EA (Sovereign), co-directed by Noah Keone Viernes and Sancia Miala Shiba Nash, is a feature length documentary about Keʻeaumoku Kapu, a Kanaka ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiian) community leader, activist, and caretaker of Nā ʻAikāne o Maui Cultural Center in Lahaina, on the island of Maui. The Kapu family gives voice to a multi-generational struggle to perpetuate native land and water management practices, stifled for over a century by plantation agriculture, the U.S. backed overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, militourism and real estate development. Drawing these events into a genealogical frame for family experience, memories and dreams, the story embodies the Hawaiian phrase “I ka wa ma mua, ka wa ma hope” (the future is in the past). Archival and contemporary projections of community link songs, chants, animations, digital cartography, field recordings, legal texts and interviews into a reflection on Kapuʻs nearly 20-year battle, in and out of the U.S. court system, to reclaim his ancestral land in Kauaʻula valley. Ea is a testament to the resilience of one family, whose efforts serve as a source of guidance for their community as well as future generations pursuing land and water rights across the Hawaiian archipelago.

Director Biography - Noah Keone Viernes, Sancia MIala Shiba Nash

Noah Keone Viernes, Ph.D. (Co-Director/Producer) is a Kanaka 'Ōiwi filmmaker, musician, and educator with ancestral ties to Punaluʻu, Kaʻū, in the Hawaiian archipelago, and a formative upbringing between Hawaiʻi, New York, Chicago, and South Carolina. Since 2013, heʻs served as a faculty member of the Global Studies Department at Akita International University in Akita City, Japan, where he offers courses in visual culture, protest cultures and political thought. His work draws from onsite field recording and visual documentation that addresses the aesthetics of protest, moving image culture and the political orientations of sound and voice in Southeast Asia and Hawaiʻi.

Sancia Miala Shiba Nash (Co-Director; Editor and co-producer as kekahi wahi) is a filmmaker and artist from Kīhei, Maui with ancestral roots in the Japanese archipelago, currently living and working in Honolulu, Oʻahu. Through time-based media, Sancia Miala works collaboratively to amplify intersectional stories of place. Her practice is guided by oral histories, archives, and acts of translation. Currently she supports the digitization and cataloging of independent documentary team Nā Maka o ka ʻĀina’s (Joan Lander and Puhipau) extensive moving image collection. In 2020, Sancia Miala co-founded with artist Drew Kahuʻāina Broderick, kekahi wahi, a grassroots film initiative dedicated to documenting transformations across Hawaiʻi and Moananui, the greater Pacific.

Director Statement

Between the Hawaiian archipelago and Japan, we (Noah Keone Viernes and Sancial Miala Shiba Nash) work across Moananuiākea (the greater Pacific region) as a way of grappling with the constellational flows that shape and inspire movement and social change. In this ongoing struggle to bridge past and present, our work embraces the critical legacies of our ancestral homelands to build resilient strategies of abundance in communities that transcend colonial and geopolitical histories of dispossession. This collaboration was driven by archival work, experimentation, and a love for Hawaiʻi’s indigenous moving image history, such as Nā Maka o ka 'Āina (Puhipau and Joan Lander), Eddie Kamae, Meleanna Aluli Meyer and George Tahara. Our feature-length documentary film Ea draws directly upon these legacies, carefully channeling this political lineage to amplify three decades of land and water rights struggles in Kauaʻula valley of Lahaina, Maui.