Hinaleimoana Kwai Kong Wong-Kalu

Hinaleimoana Kwai Kong Wong-Kalu is an Hawaiian activist, artist, and kumu hula (Hula teacher). She is a transgender woman who advocates for the rights and dignity of what Polynesian cultures designate as māhū, or “third gender”. Her role as a kumu hula, which is one of the primary ritual expressions of Hawaiian religious practice, designates her as a cultural and religious leader in Hawai’i.

In Hawai’i, hula is a ritual dance expression of what was originally a purely oral tradition. In this way Hula and the accompanying chants are recitation of sacred cultural and cosmological beliefs. Known to her students as Kumu Hina, she is an ambassador of indigenous Hawaiian culture and faith traditions (both precontact and colonial).

Wong-Kalu was born May 15, 1972 on O’ahu, Hawai’i. She attended Kamehameha School and graduated from the University of Hawai’i, Mānoa where her activism started. She currently resides on O’ahu.

In her 2015 award winning autobiographical film, Kumu Hina, she documents how her māhū identity is central to her work as Kumu as well as in her marriage to a Tongan man. Kumu Hina coaches a male, or kane, hula troop, as part of a charter school of native Hawaiians. Her mentorship of a young māhū hula student who is born female and performs with a kane troop teaches the significance of “third gender” in their culture as one who possesses both female and male spirits. Traditionally māhū were honored leaders in culture creation, but were later condemned by Christian missionaries with prejudice, transphobia and discrimination persisting to the present. In her personal life, newly married to a Tongan man, she navigates the fears he has as a straight man partnering with a transgender woman. As a trans activist, these long felt cultural tensions are intimately felt and expressed as outward calls for return to the native attitude of reverence for the third gender and their role in the Hawiian cosmology.

Additionally featured in the documentary, Kumu Hina works with the Office of Hawaiian Affairs in overseeing digging of lands believed to be native Hawaiian burial sites and remains. This is an act of indigenous advocacy as well as a service to the sacred ancestral heritage of the Hawaiian people and their faith.

Wong-Kalu has been awarded with several international honors for her film making and cultural advocacy. Her artistic contributions establishing a contemporary native Hawaiian faith through Hula is a resurgance of the traditional role of māhū as creative and spiritual leader.

(This biogaphical statement written by Alexis Stranberg-Buermann for a fall 2024 Queer & Trans Theologies class at the United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities from the sources below.)

Biography Date: February 2026

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