2025-D Mary Kawena Pukui, NIFC

Denver's 2025 Mary Kawena Pukui dollar is the first issue in the Native American program to honor a Native Hawaiian, an inclusion the Native American $1 Coin Act of 2007 explicitly authorizes alongside American Indians and Alaska Natives. Pukui (1895-1986) was the most consequential Hawaiian-language scholar of the twentieth century: co-author with Samuel H. Elbert of the Hawaiian Dictionary (1957) and Place Names of Hawaii (1974), and the source authority the modern Hawaiian-language revitalization still leans on. Christina Hess of the Mint's Artistic Infusion Program designed the reverse and Mint Medallic Artist Phebe Hemphill sculpted it; the composition shows Pukui wearing a hibiscus, a kukui-nut lei, and an aloha-print mu'umu'u, with stylized water in the background. The encircling inscription Nānā I Ke Kumu, Hawaiian for "look to the source," is the title of the reference series Pukui produced for the Queen Lili'uokalani Children's Center.

What collectors look for on the 2025-D concentrates in surface preservation, since the entire run shipped through Mint bags, rolls, and Mint Sets rather than into commerce. NIFC, Not Intended For Circulation, has been the production mode for every Native American Dollar reverse since 2012, and certified populations cluster heavily in MS66 and MS67 because the coins were never bag-handled at face value. The premium tier sits at MS68 and above, where strike sharpness on the lei beads and on the textile pattern of the mu'umu'u separates the better examples; the open water field behind Pukui takes contact marks easily inside sealed packaging, so inspect the right field under a glass before paying the MS68 premium. No published doubled-die or repunched-mintmark varieties exist for the date.

Inside the program's landscape today, the 2025-D is a common-date NIFC entry whose interest lives in the design and the program's first inclusion of a Native Hawaiian honoree rather than any population scarcity. Registry-set builders working the Native American series need the date, and original Mint-wrapped rolls trade at modest premiums over face. The 1,120,000 Denver order matches the 2023 Tallchief and 2024 Indian Citizenship figures and continues the post-2018 contraction in NIFC output. For the program's reverse-rotation framework and the wider series context, see the Sacagawea Dollar series history.