Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio

b. 1990, Pālolo, Kona, Oʻahu
lives and works in Mānoa, Kona, Oʻahu

hawai‘i triennial 2022

@ IOLANI PALACE
@ HAWAI‘I STATE ART MUSEUM

Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio is a Kanaka ʻŌiwi wahine poet, artist, activist, and educator deeply committed to perpetuating her language, culture, community, and home. Following in the footsteps of her family, she has played a vital role on multiple fronts in advancing intergenerational stories of Native Hawaiian excellence, diplomacy, and resistance across the Hawaiian archipelago and beyond. Osorio’s father, Jonathan Kay Kamakawiwoʻole Osorio, a guiding voice for many, herself included, is a revered Kanaka ʻŌiwi composer, singer, activist, historian, scholar, and educator. Since the mid 1970s, he has helped shape and lead the movement for Hawaiian self-determination and sovereignty on local and international levels.

The excerpt below from ‘Kumulipo’ (2009), an early poem by Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio, establishes a solid foundation from which to engage with and remember the radically transformative practices of Osorio, her father, and their family.

i want to teach my future children
how to spell family with my middle name—Heolimeleikalnai
how to hold love with Kamakawiwoʻole
how to taste culture in the Kumulipo
please
do not forget me
my mana
do not forget my soul
my father
Kamakawiwoʻole
who could not forget his own
Leialoha
we have failed you and forgotten the ones before
so do not forget what’s left
cuz this is all we have
you wont find our roots online
we have no dances or chants if we have no history
just rants
no roots
just tears
this is all i have of our family history
and now its yours

Osorio channels the powerful potential of people and place in another poem, ‘Ask me about The Mauna’ (reprinted on the facing page), written a decade later in July 2019 from Puʻuhonua o Puʻuhuluhulu during the most recent expression of a longstanding and ongoing movement to protect Maunakea. Through her loyal words and unwavering affection for ʻāina and koa aloha ʻāina—past, present, and future—all are made to feel the sacred abundance of Mauna a Wākea and an ever-rising lāhui that is (re)assembling and (re)membering, healing itself and Hawaiʻi in the process.

At the recent book launch of her Remembering Our Intimacies: Mo‘olelo, Aloha ‘Āina, and Ea (2021), held at Native Books in Nuʻuanu, Osorio spoke to the important work that is emerging at the intersections of Hawaiian knowledge and Indigenous queer theory and feminisms—work around relationality, desire, and belonging grounded in the land, memory, and body of Hawaiʻi. To close the event she and her father shared intimate mele and poetry with audiences, offering song and spoken word together in celebration of beloveds, especially those ʻŌiwi Wāhine who have woven ‘fine baskets of resilience to carry our daughters in’—Eliza Leialoha Kamakawiwoʻole, Haunani-Kay Trask, and Teresia Teaiwa.

For HT22 Osorio contributes a composition to be performed at Iolani Palace. As an enduring source of Native Hawaiian governance and resistance, the palace and its surrounding grounds amplify her message in honor of meʻe, aliʻi, and Mōʻīwahine Liliʻuokalani—‘Mai poina oe iaʻu.’