Thanks to agentsandstorm for the question from Furaffinity!
While it is covered in the comic in a way that I think is well enough, I think explaining a bit more about Oliver/Imua or just simply “The Hiker” is a fun topic. as the human world is one in which I tend to not focus on so much in favor of the DragonScape. Or at least of the detail I have put into it, not much is actually on this site. Of course by this point Imua has had to move on from her own origins, as frankly she can’t recall anything of them. So at the current state of canon, don’t take this as a thing she understands, just the origins that did eventually result in her.
Oliver Ikaika, nowadays known as the Hiker Imua, is Hawaiian, coming specifically from the town of Wailua. As Imua is somewhere around her early 30s, chances are Oliver was born sometime around 2126AD, or at least in the timeline of the DragonScape, 6PA and mostly grew up in Wailua.
The context around Wailua of course is one of economic collapse, abandonment, and eventual imperialism and is a rather sad tail. In the aftermath of the Pulse in late 2020, Hawaii was the spared from the surge of raddir, though only barely. The Chiming Haze only sits a few hundred kilometers from the island chain. At least in the early years the Hawaiian archipelago would try to reform a new “US government”, though eventually would declare a very uncontested independence from the US, becoming the country of Hawai’iloa. Though it wouldn’t even be a decade before economic collapse would rip apart the new Hawaiian government.
Frankly in the 2020s and 2030s, economic collapse, nuclear conflict, and radical social upheaval were already ripping apart Europe, central Asia, and Southeast Asia which would already have severely impacted Hawaii. But moreover Hawaii is the last landmass before hitting the borders of broken reality that make up The Chiming Haze. So Hawaii, along with most Pacific Islands would become some of the most geographically, socially and politically isolated areas on the planet second only to Russia, which fell to the nuclear rage of the Otgoloks in the early 2030s.
This apocalyptic social and economic isolation led to a long mass exodus from the Islands westward towards Japan, Malaysia, Australia, and other increasingly shaky nation states throughout the 2030s which only served to plummet the quality of life of the Hawaiian islands even further. By the 2050s, Hawaii would be a sparsely populated island chain of only 2500 or so people who had long since transitioned into subsistence lives, made difficult not just by the Chiming Haze, but also the impacts and throes of global warming and climate change.
And for the next 70 years or so, that’s how Hawaii would continue to exist, an isolated backwater known not as it’s own nation state but as the demeaning “Last Slice of America”.
Though eventually, the imperialistic and fascistic Southeast Asian Confederation (SEAC) would gaze eastwards in the early 22nd century, scooping up much of the Pacific Islands and their various peoples quickly and easily, either promising wealth and prosperity unseen since the early 21st century, or threatening them with drones and warships. Hawaii was particularly a jewel to SEAC thanks to the larger forests in the island chain when compared to Oceania and Southeast Asia. As for the past several Decades SEAC had committed to extreme and excessive deforestation in order to work on a variety of economy boosting megaprojects to announce their presence on the new global stage and order. That aggressive decades long bout of deforestation along with climate change, radiation, and general environmental collapse would quickly make once bountiful forests across Oceania and Southeast Asia just shadows of their former selves.
SEACs occupation of Hawaii was broadly focused on resource extraction and infrastructure for observing the Chiming Haze that lay just beyond Hawaiian shores. This did bring jobs and infrastructure that would remodernize Hawaii, albeit under a strictly exploitative fashion. Though regardless it would be argued that the loss of some rights and nature would be worth it in exchange for a new start within SEAC.
And it was this environment in which Oliver Ikaika was born. Born into general poverty in Wailua, surrounded by the long since chopped down forests that once defined the region, growing up under the propaganda and pipelines built by SEAC somewhat before his birth. As an adult Oliver Ikaika would get a job observing the Chiming Haze and, once the Chiming Haze anomalies that would allow their entry into the Americas were noted, Oliver would be sent out for training. After their training and after becoming an E.R.E.M. Forward Observation Specialist, they were sent on a one way trip (without their knowing of them being a sacrificial lamb).
So while Imua may not remember exactly where she is from by the current point of the comic, she is Hawaiian. It was thanks to them growing up with the indigenous Hawaiian language, ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi that their current name was able to come out of the black hole where her memories once were anywho.
Imua means “To go onwards”!
Hope that answers that!