‘The Richness of the Scholarship is so Alive’
Hiʻilei Hobart ’03 returns to Colby as a leader for this year’s Summer Institute in Environmental Humanities
Every year,Colby’s Summer Institute in Environmental Humanities brings together talented and passionate academics, artists, activists, and researchers from all over to share ideas and works in progress that explore the complex relationship between humans and the environment.
For one of this summer’s seminar leaders, the weeklong institute is also something of a homecoming. Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart ’03, an assistant professor of Native and Indigenous studies at Yale University, was delighted to return to Colby to be part of the environmental humanities conversation, which she described as remarkable.
“It doesn’t always happen in these academic gatherings where the collective richness of the scholarship is so alive,” Hobart said. “To be invited to be one of the seminar leaders is such a gift—and a surprise, and an honor. It’s one of the most exciting professional things to have happened to me, to be asked back to your alma mater.”
A long journey
Hobart is Kanaka Maoli, or Indigenous Hawaiian, and through her teaching, research, and writing, she weaves together food studies, native and Indigenous studies, and environmental studies.
She’s an academic, though an unconventional one, with advanced degrees in the fields of decorative arts, design, and culture; rare books librarianship and archives management; and food studies.
Her chosen path has led her to fascinating subjects and important projects, including the 2022 repatriation of iwi kupuna, or ancestral remains of native Hawaiians, from the Yale Peabody Museum. She saw the jaw and teeth bones on a visit to the museum soon after she started teaching there and made it a priority to work with university officials and other Kānaka Maoli students to arrange their return.
Hobart’s first book, Cooling the Tropics: Ice, Indigeneity, and Hawaiian Refreshment, published by Duke University Press in 2022, won several prestigious awards, including the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association Best First Book Prize, the Scholars of Color First Book Award from Duke University Press, and the Samuel and Ronnie Heyman Prize from the Yale University Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
When Hobart first came to Colby from Hawaiʻi, she had no idea that any of this would be in store for her. “I wasn’t ever expecting or imagining that I would become an academic,” she said.
Truthfully, it seemed a little like serendipity that she discovered the College at all. Hobart stumbled upon an online multiple-choice quiz about where to go to college from the Princeton Review during the early days of the internet in the late 1990s, and liked the answer it gave her.
“It told me I should go to Colby, and so I applied early decision,” she remembered. “Going so far out of one’s context to a new place is not an easy transition, but I was so thrilled with Colby, and I got a really great education.”
After a rocky first semester, Hobart found her groove, taking classes from favorite professors like Elisa Narin Van Court, associate professor of English, emerita, and Jennifer Finney Boylan, who served as director of the Creative Writing Program and co-chair of the English Department.
In their classes, she fell in love with the discovery of learning and with the feeling of having space to write and think.
Hobart also started dating her husband, Jake Hobart ’03, during their junior year.
All of these threads contribute to a deep regard for the College.
“Colby is actually the institution that I do feel really fond of,” she said. “I have appreciated the commitment to liberal arts education, which feels really important to me, and it has overall been very thoughtful in how it navigates higher education waters, which are honestly quite choppy. I really am so pleased to be an alum.”
The importance of the Summer Institute in Environmental Humanities
The summer institute, now in its sixth year, is part of the College’s larger initiative for environmental humanities. The multidisciplinary field recognizes the failure of the industrial world to address complex environmental problems and the need to question long-held assumptions about human interactions with nature.
One of the week’s important goals is to create space for conversations about cutting-edge environmental humanities topics, and over the years, the summer institute has become a leading gathering place for established and emerging scholars. The institute, which is organized and hosted by the Center for the Arts and Humanities, is also dedicated to building an international network of scholars and creating opportunities for mentorship and rigorous scholarly engagement.
Dean Allbritton, director of the Center for the Arts and Humanities, said that at a time of federal funding upheaval and higher education pressures, the institute’s mission is all the more critical.
“We’re at a moment where bringing people together, having these conversations, and providing a space for thinking together is the most important it’s ever been, I would say, because we’re losing repositories of knowledge and we’re losing access to knowledge,” he said. “It’s also important because of the joy of being together and thinking together. Every year, the summer institute feels like a community, and we become so close through such intensive work. I think that is really valuable.”
Interest in the institute has grown over the years, with 40 fellows in attendance this summer, the most there have ever been. Hobart joins the other seminar leaders, Allison Carruth of Princeton University, Hsuan L. Hsu of the University of California, Davis, and Max Liboiron of the Memorial University of Newfoundland. Each brings diverse perspectives and experience to the work, Allbritton said, adding that it is special to have a Colby alum in the mix.
“Having Hiʻilei here has been just incredible,” he said. “It’s been great to have someone with such deep knowledge of Colby and Waterville, who’s also coming back to it with fresh eyes. I have really appreciated her viewpoint and her thoughts.”
A unique and complicated state park
Earlier this week, Hobart gave a keynote address at the Chace Community Forum called “Saving Kahana: The Politics of Conservation and the Hawaiian Pleasurescape.” In it, she shared a deeply researched and thoughtful meditation on a unique Hawaiian state park on the island of O’ahu, and it’s part of her second book project, Pleasure Seekers: Land, Power, and Colonial Parkspace.
The audience listened carefully as Hobart talked about Ahupuaʻa ʻO Kahana State Park, which was established as a “living park” in the 1970s, the only such designated park in Hawaii. It was created to showcase traditional native Hawaiian lifestyles, cultural practices, and environmental stewardship. Alongside standard park amenities like hiking trails and public restrooms, the park is also home to 31 households. In order to maintain the terms of their lease agreements, those families must complete 25 hours of labor per month by facilitating cultural programs for the public.
“Because of this, life in Kahana unfolds in the shadow of political, budgetary, and social management, land zoning laws, building and infrastructure codes, community surveys, and master plans, which manage residential life in a site maintained for public leisure,” Hobart said. “Such an arrangement is not only unusual, but also complicated and difficult for the people who have called Kahana their traditional homelands for generations. It is an arrangement for people who refuse to leave.”
In her book, she considers Kahana and several other state parks in terms of the ongoing ramifications of colonialism, development pressures, and the idealization and romanticization of the Hawaiian tropical paradise that took root in the mainland U.S. after World War II.
“In what ways do pleasure-seeking practices dovetail with things like conservation and preservation toward settler-colonial ends?” she asked. “And how do Kanaka Maoli communities and native peoples more broadly navigate these structures through creative forms of resistance and care?”
Living relationships
One answer may be in the way that people can love unreservedly and be in relationship with the land that is their home, no matter how complex the situation. Hobart described a conversation she had with a resident of Kahana whose words were the opposite of dry bureaucracy.
The woman told her she loved her home almost with the kind of passion you would feel for a romantic partner. She adored its beauty and the way she felt Kahana cared for her and the other residents. As she spoke, she gestured toward the trees, mountains, and sky, taking in the totality of the valley in her view.
“I could see what she meant about taking land as your lover. You want to know all its names and stories. You want to pour into it what it gives to you,” Hobart said. “My friend’s description of her relationship with Kahana narrated something radically different than the forms of legal belonging outlined by tenant leases with the state.”
It’s a living relationship, and it matters.
“What I would like to emphasize most is that specificities of people and place matter when doing this work because it is in the specifics that we can understand how large, unwieldy processes of imperialism and colonialism operate on the ground,” Hobart said. “The dispossessive devil is in the details, so to speak.”
