About me
Dr. Marie Alohalani Brown is an award-winning author and committed activist/kiaʻi. She is Kanaka ʻŌiwi and grew up in Mākaha, Waiʻanae on Oʻahu, but her Kanaka ancestral roots are in Hoʻokena, Hawaiʻi. A world traveler, Dr. Brown has visited over thirty countries; lived in Tokyo for four years and Rome for nearly seventeen. She speaks English, Hawaiian, Italian, and French to varying degrees of fluency. She currently resides at Moʻo Momona, at Kapuʻeuhi, Hawaiʻi Island.
Dr. Brown is a specialist in Hawaiian religion and moʻolelo; 19th-century Hawaiian history, historical trauma and healing; and ʻŌiwi life writing. Much of what is known today about Hawaiian religion derives from the writings of 19th-century Hawaiians in the Hawaiian-language newspapers published between 1834 and 1948, and in interviews carried out from the 1950s until the present. These archives have been the primary focus of Dr. Brown's research for nearly two decades.
Dr. Brown strives to raise awareness of the importance of moʻolelo, a Hawaiian artistic-intellectual genre, as a receptacle of and a vehicle for transmitting Hawaiian knowledge. The genre termed moʻolelo is predicated on ʻŌiwi ways of knowing and being. Mary Kawena Pukui’s definition of moʻolelo showcases the way that it is culturally informed: moʻo and ʻōlelo combined denote “series of talks,” a union reflecting a long history of oral tradition as Pukui points out (see Pukui and Samuel H. Elbert’s Hawaiian Dictionary, s.v. “moʻolelo”). Although this genre is distinctly ʻŌiwi, it encompasses and/or incorporates and weaves together elements from what in English would be termed story, history, myth, epic, legend, origin story, cautionary tale, folk tale, and life writing, such as autobiography, biography, and memoir.
Photo: Ala Kupuna, Mauna Kea, Hawaiʻi Island.
Dr. Brown is a specialist in Hawaiian religion and moʻolelo; 19th-century Hawaiian history, historical trauma and healing; and ʻŌiwi life writing. Much of what is known today about Hawaiian religion derives from the writings of 19th-century Hawaiians in the Hawaiian-language newspapers published between 1834 and 1948, and in interviews carried out from the 1950s until the present. These archives have been the primary focus of Dr. Brown's research for nearly two decades.
Dr. Brown strives to raise awareness of the importance of moʻolelo, a Hawaiian artistic-intellectual genre, as a receptacle of and a vehicle for transmitting Hawaiian knowledge. The genre termed moʻolelo is predicated on ʻŌiwi ways of knowing and being. Mary Kawena Pukui’s definition of moʻolelo showcases the way that it is culturally informed: moʻo and ʻōlelo combined denote “series of talks,” a union reflecting a long history of oral tradition as Pukui points out (see Pukui and Samuel H. Elbert’s Hawaiian Dictionary, s.v. “moʻolelo”). Although this genre is distinctly ʻŌiwi, it encompasses and/or incorporates and weaves together elements from what in English would be termed story, history, myth, epic, legend, origin story, cautionary tale, folk tale, and life writing, such as autobiography, biography, and memoir.
Photo: Ala Kupuna, Mauna Kea, Hawaiʻi Island.