Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Stars Are Turning Their Fame Into Aloha in Action in 2025

Keywords: celebrity activism 2025, Hawaiian and Pacific Islander stars using fame for change, female artists 2025, US celebrities social impact

You know that feeling when you land back home in Hawai‘i or the islands—the moment the plane doors open and the air hits you soft and salty, like the ocean exhaling? That feeling of being held by a place, of being wrapped in something bigger than yourself?

That’s what it feels like watching some of our Pacific Islander and Hawaiian stars using their fame in 2025. It’s not for clout. Not to impress the outside world. It’s for us. For the aunties. For the keiki. For the ancestors who kept singing even when they weren’t allowed to speak their own language.

Take Jason Momoa. Sure, the whole world knows his name. But back home, he’s still that barefoot kid from the west side. The one who surfs at sunrise and cries when he talks about the land. This year, after yet another battle over Mauna Kea, Jason didn’t just show up on Instagram. He flew home, put his hands in the dirt, and stood in ceremony with elders. When he speaks, it’s like hearing your cousin with too much heart and not enough patience—but exactly the kind of fire we need right now.

And Nicole Scherzinger—you might know her for pop songs and glammed-up TV moments, but underneath all that is a local girl who never stopped carrying her kupuna with her. In 2025, she started quietly paying tuition for Native Hawaiian students who wanted to study music, hula, or Hawaiian language. Not because it’s trendy, but because “nobody helped me, and I don’t want it to be like that for them.” Her words. Not a soundbite—just something she said, softly, over coffee with a teacher in Waimānalo.

Keala Settle, the voice that broke open The Greatest Showman, is spending more time these days offstage, in church halls and youth centers, singing hymns and talking story with young people who feel like they’re falling through the cracks. She tells them how she used to feel too loud, too different, too much—and how she had to grow into the truth that she was never too anything. Just enough. Just as she is.

This is what celebrity activism 2025 looks like here:

• It’s intimate. Not press releases. Not campaigns. Just calls, texts, hugs, check-ins.
• It’s ancestral. They don’t move without asking what their great-grandparents would’ve done.
• It’s grounded. Literally—in the ‘āina, the ocean, the old stories.
• It’s layered. It holds grief, hope, history, and love all at once.

It’s kuleana—that deep responsibility to take care. And they feel it. You can see it in the way Jason wells up talking about sacred water. In Nicole’s voice shaking when she sings for her tutu. In how Keala wraps her arms around a young girl and says, “You’re seen.”

None of them are perfect. They’re still learning, still healing, still navigating the weird space between fame and family. But they’re not forgetting who they are. Or where they’re from.

And maybe that’s the most powerful kind of activism there is—the kind that says, “I remember you. I carry you. I’m still yours.”

So yeah. Hawaiian and Pacific Islander stars are doing something different in 2025. They’re not leading movements from stages. They’re kneeling beside kupuna. Holding space for kids. Planting trees where fires burned.

They’re not being loud. But they are being true.

And here, that’s what really matters.