V. Pauahi Souza

Education

• PhD Candidate University of British Columbia - Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality, and Social Justice 
• Master's (Divinity) - Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary 
• Bachelor's (Christian Social Ministries) - Campbellsville University 

Biography

V. Pauahi Souza is a proud Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) from the occupied Hawaiian Kingdom who has been part of the Hawaiian diaspora most of her life. She has lived in Hawai'i, Germany, Colorado, and spent most of her life in Kentucky. While her education is mostly in Christian religious traditions her values are rooted in Hawaiian values and practices. Prior to working on her PhD, her non-academic career has consisted of working in healthcare with an emphasis on mental health with addiction medicine. Her healthcare career is ongoing and spans over twenty-years. She is an advocate for all things mental health and a lover of her land, her People, and her Lāhui (Nation). 

Research

Pauahi's research focuses on racial trauma of Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) who live in the diaspora. She names racial trauma as racial events that happen through the paradisal imaginary of the tourist and settler gaze that creates mental health symptoms around exoticizing Hawaiʻi and her Islands Peoples. Through the idea of the paradisal imagination, she unpacks the concept of Xtory that Indigenizes how history is extractive, exploitative, and erases Indigenous communties. 

The work Pauahi does largely focuses on the experiences of Kānaka Maoli self-identifying women who live in the diaspora and the mental health issues and symptoms that are presented with everyday occurrences of microaggressions towards Kānaka Maoli by all communities. These microagressions consist of monetizing off of ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi and/or Hawaiian culture as a non-Hawaiian, dismissal of historical grief, and co-option of traditions and cultural practices. Her research combines her work as a mental health practitioner and an emerging academic to disrupt narratives surrounding Western modes of clinical care for Kānaka Maoli in the diaspora. By using Kānaka Maoli ideologies, disrupting narratives addresses the illusion of paradise as a racist paradigm enjoyed by priveleged individuals who fetishize Hawaiʻi and denies her agency as the Hawaiian Kingdom.