Demiliza Saramosing

Demiliza Saramosing is Bisayan (American) and was raised on the island of O‘ahu in the ahupua‘a and urban, majority working-class and immigrant city of Kalihi. She is also a first-generation college student holding B.A. degrees in Ethnic Studies and Journalism from the University of Oregon and is currently completing her M.A. degree in Asian American Studies from UCLA. As a Filipina settler raised on U.S. illegally occupied Native Hawaiian land, she believes her settler responsibility as a scholar is to bridge settler of color and Native epistemologies of and resistance movements on Hawaiian lands to achieve a collective consciousness for liberation. She has initiated this work through her current ethnographic M.A. thesis project on the Kalihi Valley Instructional Bike Exchange (KVIBE), a mentorship program in Kalihi that empowers boys of color of Filipino and Chuukese descent through the building and riding of bicycles. She is studying how the program mobilizes Nakem (Soul Consciousness) pedagogy, an Ilokano framework centered on the use of storytelling, to assist connecting these boys of color to their own histories, to each other, and to the urban and natural structures and landscapes in Kalihi. She is looking forward to expanding on this work for her Ph.D. project. In her free time, she loves exploring local coffee shops as well as talking story and being silly with friends. Her preferred pronouns are: She/Her/Hers.