Fuifuilupe Niumeitolu, PhD

Assistant Professor, Dept. of Critical Race & Ethnic Studies, UC Santa Cruz

Fuifuilupe Niumeitolu is a Tongan, Oceanian, scholar, storyteller and community organizer. Her research, poetry and community work center issues of; climate and environmental justice, ending violence against women, prison abolition and restorative justice and building radical solidarities with California American Indian tribes to protect Indigenous Sacred Sites in the Pacific/Oceania and here in California. She graduated with her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley in 2019. Currently, she is a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow and Facilitator of the Oceania: Pacific Islands Studies Research Working Group in the Department of Native American Studies at University of California, Davis and she will be starting a new position as Assistant Professor of Oceania/Pacific Islands Studies in the Dept. of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz in Fall 2022. Fui is a part of the Sogorea Te Land Trust, an Urban Indigenous women-led organization, that rematriates Indigenous lands back to Indigenous peoples and she hosts the popular “Sogorea Te Seeding Hope Speaker Series.”