Hawaiian Indigenous Schools
During the recent port stay in Honolulu, a group of Semester at Sea students visited schools that serve indigenous students on the island of Oahu. Chelsea Fuller, a journalism major at the University of Florida, shares her impressions.
The Other Side of Town: A Student’s Account of Indigenous Schools in Hawai'i through an FDP Led by Professor Robert Hoffert
After a 45-minute drive up the Wai’anae Coast, our first stop of the day was at the Institute for Native Pacific Education and Culture (INPEACE). When I met with the student teachers and deluged them with questions, they were really interested in talking about the issues with me.
Hawai’i has one public school system for the entire state. It’s the only state like this, and the system provides little opportunity for responsiveness to the unique needs of people on the margins. And that’s what we experienced: the needs of the indigenous people of Hawai’i, whose language and culture are native but not catered to in the Hawai’ian school system.
We went into the ethnic ghettos on the coast, where families, even before, but especially now because of the recession, are plagued by homelessness and serious economic need. At Makaha Elementary as they explained the special needs of their students, I began to understand why I selected this field program.
Many Hawai’ian children go to private or charter schools (President Barak Obama went to the best private school on Oahu, founded by missionaries).
Others go the King’s schools which are designed to give the island’s best and brightest students the best education in Western ideals. These students often get the opportunity to continue their study on the mainland. However, little attention is paid to Hawai’an language and culture. Professor Hoffert told of one student, who when he got to college, didn’t even know what to say to others about being a native Hawai’ian because he never was educated in his own culture.
Schools that serve indigenous students operate with few resources. At Makaha Elementary, they’re fortunate to have outside enrichment of education through a farm subsidized by the Catholic Church that’s annexed on to the school’s campus.
The farm’s caretaker is Mr. Gigi, a priest from Italy, who did some work in the Philippines but came to Hawai’i and never wanted to leave. I was mesmerized by Gigi, a selfless, simple man, who will touch so many in his lifetime and be completely unknown outside of this outskirt of Honolulu. He started working in 1979 with special needs students at Makaha on the farm, but now he works with all children in all grades through inter-disciplinary activities that lend physical examples to lessons learned in the classroom. For example, a patch of dirt was labeled with Pacific island names, separated by strings going all directions. The kids built this to demonstrate understanding of longitude and latitude of their home with respect to their neighboring islands.
The children help harvest the vegetables and herbs on the farm and then take them home to help feed their families. Locals are also invited on Saturdays to work on the farm for some extra food or money. Gigi works with them, talking and putting life into perspective all the while.
He thanked us for coming to the school and to this area of the island. “We can learn a lot of things from the book, but we cannot learn attitudes from it,” he said. “The best way to change the world is through building personal relationships.”
Perhaps this Semester at Sea field program helped form a few of those connections.
