Daniel Iwama

Education

• PhD (Planning): University of California, Los Angeles
• MA (Planning): University of British Columbia
• BA (Philosophy): University of British Columbia

Research

Daniel Iwama is Assistant Professor of Indigenous Studies and teaches into the SFU Global Asias Program. Daniel's research is most interested in land and Indigeneity on densely militarized islands. Most of this work pertains to Okinawa and its diaspora, and to the global sphere of Indigenous politics. He writes about the dynamics of militarism and empire, and about how communities living in these circumstances maintain their relationships with place and culture. Daniel's formal training in planning informs how he understands these worlds of activity, usually through the lenses of the radical or insurgent traditions.

In various projects Daniel is approaching the above from different perspectives. In one of these, he asks how Okinawan relationships with land are maintaining or being rearranged in processes of military base return and what this might teach us about Indigenous political conditions under militarism in island regions broadly. Recently, he has begun a community based project investigating the role of Okinawan diaspora organizations as centres of Indigenous cultural production and identity formation.

Biography

Daniel is a second-generation Uchinānchu whose family (Uehara) comes from the Kume Village of Okinawa Island, and a Red River Métis citizen of the Manitoba Métis Federation (Swan River Local). He is an interdisciplinary scholar with degrees in philosophy and planning from the University of British Columbia, and in 2023 completed a PhD in planning from the University of California, Los Angeles. Daniel was raised on unceded Coast Salish Territories in the City of Vancouver, where his family is still active in the local Okinawan community. 

Select Publications

Iwama, D. A. (2025). Amerika yu mada yamatu nu yu: Legalizing Transpacific Dispossession in Postwar Okinawa. Amerasia Journal, 1-18.