The Seeds We Planted: Portraits of a Native Hawaiian Charter School

Preface

xi xi Preface The year 1998 marked one hundred years of U.S. control of Hawai‘i, which the international community of nations had recognized as an independent country—the Hawaiian Kingdom—since the 1840s. I spent that summer teaching a course in applied English for Kanaka Maoli students about to enter their senior year in high school.1 The course was part of a state community college summer bridge program founded to address the underrepresentation of Native Hawaiians in higher education. Through a suite of courses, the students were to develop skills for navigating the postsecondary transition to a career or college. My friend and high school classmate Keola Nakanishi worked alongside me as a coteacher. Young educators fresh out of college, we were told that students should learn how to create résumés,write cover letters, complete job application forms, and practice other basic skills young people need in order to apply for college or enter the work force. We, however, were eager to teach literacy as a liberatory praxis rather than as just an economic expedient. I had recently completed a bachelor’s degree in Hawaiian studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, a program that encouraged students to analyze the political stakes of knowledge and to blend scholarship with robust community engagement. Like women’s studies , ethnic studies, and Native studies programs elsewhere, Hawaiian studies grew out of social movements for justice. Our teachers approached education as part of a larger political project of Hawaiian self-determination and nationhood. Like them, I wanted to help my own students see their paths as embedded in larger terrains of collective struggle and survival. Keola and I titled our class Mana Maoli (True Power or Native Power), signifying what we wanted our students to recognize in themselves and in our people. We opened that summer with a conversation about how our‘Ōiwi ancestors of the kingdom era had produced a level of popular literacy comparable to, if not exceeding, most nations in the world.2 Within PREFACE xii xii a generation after the introduction of a printing press in 1822, nearly the entire adult population had attended school and learned to read and write.3 Amid waves of foreign-introduced diseases and imperialist designs on their country, nineteenth-century Kānaka wrote and published copious pages of histories, letters, songs, lamentations , and political commentary, particularly through the Hawaiianlanguage newspapers but also as books, personal correspondences, and legal documents.4 In fact, the millions of pages of documents in the Hawaiian language comprise a unique treasure among Indigenous peoples worldwide, whose languages, cultures, and knowledge bases have been assaulted by processes of imperialism and colonialism. Literacy provided new avenues for articulating Hawaiian nationhood. It became a practice of Hawaiian survivance, a term which emphasizes “renewal and continuity into the future”rather than loss and mere survival “through welcoming unpredictable cultural reorientations.”5 As Vizenor writes,“Survivance is the continuance of stories, not a mere reaction, however pertinent.”6 I have written this book as a twenty-first-century story of Hawaiian survivance. This uniquely Hawaiian story addresses broader concerns about what it means to enact Indigenous cultural-political resurgence while working within and against settler colonial structures. Contemporary Indigenous education seeks to rearticulate schooling (historically aimed at our assimilation to settler society) within projects of collective renewal and continuity. Through our conversations on that first day of class, I was stunned to learn that none of our students, except the two who had been enrolled in Hawaiian-language immersion schools for the previous twelve years, were aware that our kūpuna (ancestors) exponentially and enthusiastically spread the skills of print literacy in the early 1800s. Powerful pedagogies of erasure caused such disconnection. For the bulk of the twentieth century, the settler state government in Hawai‘i failed to support or fund any form of Indigenous education.Young people were severed from the legacy of Hawaiian literacy, as not a single school in the islands made the Native Hawaiian language or culture central to its curriculum until the advent of language-immersion schools in the mid-1980s.7 Kanaka social movements of the 1970s had successfully pressed for PREFACE xiii xiii change in various aspects of life in the islands. Riding this wave of social movement, delegates to the 1978 state constitutional convention included provisions for a Hawaiian education program consisting of language, culture, and...