Sarah Leilani Sissum’s earliest memory is the sound of her mom’s soothing voice during bath-time as she sang "Tiny Bubbles" by Don Ho. Later, young Sissum came across her mother’s ʻulīʻulī, tucked away in their Illinois home.
Growing up in the Hawaiian diaspora, these snippets of Hawaiʻi were Sissum’s introduction to her Kānaka Maoli roots. “Culture in my family is very specifically passed through the women,” she said.
Today, Sissum, 27, is the woman passing tangible pieces of culture back to their rightful stewards. She serves as the repatriation fellow at the Field Museum’s Center for Repatriation, Tribal Relations, and Provenance Research in Chicago. There, she helps facilitate the return of human remains and sacred objects to their respective Indigenous communities.
When the position was extended to her, Sissum felt the call to accept. She regularly works with Native American tribal nations.
“It helps us move more pono on the Native lands we visit,” she said, “and it helps us better understand what our kuleana for our ʻāina can look like while in diaspora.”
Sissum was born in San Diego. Kānaka Maoli on her maternal side, her ʻohana originally hails from Hawaiʻi Island then later, Oʻahu. After World War II, her great-grandfather moved the family to California. His daughter – Sissum’s grandmother – married an American Navy sailor of European ancestry and had Sissum’s mother, Lori Luana Anderson.
Her father, Dan Sissum, also claims European genealogy – though Sissum definitively describes him as “very Midwestern.”
Her family moved from San Diego to Loves Park, Illinois, soon after Sissum’s birth. Her childhood revolved around academia. While Sissum’s older half-brother was an athlete, she was academically inclined, absorbing page after page of Magic Tree House and Percy Jackson & the Olympians books at the library. Sissum thrived in the classroom and gravitated toward English, history and math.
She dreamed of becoming a movie director because she and her father connected through film.
One Disney animated movie was played on repeat: "Lilo & Stitch." It was one of Sissum’s only ties to Hawaiʻi at that time.
Her mother yearned to dance hula but couldn’t find a hālau to join in Illinois. Regardless, her graceful hula hands made an everlasting impression on Sissum’s developing mind – though she had no desire to learn to dance. Western caricatures of hula dancers made her uncomfortable.
“Now, obviously, I see it with such different eyes, through such a different lens,” Sissum said.
Her world turned upside down at age 11 when her parents divorced. Sissum resettled in Jacksonville, Oregon, with her mom, moving in with her maternal grandparents. She spent summers with her dad. Both of her parents eventually remarried: Lori to Ron and Dan to Debi. Her stepparents played significant roles in Sissum’s life.
Her time in Oregon elicits complicated emotions. There, she finally crossed paths with other Pasifika kids. While her home life could feel heavy, she had a normal high school experience, taking advanced placement courses and performing theatre. Sissum graduated from South Medford High School in Medford, Oregon, in 2016.
It was at Southern Oregon University that she blossomed. Sissum joined the honors college, double majoring in English and history.
She began working as a writing tutor in 2019. Later that year, she became an undergraduate research assistant, diving into the lives of European immigrants in Oregon and handling artifacts. In 2020, Sissum spent six months as a program assistant for the university’s history department. She also served as an audio producer at the Southeastern Council of Latin American Studies.
All the while, she was building her foundation in critical race theory, which would later help her unpack Hawaiian history. Despite her full plate, Sissum managed to write two capstone papers and graduate amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
After taking time off, she decided to pursue a master’s degree in museology/museum studies at the University of Florida. “I’ve always been a fan of museums and heritage work,” Sissum said. She sought to find her niche.
In 2022, she left Oregon for Gainesville, Florida. Sissum looks back on this chapter as transformative. “I was breathing in so much life,” she said. She accepted a research assistant role with the Digital Humanities Project, learning restorative justice as she worked to honor Black heritage in Alachua County.
That same year, Sissum became the public relations and communications associate at the University of Florida College of the Arts. In 2023, she started as the programming and event coordinator at the Cotton Club Museum and Cultural Center, a museum focused on African-derived history.
She ultimately felt pulled to research her own culture, looking into figures leading the charge in Hawaiian historic preservation. “That’s where I was like, ʻOkay, I’m seeing kuleana here. I’m seeing myself more here. And I’m seeing just the fullness of our culture,’” Sissum said.
Her thesis, “Aloha Away from the ʻĀina: Diasporic Kānaka-Informed Considerations for Museal Praxis in the Continental United States,” reflects her passion and contributes to a small but growing body of research from Native Hawaiians in the diaspora speaking to their own lived experiences and desires for themselves and for the lāhui. She graduated in 2024.
This year saw another chapter unfold: a move to Chicago. Sissum accepted the anthropology alliance registration internship at the Field Museum, where she handled donated Native Hawaiian objects and sought to preserve their mana. She’s continued at the museum in her current role as repatriation fellow.
She also joined the team at Hawaiian Diaspora as a community knowledge and stewardship strategist, contributing to research. Sissum believes now is an exciting time to be Kanaka Maoli.
Looking forward she said, “I do deeply long to, at some point, live on the island that my family comes from. I also very much believe that the time will come when it’s supposed to come.”
This article is reprinted with permission from OHA's Ka Wai Ola newspaper: "Finding her niche in repatriation" by Megan Ulu-Lani Boyanton in its January 2026 issue, Vol. 43 No. 1. Read more at kawaiola.news.
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