SAIO 50 for 50: Dr. David A. Chang
This Week's Spotlight: Dr. David A. Chang ('90, B.A. International Relations with honors)
Dr. Chang (Kanaka Maoli/Native Hawaiian) is the Chair of the American Indian Studies Department and a Distinguished McKnight University Professor in history at the University of Minnesota. A historian of indigenous people, colonialism, borders and migration in Hawaii and North America, Dr. Chang writes Indigenous history to serve Indigenous communities in the present, including by connecting his work to contemporary political movements. He is in an aloha ʻāina that stood with the protectors at Mauna Kea and supports the efforts of Native Hawaiian and Native American people to protect our homelands, home waters, and sovereignty.
His award-winning second book, The World and All the Things Upon It: Native Hawaiian Geographies of Exploration, examines indigenous people as active agents of global exploration, rather than passive objects of that exploration, by drawing on Hawaiian-language sources—stories, songs, chants, texts, and political prose—to reveal Kanaka Maoli reflections on the nature of global geography and their place in it. He is currently working on the history of Kanaka Maoli in California and on the West Coast, especially in relation to Native American people in California.
Dr. Chang is on the editorial board of Amerasia Journal and the editorial advisory board of the Journal of Civil and Human Rights and is a former secretary of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association. In addition to his Stanford degree, Dr. Chang holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Wisconsin.