She was professor emerita at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, where she founded and directed the Kamakakūokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies.
[12] Trask hosted and produced First Friday, a monthly public-access television program started in 1986 to highlight political and cultural Hawaiian issues.
[10][13] She also wrote the 1993 book From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawaiʻi, which has been described by Cynthia G. Franklin and Laura E. Lyons as a "foundational text" about indigenous rights.
[14] Trask represented Native Hawaiians at the United Nations Working Group on Indigenous Peoples in Geneva.
[10] In 2001, she traveled to South Africa to participate in the United Nations World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance.
[citation needed] Trask later wrote about how these experiences as a graduate student helped develop her theories about how capitalism and racism sustained each other.
[18] Later in her career, Trask denounced her identification as a "feminist" because of its mainstream focus on Americans, whiteness, and "First World 'rights' talk.
[citation needed] She clarified that the bill was drafted ex parte and that hearings were withheld to exclude native community involvement.
[26] She believed the Japanese occupying Hawaiʻi “like to harken back to the oppressions of the plantation era, although few Japanese in Hawaiʻi today actually worked on the plantations during the Territory (1900–1959).”[26] Trask’s critique of Asian settler colonialism is cited as a foundational development in both Asian American and decolonial justice studies.
[36] In her obituary, the New York Times noted her fight for Indigenous sovereignty and cited her quote, “We will die as Hawaiians.