Lilikalā K. Kame’eleihiwa is a senior professor at the Kamakakūokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawaii Manoa, and from August 2014 until June 2017 was itʻs director for the third time. Trained as a historian, and fluent in Hawaiian language, she is an expert in Hawaiian Ancestral Knowledge, Hawaiian land issues, mythology, history, cultural traditions, Historical Hawaiian Fishponds on Oahu, and the Hawaiian Sovereignty movement.

She was the co-script writer of the award-winning video “Act of War: Overthrow of the Hawaiian Nation” (1992), and was the producer of the video “Natives in New York: Seeking Justice at the United Nations” (2003).

In July 2014, she led a group of 13 Hawaiian faculty, staff and students to French Polynesia to survey 30 temples in 21 days on 5 different islands, Huahine, Raʻiatea, Borabora, Moʻorea and Tahiti. Her other recent research has been on Traditional Hawaiian Land Management and Food Sustainability for Oahu in an Administration for Native Americans grant, where she trained 10 Hawaiian graduate students to research Hawaiian Land documents and Ancestral Knowledge for Food Sustainability. As a result, her students were able to type and post the 8,500 handwritten 1848 Land Commission Awards, as well as the Native and Foreign testimonies for those awards detailing what planted on the land at that time.