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DECOLONIZATION AND PUBLIC EDUCATION IN HAWAI‘I TINA GRANDINETTI Every day in Hawai‘i, behind the red-dirt stained walls of our public schools, thousands of students participate in a tremendous exercise of cross-cultural interaction, tolerance, and understanding, between peers of different ethnic groups and varying economic backgrounds. The unfaltering routine of each morning renders invisible just how powerful this daily exchange truly is, that Hawai‘i’s public school system has long been a driving force behind our unique island culture. At one point or another, or several simultaneously, our public school system has served as an agent of American cultural imperialism, helped laborers pull themselves out of exploitative jobs, oppressed and devalued Native culture, and fostered a political revolution that challenged a powerful planter oligarchy. I have always been proud to be a product of the public school system, and it wasn’t until I left home that I became aware of these complexities mirrored in my own experience. While my education helped me develop cultural literacy and appreciate diversity, it also failed to teach me about my home, its history, and my place within it. Hawai‘i’s public schools play a critical role in defining our island identity, and yet have been rooted in a colonial ideology that positions Natives and non-Natives alike as inferior to the continental US. Perhaps it is time now to imagine a new role for our schools, as powerful tools for decolonization and empowerment, as vehicles for defining our island experience on our own terms. My belief in this decolonizing potential grew from my personal experience within Hawai‘i’s public school system and my continued educational journey. When I was in the second grade, my parents pulled me out of a small private school and enrolled me at Mililani Uka Elementary because they believed that the lessons I would learn from a socioeconomically diverse classroom were just as important as those I would learn out of a book. From my first day at Mililani Uka, till my graduation from Mililani High School in 2007, I felt proud of my education. After moving to the US continent for Grandinetti, Decolonization and Public Education in Hawai‘i 189 college, however, I encountered a creeping feeling of confusion. Growing up hapa in Hawai‘i, I never felt that my self-identity was an issue—being “local” had always meant the most to me. On the continent though, I wasn’t Hawaiian , as people often assumed; I wasn’t haole; and I didn’t identify with being “American.” I knew that Hawai‘i was different, but I didn’t know what that meant. It was then that I began to recognize that my education was, in many ways, lacking. After returning to the islands to complete my BA in Political Science at the University of Hawai‘i at Mänoa, I stepped even farther from home on a fourteen-month trip around the world, driven largely by a desire to place Hawai‘i’s complex history within a global context. While traveling often leaves me with more questions than answers, it has also made clear that there were holes in my schooling, and that filling these holes would have enriched my education and my subsequent experiences in the world. In the conversations I had with other travelers during my journey, I found myself struggling, time and again, to explain that while Hawai‘i is proud of its distinct identity, our children take only one compulsory Hawaiian History class in their entire time in school. I hesitated to admit that while I am passionate about Hawai‘i’s culture and history, I do not speak the Hawaiian language and had very few opportunities to learn it. While brainstorming for this essay in a village in Nepal, I spoke with a young couple from the Faroe Islands . They talked about how establishing their native Faroese as the language of instruction in public schools was an important milestone in the struggle to achieve “home rule,” or political autonomy, from Denmark. They, like many other travelers from countries where bilingualism is the norm, commented on how typically American it is to portray bilingualism as unattainable. And I began to recognize this monoligualism as just one symptom of US cultural imperialism—homogenization of a uniquely heterogenous society. Exchanges like this one, repeated so many times with people from so many places, gradually made me aware that my education remained rooted in a colonial past. By failing to...

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