Inside: Incarcerated Voices of Hawaiʻi and Beyond

Program type: 
Exhibition
Dates: 
Friday, May 9, 2025 - 6:00pm to Friday, July 25, 2025 - 4:00pm

INSIDE: Incarcerated Voices of Hawaiʻi and Beyond

Curator: Kanani Daley & Co-Curator: Laura Dunn 

Soft opening May 9th, 6pm.

Official reception and artists talk May 30, 6pm.

On view May 10th - July 25th, 2025 at East Hawai‘i Cultural Center’s Main Gallery and Ola Nā Iwi Gallery.

INSIDE, an exhibition for the pa‘ahao (incarcerated people) presents an urgent and compassionate portrait of those often rendered invisible, illuminating stories of hope and resilience through the humanitarian efforts of community advocates Kai Markell, Kim Kamaluʻokeakua Moa, Kahu Kaleo Patterson, Robert Chang, and Yola Monakhov Stockton. The exhibition also welcomes special guests hailing from Turtle Island: incarcerated filmmaker Louis Sále (native of Hawai'i) at San Quentin Rehabilitation Center, and scholar Tria Blu Wakpa in collaboration with incarcerated Oglala Lakota elder, artist, and writer, George Blue Bird. INSIDE is in concert with the Exhibit of E Mau Ke Ea: The Sovereign Hawaiian Nation was produced by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). The E Mau Ke Ea Exhibition includes 18 free standing banners with text and graphics that introduces visitors to the complex and nuanced history of the Hawaiian Nation, from the consolidation of the islands by King Kamehameha I in 1810 to the resurgence of Hawaiian nationalism today. 
 
Exhibition Statement:
“...Where alternative social institutions may have sought to ameliorate the economic insecurity inherent in capitalism, mass incarceration has taken up this regulatory function by first separating and then locking up the most marginalized and vulnerable to the vicissitudes of capitalist growth… Mass incarceration serves to create a new ascriptive category, one that is formally based on individual acts while still managing populations.”  
       -Geert Dhondt [1]
 
Native Hawaiians make up twenty-four percent of the general population of Hawai‘i, and twenty-seven percent of all arrests [2]. The United States makes up less than five percent of the global population, yet the U.S. has more than twenty percent of the world’s prison population, making it the highest incarcerated nation per capita in the world [3]. African Americans make up thirteen percent of the population, while they make up nearly half of the prison population [4]. According to a report released by the MacArthur Foundation, the rate of Native American incarceration is thirty-eight percent higher than the national average [5].
 
The criminalization of poverty, racial injustice, and primitive accumulation of land are inseparable from the enduring legacies of capitalist colonialism. INSIDE critiques the colonial paradigm as it seeks to advance solutions. An anti-oppressive approach to decarceration requires a broad understanding of liberation as integral to an individual within a larger cultural spectrum. Everyone comes from a history, a genealogy and geography, a family, a community, and each is infinitely growing within layers of spiritual and psychological dimensions. Our freedom and our struggle is a narrative that has been and continues to be perpetuated across generations as a communal and inner-lived experience. 
 
INSIDE, is translated as LOKO in ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i (Hawaiian Language) , and can be interpreted as : 
In, inside, within, interior, internal organs, and ho‘oloko suggests to implant a thought, good or bad; it also means character, disposition, heart, and feelings. Kō loko, is translated as those inside; and Mea o loko are contents or things inside.
 
While the actual use of the word INSIDE, in the prison setting, refers to being behind prison walls, it also suggests the experience of the subtle realities of a person, their  emotions, psychology,  and spirituality.  Loko is also used for lake or pond, and in this context and concept, this suggests the inner being and inner world, a world unseen, and the reflexive and reflective experience.
 
-Ola Nā Iwi Curator Kanani Daley  
 
References:
  1. Geert Dhondt is a professor of economics at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and the author of the article,The Logic of the Whip: Mass Incarceration as Labor Discipline in the Neoliberal Social Structure of Accumulation (2016), p.3
  2. Office of Hawaiian Affairs. 2010. Disparate Treatment of Native Hawaiians in the Criminal Justice System, OHA
  3. Dhondt, Geert, Sept 6. 2023, Crime Vs. Class Unveiling the Prison System, Institute for New Economic Thinking 
  4. Wertheimer, Julie. May 16, 2023.  Racial Disparities Persist in Many U.S. Jails, Despite narrowed gap in incarceration rates, Black people remain overrepresented in jail populations, admissions—and stay longer on average, The Pew Charitable Trust
  5. Fox, D. L., Hansen, C. D., & Miller, A. M. (2022). Over-incarceration of Native Americans: Roots, inequities, and solutions. Safety and Justice Challenge. https://safetyandjusticechallenge.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/OverIncarcerationOfNativeAmericans.pdf. This report was created with support from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation as part of the Safety and Justice Challenge, which seeks to reduce over-incarceration by changing the way America thinks about and uses jails.   

 

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