Fuifuilupe Niumeitolu is a Tongan/Pacific Islander scholar, poet and community organizer. Fui received her doctorate from the Comparative Ethnic Studies Department at the University of California, Berkeley in 2019 and is currently a Lecturer in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is working on two book manuscripts; The Mana of the Tongan Everyday: Tongan Grief and Mourning, Patriarchal Violence, and Remembering Va and a collection of creative non-fiction titled, Looking For Hine Nui Te Po: Searching for Our Mother. Her research and storytelling examines the productions of violence against women in Tongan families and communities that are legacies of European and U.S. colonialisms. She is on the founding committee of the Moana Nui Pacific Islander Climate Justice Project and Oceania Coalition of Northern California (OCNC), community organizations working for Pacific Islander self-determination through organizing land and climate justice projects, facilitating groups and Ceremony with Pacific Islander prisoners in Northern California as well as creating solidarities with California American Indian tribes to protect Indigenous Sacred spaces in California and in the Pacific. In addition, Fui is part of the Sogorea Te Land Trust, and she hosts the popular Sogorea Te Land Trust “Seeding Hope” speaker series and she hosts the radio segment “From Moana Nui to California; Indigenous Women’s Stories of Land” on KPFA 94.1 FM. This Fall 2020, she is curating, Our Moana Nui; We are Pacific Islander Studies, a literary event sponsored by the San Francisco Public Library featuring distinguished Pacific Islander poets, storytellers and frontline leaders from the U.S. and the Pacific to honor the life and work of the renowned Samoan poet, Albert Wendt. This project is part of a series of programs advocating for the reinstatement of Islander Studies in the California Ethnic Studies curriculum.

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