E Kū: To Stand in Hope | Dr Emalani Case 

Dr Emalani Case joined us as a Kai Awheawhe at the Toi Tangata Hui ā-Tau 2026. Emalani’s workshop focuses on the concept of hope, or more specifically, radical hope, as an essential part of wellbeing. In Indigenous contexts, when we might return from the many battles we face, how do we maintain hope in a future that we may not see ourselves? How is that hope essential for our own wellbeing and for the wellbeing of generations to come? What keeps us in the fight?

Dr Case's kōrero discusses radical hope as a concept and embodying that concept in chant. Coming from Hawaiʻi, Emalani will teach a chant that has been instrumental in social, political, and cultural movements that speaks to an intergenerational practice of hope as an expression of love for the future. Chanting, while not including large physical movement, is about internal movement, reawakening and reenergising all that we need to continue the fight from the inside out.

“If you are working with or for or because of Indigenous people, you have to hope.” 

Emalani Case is a Senior Lecturer in Pacific Studies at the University of Auckland. She is a writer, teacher, and aloha ʻāina deeply engaged in issues of Indigenous rights and representation, colonialism and decolonisation, and environmental and social justice. She is from Waimea Hawaiʻi.

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