a small group! A number of the things that we do are inspired by community members who have an idea and then we try to give it legs. Probably one of the most visible and important things that we have been doing is Black August. Our version of Black August may be a departure from what other Black radical groups might be doing, inspired by what I mentioned previously about Black August events in California in the early 1970s with Black activism countering the carceral system. In other places, I have encountered Black August as having very much a Pan-African focus and centering prison and Black liberation. This is not to say that we don’t do that, but we spend the entirety of the month focusing on Hawaiʻi and the Pacific.

I would take the month of August as an event itself. This last year, because of COVID, we ended up doing twenty-four separate events in the thirty-one days, always ending with the People’s Feast. It was a little strange to do that virtually, but we do a lot of work in Black August to try to get our Black community in dialogue with Indigenous people, with concepts of indigeneity that are more expansive, and to bring people into relationship with land and ancestors.

We also have been interested in holding sacred secular space with community. Black people have been colonized through religious interaction, as have Indigenous people in the Pacific. One of the things we did this year was around Juneteenth. We have celebrated Juneteenth the last few years, but this year we held a ceremony to honor some of the people killed by police and through vigilante violence while also celebrating not only the liberation of North American enslaved people, but also connecting that to what is going on in West Papua, thinking about the interactions with Indigenous people there and the Indonesian government. We invited people to come and draw on some cultural touchstones that are attested to throughout the African diaspora. We asked people to dress in white and to bring offerings to create a collaborative altar for our ancestors. As it was in the middle of the pandemic, we expected that maybe thirty people would show up. We had about five hundred people come to the park on the Gold Coast, near Diamond Head! I think it was really a testament to people seeking connection especially in a time when we are being isolated, but also for our Black community and our allies who are not Black people wanting to honor the sacredness of Black lives. That was a big draw for folks to come and engage with us.

And then, of course, the other piece of that is that we want to center Black joy. We do a lot in the arts and celebrating the genius and creativity of Black people through artist residencies and events, like our Black Futures Ball, which was a fundraiser for us. We invited our attendees to be creative in the ways that they connected with it, with their own racial and ethnic history, but also celebrating Blackness and Black creativity.

NTS: That is fantastic. That was the last time we were here [in Hawai‘i].

AG: Yeah, that’s right. I mean, it feels like a new world. It’s like…

NTS: Another world.