At what point do our histories turn into mythology? Do our ancestors become characters in stories we tell our children before they go to sleep? At what distance do our homelands become dreamlands? Does our blood begin to speak a different language? Or, do our bones turn to milk?

Dane Nakama is a fourth-generation Japanese Uchinanchu ceramicist, painter, and educator raised on the island of O’ahu. Throughout their childhood, Nakama’s father, a retired Hawaiian history teacher, lulled them to sleep with bedtime stories about Hawaiian gods and family history, while their grandmother read them Japanese fairy tales (or, mukashi-banashi.) These stories served as a catalyst for the dreamy, multicultural lexicon that make up Nakama’s work today. Through what they refer to as an “island dream journal” style of making, Nakama often explores themes of cultural hybridity, settler colonialism, indigeneity, and ancestral knowledge