She bears witness to me, gathering parts of myself. Peering through the tinted jalousies of her green house, my grandmother watched me climb over the shallow cement wall to her plumeria tree, planted in the red dirt of Mililani, O'ahu. I was curious about the anatomy of flowers—the impossible fuchsia and goldenrod sunset, painted over each white petal, and the thin stems carrying the flower's milk in its crevice. Yelling from her bedroom window, my grandmother warned me that the plumeria's milk was poisonous. I squeezed the milk from the stem anyways and tasted its bitterness on my pointer finger.
     "I wish the reader to know that the beginning I am about to lay out before you is just one of many." It made sense that my first of many entries to reading Remembering Our Intimacies: Mo'olelo, Aloha ʻĀina, and Ea (University of Minnesota Press, 2021) by Jamaica Osorio was in my childhood home in Mililani, where I had first watched my own queerness drip out of me, at first like some poisonous sap of a flower. Osorio's book insists that what has been discarded in institutional academia—queer intimacy, Indigenous knowledge, archival residue—becomes a site of lush creation. Refracting the overlooked, even censored, mo'olelo of the goddess Hi'aka and mortal Nānāhuki, she resuscitates a queer erotic lineage beginning in the lehua blossom grove of Hōpoe. Their intimacy, often censored in both classroom curricula and Western readings, is not incidental but central. (Similar to Osorio in Hawaiian immersion school, when I first was taught Hi'iakapoliopele at Kamehameha Schools, the epic was reduced to Pele's jealous wrath—Hi'iaka stealing Lohiau.) At my high school, ʻIolani School, no such class provided the intersection between queer and Native Hawaiian literature. Osorio, by sharp contrast, uncovers the epic's subterranean logics: how from the seeming detritus of fractured relationships, Hi'iaka's love for Nānāhuki becomes a model for aloha ʻāina itself. After all, when Hi'iaka first encounters Nānāhuki in the grove, Hi'iaka declares her name to be of the land, Hōpoe.
      As far as Native Hawaiian literary criticism goes, Remembering Our Intimacies offers a fierce intervention. It's an acutely environmental reading of an archive, and in this way, a textual refusal to separate land from love, or critique from feeling. Although Osorio first wrote the bulk of her book for her final dissertation project of the English Ph.D program at the University of Mānoa in 2018, her text does not merely inhabit the institutional archive—it transforms it. Against dominant decolonial tendencies that reject the archive, she resurgently considers the archive a "place of abundance" on account of its rich repository of Hawaiian newspapers. But the true geography of the book is Osorio's own: she writes from her father's home in Puna to her grandmother's home in Pāoa, mapping her chapters across islands and intergenerational memory. One step further than Apache scholar Keith Basso's "wisdom sits in place," Remembering Our Intimacies models wisdom moving through place.
      Reading, here, is not an act of clarification but of creation and trans-island traversal. Intimacy, between lovers, readers, and lands, is a methodology, beckoning the Indigenous reader to participate along the journey.
      Osorio deftly carries readers across the genealogy of the epic of Hi'iaka's reception that has brought her to her reading, manifest in action. She refigures the archive not as a static repository, but as a site of lived relationality. Through careful readings of the Hi'iaka epic's serialized newspaper publications—at least thirteen full iterations across seventy years before the ʻŌlelo Hawai'i language ban in 1896—she uncovers how the politics of ʻaikāne relationships were quietly preserved, if not explicitly celebrated. At the height of illegal overthrow and eventual American occupation of the Hawaiian Kingdom, the epic of Hi'iaka was deliberately republished, becoming "counterhegemonic narratives in the face of a multitude of domestic and international challenges." This archival recovery refuses the abstraction of queer literature, grounding it instead in politically generative acts of witnessing and remembrance. Yet, it would be reductive to say that Native Hawaiian politics chafes against the genre—the refusal is more fundamental, from language.
      What Osorio offers is not merely an Indigenous queer reading, but a denial to extract mo'olelo from its environmental and linguistic grounds. Translation is obviously not neutral in power. English, with its imperial coding, cannot carry the full cultural freight of ʻŌlelo Hawai'i. Kānaka scholar Noenoe Silva first notes in Aloha Betrayed (2004), it is "impossible to convey all of the cultural coding that English strips away, and equally impossible to avoid the western coding that English adds." Osorio's method, then, is one of rigorous paraphrase and refusal of dominant genres, straight timelines, and settler grammars. Her procedure is "engaging directly with the Hawaiian-language text without supplying [readers] with the alluring distraction of a full ʻtranslation' that pulls them away from the source," troubling the way that readers ought to think about Hi'aka and Hōpoe in terms of identity and relationship. The thesis for capturing both, subversively, belies within the translation's conceit: as a Native Hawaiian deity, Hi'iaka cannot be affixed to a straight or queer identity, because there is no English equivalent to ʻaikane. However, that certainly doesn't mean that she and Hōpoe cannot be seen and cherished as what Osorio writes "a pu'uhonua, or a place of refuge, a gathering for Indigenous queers like [her]self to see ourselves unapologetically represented in our literatures and histories."

Remembering Our Intimacies is not the only text of Osorio's where she is preoccupied with sites of refuge. In her most recent essay, "Abolition Dreams from a Resurgent Pu'uhonua," she studies the term puʻuhonua, instead with the comprehensive abolition of carceral systems, to ideate futures of liberation for Black and Indigenous communities. It is perhaps apt to point out how both projects are politically future-oriented, what has always been a tenet to queer studies, beginning with José Esteban Muñoz's seminal work Cruising Utopia (2009) which sets forth that "queerness is essentially a rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world." This is to say that geographically, queerness pushes outward to find intimate, communal refuge—toward the periphery, the liminal, the overlooked, which still hold possibility to what can become. For Osorio, such movement shows us the direction toward, what's more, the architecture, for such political dreaming.
      Co-opting the preface language of the American Quarterly editors from which Osorio's most recent essay comes from, when the late Haunani Kay-Trask declared her popular refrain, "We are not American," what she is also saying is that the Thirty Meter Telescope should not be constructed. Demonstrating how the State of Hawai'i has asymmetrically responded to the "threat" of grassroots power, Osorio notes the State of Hawai'i has spent more than $11 million funding private security alone for the telescope. Her activism on the slopes of Mauna Kea is not separate from her literary analysis: the final two chapters of her text are dedicated to the lessons she learns and practices from the relationship between Hiʻiaka and Nānāhuki, where Pele, in rage, breaks her oath to Hi'iaka by destroying the lehua grove at Hōpoe, thereby killing Nānāhuki. Yet, when she commands her younger sisters to kill both Hi'iaka and Lohiʻau, they refuse. They instead name what has happened, hemo ka piko, that the umbilical cord of between Pele and Hi'iaka has been severed. Osorio maps this relational rupture onto the terrain of governance, showing that it is not hierarchy, but intimacy that guides moral and political responsibility. "Our kūpuna faced these hulihia bravely," she writes, "while choosing to author and publish, over and over, a mo'olelo that so intimately discusses the politics of ʻohana, leadership, and governance."
      The political and the intimate are not separate registers; on the frontlines of Mauna Kea, Osorio met her partner Malia Hulleman. For FLUX Magazine in January 2020, she published journal entries from the frontlines, fragments of which became parts of the final manuscript for Remembering Our Intimacies. She writes about Hulleman, "I channeled all of the warmth I found in her eyes into steadying my pulse. I wanted there to be no mistaking my convulsing body for fear." Typical of Osorio, a close student of Trask, poetics merge the political and the intimate; the poetic voice embodies the land, never ceasing to marvel at its persistence of survival." Again for FLUX, she writes, "My body / A kīpuka expanding / Into peleʻs pāhoehoe grip / Holding holding holding my quiet," confessing that protest is agency as much as surrender to the gods, and its volume is loud just as much as its silence. It should not be lost on us that Mauna Kea is Peleʻs terrain. Osorio locates meaning precisely there, in the snowy, post-volcanic landscape, where fertility has returned through protest.
     On July 17, 2019, during the height of the anti-TMT protests on Mauna Kea, 33 kūpuna and one caregiver were arrested by law enforcement officers. The irony of state authorities arresting these Kānaka Maoli on their own homelands speaks for itself. According to Osorio, the anti-TMT protests "grew to possibly the greatest activation of our people since the kū'e petition drive in 1897, we wondered if we would ever be met with a force that we contemporary Kānaka had never before encountered." Embedded within Osorio's invocation of the famous anti-annexation protests is one of my favorite rigorous paraphrases, ʻai pōhaku, literally meaning "stone eaters" to describe those arrested on Mauna Kea. Shortly after Queen Lili'uokalani was forced from the throne and Native Hawaiian sovereignty was no longer recognized, the provisional government warned that Kānaka Maoli who failed to take the oath of allegiance to the government would be forced to eat stones. In reply, we called ourselves as activists, ʻai pōhaku.

Remembering Our Intimacies is a metatextual homage to the genealogy of Native Hawaiian literature it succeeds—most directly after Jamaica Osorio's father, Jonathan Osorio's Dismembering Lāhui. Osorio's work is not merely a continuation, it is her own act of remembering. She chronicles the memories of her father, the blistering heat of her own childhood Waikīkī where she first learned to swim, to her testimony to adulthood and activism on Mauna Kea. These personal fragments, like spring water, seep through the pages as refusals to violence—not in retreat, but in the gentle and generative act of return.
     One of the ruptures Remembering Our Intimacies holds most tenderly is found in the centerfold of the book, the memory of Osorio's late grandmother, Puna, who battled dementia. (Puna passed away into the realm of pō early in the morning of Osorio's dissertation defense, so out of respect, she preserved this portion of her manuscript as it was.) Although on most days, Puna struggles to remember that she has lived in Pāoa for the past twenty years, she is always quick to remind her ʻohana that she is first native to Hilo. In this way, she embodies a Native Hawaiian theory of memory—not centered in the individual cognition but grounded in the relation to land. Osorio compares her Puna to Hiʻiaka, who in naming herself Keahiakala, ties herself to place: "she takes on an inoa of her place and wears it like a genealogy." If Western frameworks understand memory primarily as loss, Osorio understands it as continuity. Memory is not what disappears from the mind, but what is sustained in mo'olelo, in names we refuse to forget. Now an undergraduate on the East Coast, I carried Remembering Our Intimacies across the Pacific as a way of recalling my ʻāina hānau. In remembering place, though, I lost sight of reciprocity. Memory runs both ways, and I still wonder if my homeland remembers me.
     It is in her recollections of her childhood in Waikīkī, a seemingly ironic place for a Native
Hawaiian activist to be born and raised, that Osorio fleshes out this bidirectionality further. Reminiscent of Trask's poem "Waikiki," where she calls the tourist town the "sewer center / of Hawai'i," Osorio writes of how tourism and its ecological footprints have discouraged her visiting Kaimana beach, now having "manufactured sand [that] is chalky and clings to the skin in an unnatural way." Like Trask before her, Osorio reminds us that the political voice is never divorced from the body—it is rooted in it, bleeding into the shoreline, breaking into verse. She continues that as a result, "we come to this shoreline less and less, it is not just that Kaimana becomes less familiar to us. We become foreign to her." Osorio reasserts that our insistence in maintaining the power of words and their related values are, themselves, political acts.
     I end with another beginning. Remembering our Intimacies opens with the forewarning of how coloniality enacts a violent amnesia—a forgetting of homelands, and a writing over of Kanaka bodies.

Can you see those strange men
Watching from beyond the page
see the way they have drawn us naked and grown
they miss your skin feathered with lehua
writing us into stillness into silence
how it seems through them,
we have been forgotten

This is not just a lament; it is a summons from the poetic voice of Hi'iaka, grieving over the groves of Hōpoe that once held her lover. The beginning presupposes forgetfulness, perhaps even from the reader themselves. And like an incantation, the book responds: I won't forget you.