Associate Professor, Language & Literacy Education
Associate Professor, First Nations and Endangered Languages Program in the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies (Faculty of Arts)
Email: candace.galla@ubc.ca
MET Courses: ETEC 521
“Aloha kāua! He Kanaka Hawaiʻi au. ʻO Hawaiʻi kuʻu one hānau. Raised in a sugar plantation town, Pāhala in Kaʻū, I was exposed to a diversity of languages and cultures from a young age – some of which had influence on Hawaiian Creole English (also referred to as Hawaiian Pidgin). Although ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi (Hawaiian) was not spoken in my home, I engaged in Hawaiian cultural practices – specifically hula. Through hula I began to learn ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi, which is the foundation of hula and without it cannot exist. I continued to learn Hawaiian language and culture formally at Kamehameha Schools Kapālama. Upon graduation, I attended the University of Arizona on the original homelands of the Tohono O’odham and Pascua Yaqui nations where I received a B.A. in Linguistics, an M.A. in Native American Linguistics and a Ph.D. in Language, Reading and Culture. While I resided in Tucson, I was the Program Coordinator of the American Indian Language Development Institute (AILDI) – the program that reignited my passion back into language renewal and inspired my research on Indigenous language revitalization and technology. I returned to Hawaiʻi and taught in Ka Haka ʻUla O Keʻelikōlani College of Hawaiian Language at the University of Hawaiʻi Hilo where I taught linguistics and Indigenous language education courses. As an Associate Professor in the department of Language and Literacy Education (Faculty of Education) and the First Nations and Endangered Languages Program in the Institute for Critical Indigenous Studies (Faculty of Arts) at the University of British Columbia, I am grateful for the opportunity to learn and teach on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓ speaking Musqueam people.”