Mary Baker

Assistant Professor

About

Mary Tuti Baker is an Assistant Professor in comparative Indigenous studies with a joint appointment in Canadian-American Studies, Salish Seas Studies and Fairhaven College. A Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) scholar, she earned her PhD in Political Science from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa with specializations in Indigenous Politics and Futures Studies. Her work examines the relationship between Kanaka Maoli values and practice and the politics of decolonization. She is currently working on a manuscript entitled “The Land Is in Us: Embodied Aloha ‘Āina Enacting Indigenous Futures” which is a critical examination of aloha ʻāina as an Indigenous ideology. She is interested in the articulations across various Indigenous communities as well as non-indigenous social justice movements. Her most recent publication is the essay “A Garden of Political Transformation: Indigenism, Anarchism and Feminism Embodied” in a special issue of Anarchist Development in Cultural Studies edited by J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, which examines the diverse practices coalesce around the ideological principles of aloha ʻāina and anarcha-indigenism, a world-view grounded in indigenous land-based practice and knowledge systems and anarchist principles of fluid leadership and horizontal power structures.