Noenoe Silva

Noenoe K. Silva (born October 19, 1954)^[1] is a Hawaiian author and scholar. A professor of political science at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa,^[2] her work has appeared in Biography, American Studies,^[3] and The Contemporary Pacific.^[4]

Silva was born on Oʻahu and is of Kanaka Maoli^[5] descent. She returned to Hawaii in 1985 after growing up in California. In 1991, she earned a bachelor's in Hawaiian language. In 1993, she completed a Master's degree in Library and Information Studies, and in 1999 earned a PhD in political science.

While still a doctoral candidate, Silva was instrumental in rediscovering the Kūʻē Petitions, which had been presented to the United States government in 1897 in an attempt to halt American annexation of Hawaii.^[6] The petitions formed part of the basis for her book Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism, an examination of Hawaiian language accounts of the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom.^[7]

In 2006, Silva received a Katrin H. Lamon Fellowship from the School for Advanced Research to continue her research along similar lines through building a database of Hawaiian authors.^[8]

Silva also contributed to A Dictionary of the Hawaiian Language, an updated reprint of the first Hawaiian-English dictionary prepared by Lorrin Andrews in 1865, which was published by Island Heritage in 2003.^[9]

Aloha Betrayed received the Kenneth W. Baldridge Prize from Brigham Young University–Hawaii.^[10]

• The 1897 Petitions Protesting Annexation (1998) (as editor)
• Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism (2004)
• The Power of the Steel-Tipped Pen: Reconstructing Native Hawaiian Intellectual History (2017)

• Hawaiian sovereignty movement

• Official homepage