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

Chapter 1: The Emergence of Indigenous Hawaiian Charter Schools

47 47 ONE The Emergence of Indigenous Hawaiian Charter Schools The mission of liberatory Hawaiian education is to promote, protect and nurture Hawaiian culture in the next millennium, in an ever-changing modern society and work towards future political, economic, social and cultural Hawaiian self-determination. ■ Kū Kahakalau, founder of Kanu o ka ‘Āina public charter school and Nā Lei Na‘auao Hawaiian charter school alliance It could be argued that the establishment,against all odds,of Hawaiian culture–based charter schools in urban and rural communities across the islands was the most visible and significant accomplishment of the Hawaiian movement in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The post–World War II and poststatehood democratic revolution in Hawai‘i neither brought revolutionary changes in land usage nor upset existing settler colonial structures of power and logics of domination.1 Rather, it replaced some white settler elites with local Japanese and Chinese settler elites. In much the same way, the political ascendance of Asian settlers within the public education sector to the ranks of Department of Education decision making has not led to a significant upset in the regimes of knowledge and power that maintain the suppression of Hawaiian sovereignty and the social inequalities in which Native people and more recent and/or less assimilated immigrants remain at the bottom.2 Kānaka Maoli, in alliance with non-Hawaiian educators and families who support Hawaiian education, created charter schools as preferred alternatives to an unresponsive and unequal mainstream school system. This chapter explains how an Indigenous movement based on aloha ‘āina came to dominate or, at least, play a major role in the establishment of charter schools in Hawai‘i. I look at the emergence of THE EMERGENCE OF HAWAIIAN CHARTER SCHOOLS 48 48 Indigenous Hawaiian culture–based charter schools at the intersection of two distinct movements: the late twentieth- and early twentyfirst -century Hawaiian nationalist movement and the U.S. charter school movement. The articulation of these two movements was in some ways odd given that the charter school model of school reform has often been linked to neoliberal, market-based ideologies, whereas Hawaiian movements have mobilized against the fragmentation and destruction that unregulated market expansion has often caused on our lands.The U.S. charter school phenomenon has proved able, however, to include space for an array of groups with varying social, political, and economic aims. This chapter addresses the historical and political context within which such an articulation was possible in the Hawaiian case. I particularly attend to the ways Kānaka Maoli who founded charter schools understood this work. I begin with an overview of some of the struggles for land,water,cultural practice,and sovereignty that created the conditions of possibility out of which Hawaiian charter schools could emerge. My discussion highlights aspects of aloha ‘āina that would later become central to the educational practices at Hālau Kū Māna and other Hawaiian charters. Throughout the chapter I show the ways twenty-first-century Hawaiian charter schools operate in the spaces of tension between naturalized structures of racism and settler colonialism and the ongoing assertion of Hawaiian self-determination and peoplehood. Education and Aloha ‘Āina in Post-1959 Hawaiian Social Movements The dominant narrative about Hawai‘i’s transition from territory to fiftieth state has remained largely unchanged from the mid-twentieth century to the present. The myth centers on the trope of equality and democracy arising out of a formerly racially stratified plantation society , a triumph of civil rights over white supremacy. In his groundbreaking critical study of Hawai‘i statehood discourses, Dean Saranillio describes this hegemonic historical narrative as a “tale about a long struggle to oppose haole (white) racism and an expression of selfdetermination that was democratically and definitively settled” with THE EMERGENCE OF HAWAIIAN CHARTER SCHOOLS 49 49 the passage of the 1959 Hawai‘i Admission Act and the rise of a new historic bloc led by the descendants of Asian plantation laborers.3 He observes that whereas the statehood movement “made racism against Asian Americans visible, statehood proponents made invisible (by naturalizing) another form of oppression, a primitivist (and American modernist) notion that viewed Native Hawaiians, like other indigenous peoples, as permanently‘unfit for self-government.’ ”4 Although a critical mass of Hawaiian history scholars have shown that the process by which Hawai‘i became incorporated as a state violated international law and perpetuated the...