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

Introduction: Indigenous Education, Settler Colonialism, and Aloha ‘Āina

1 1 INTRODUCTION Indigenous Education, Settler Colonialism, and Aloha ‘Āina I maika‘i ke kalo i ka ‘ohā. (The health of the taro is observed in the offspring it produces.) ■ Traditional Hawaiian proverb You tried to take it all away, but we have our pride that will stay. We may look like a bunch of kids, but you better watch out we’re closing in. Took our queen and locked her away, now you’ll deal with us the present day. As the seventh generation, we must all become a nation. Keep the land prosperous, rise above, above all the rest. We won’t take it for granted, ‘cuz that is the seed you planted. We will not take it for granted, ‘cuz that is the seed we planted. ■ Lyrics from “Seventh Generation,” written and performed in 2002 by Hālau Kū Māna students Ku‘ulei Freed, Shari Kapua Chock, Kaleiali‘i Baldwin, and Ka‘apuni Asaivao As the 2010–11 school year was coming to a close, I sat with Kau‘i Onekea—a 2006 Hālau Kū Māna (HKM) graduate—at the wooden picnic tables under the two white twenty-by-twenty-foot tents where HKM students ate lunch. Kau‘i was never a student on this, the current and hopefully permanent campus. She had returned, however, to HKM as an assistant Hawaiian language teacher two years after her 2006 graduation. When the four trailer-classroom spaces behind us were full, she sometimes held classes outside at these tables. Kau‘i had walked across the stream from her home in Maunalaha, where her ‘ohana (extended family) has lived for generations back as far as they can remember.Maunalaha remains one of the only places in INTRODUCTION 2 2 Honolulu where a small community of Hawaiian families have been able to maintain continuous residence on the land since ‘Ōiwi Wale Nō (Natives only) times.1 A nineteenth-century port town, Honolulu eventually became the governmental and commercial center of the islands . As the city grew up around them and a haole (white foreigner) oligarchy actively displaced Kanaka andAsian settler subsistence farmers from various parts of Honolulu throughout the twentieth century, the ‘ohana of Maunalaha became what Davianna McGregor likens to a “cultural kīpuka.” Kīpuka are stands of old-growth trees and plants that survive the destruction of volcanic flows and then“regenerate life on the barren lava that surrounds them.”2 Maunalaha and its people similarly survived the flow of concrete and steel that created the hundreds of high-rise buildings within walking distance,living evidence of Hawaiian survivance amid settler colonial structures. Unlike McGregor’s kīpuka, Maunalaha and Hālau Kū Māna—a Hawaiian culture–based secondary school operating since 2001—are in close proximity to the centers of urban life. Just above us, on Makiki Heights and Round Top Drive, sit some of the most expensive luxury homes in town. On my way to meet with Kau‘i, I drove past two of the top private schools in Honolulu,each less than three miles from HKM’s well-hidden campus. After our meeting I made the five-minute drive down Ke‘eaumoku Street to Ala Moana, a beach park sitting across the street from the world’s largest outdoor shopping mall,which is over two million square feet and regularly charting over a billion dollars in annual sales—a monument to global capitalism and consumerist culture residing upon our land. But Kānaka are here too, in the city, maintaining connections to‘āina (land that produces sustenance) and to each other. This was precisely why those of us who were involved in the founding of Hālau Kū Māna specifically chose to locate the school in Honolulu rather than in other parts of the island that were well known as areas with high concentrations of Native Hawaiian people. Kau‘i and I talked about her high school years at HKM and her return as a staff member and teacher. Over the span of those eight years, she saw it all: each of the school’s four campuses and three executive directors, the birth of the school’s sailing canoe, the restoration of ancient lo‘i kalo (taro fields),the school restructuring under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB),a few of her peers’pregnancies, the deaths of INTRODUCTION 3 3 kūpuna (elders) who gifted their knowledge...