Noenoe K. Silva is Kanaka Hawaiʻi from Kailua, Oʻahu. She is professor of Hawaiian and Indigenous Politics in the Department of Political Science at University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, and Cooperating Faculty in the Kawaihuelani Center for Hawaiian Language.
She is the author of Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism and The Power of the Steel-Tipped Pen: Reconstructing Native Hawaiian Intellectual History, both published by Duke University Press, and numerous journal articles.
Her research interests include the reclamation of ʻike Hawaiʻi (Hawaiian knowledge) through the furtherance of understanding of ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi, mele Hawaiʻi, and moʻolelo Hawaiʻi, (Hawaiian language, poetic genres, literature and history) and the reconstruction of histories of Hawaiʻi through the archives written in ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi by kūpuna Hawaiʻi.