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WE, THE STAR KEEPERS RYAN OISHI For the past two years, I have found myself in a perfect storm of weddings. At the age of thirty, the biological clocks of my high school friends seem to have aligned with the certainty of a tidal chart. Upon this nuptial tempest, I have been cast to the shores of Boston and San Francisco, Richmond and the North Shore of O‘ahu, and nearly every hotel in Waikïkï. These weddings are a time of reconnecting. Stories from our high school days at Punahou are dusted off and trotted out with great relish. And they are also a time of looking towards the future: blossoming new families, promising new careers. Because I am one of the few of us still living in Hawai‘i, my friends frequently ask me questions about home. And because I work at Kamehameha Schools, sometimes these conversations turn to Hawaiianrelated issues (as if my employment has somehow vested me with expertise in Hawaiian-related things). A month ago, I found myself walking down a bustling Vancouver street with my soon-to-be-married friend when the topic of Hawaiian sovereignty came up. My heart sank when I saw in his eyes that sovereignty was not even a possibility in his imagination. My heart sank because my friends, in most situations, are very intelligent individuals. They were successful students in high school and college. Many are now entering respectable professions as doctors and lawyers, engineers and businessmen; some will return to Hawai‘i and become future leaders in our communities. And yet, when it comes to the issues closest to home, to issues like sovereignty or GMOs or food sustainability or rail or the building of a new telescope on Mauna Kea, I’ve noticed a certain lack of foundational knowledge, the prerequisite of healthy debate. I worry when I hear my friends rely on reductive and sometimes inaccurate narratives of Hawai‘i’s history, narratives that have been promoted by our tourism industry and tacitly supported by our educational system.1 As a high school teacher at Kamehameha Schools, these conversations caused me to reflect on my role as a teacher in providing that foundation. What responsibilities do we have in preparing the next generation of servant Oishi, We, the Star Keepers 43 leaders, many of whom will be nurtured in our private schools? What foundations of knowledge do our students need to face the challenges of Hawai‘i’s future? MY jOURNEY I thought back to my own education at Punahou: the many wonderful teachers I had, and the wealth of resources and opportunities available to my friends and me. It was an incredible privilege to attend Punahou, and I was reminded of that fact by my father, who in response to a generous financial aid package , dragged me one Saturday morning down to Middle Field with a pick and bucket to pull weeds. “This is a small way for us to pay back the school,” he said (oddly, I was equally proud of my father as I was embarrassed at being seen by my classmates). And yet, for all the opportunities and doors that were opened for me at Punahou, I don’t remember taking a single Hawaiian history class in my four years of high school. In English, I had the opportunity to read Hamlet and The Great Gatsby and dozens of other novels and poems and plays, but not a single Hawaiian mo‘olelo. In my senior year in 2000, the Hawaiian language program was just starting as an elective class. None of my friends took Hawaiian ; it didn’t count towards graduation requirements. For all the valuable things I learned at Punahou, from Japanese to calculus to European history, I left knowing little about the contemporary issues facing Hawai‘i, and the dynamic history that has shaped our present.2 It was only in college at the University of Southern California—through a postcolonial literature class that exposed me to Irish and Caribbean writers like W. B. Yeats, Derek Walcott, and Kamau Brathwaite’s rhythm of the hurricane—that I arrived at Doheny Library, searching for Cathy Song and Haunani-Kay Trask’s Light in the Crevice Never Seen. I also found Bamboo Ridge on those shelves. What a revelation it was to read Darrell Lum’s “Beer Can Hat” for the first time! This led me back to Hawai‘i to pursue a Masters degree in English at the University of Hawai...

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