First Digital Artifact Writeup

What technologies exist to help Native Hawaiians? Precious few, I'm afraid. While there are many technologies that could be used with the Hawaiian population, the impetus – financial, cultural, whatever – simply does not exist. As it is, the efforts of individuals – Keahi Souza, Kahu Brenda Ignacio, Kumu Lake, Manning Taite, or Kumu Keahi Renaud – do more for Native Hawaiians than our fancy western technologies.

Kumu Keahi, however, bridges this gap. No one would accuse his websites of being beautiful, for they are not. While the rest of the world is using flash to create websites with eye-candy and unrivaled functionality, Keahi and his students are stuck in a less attractive past. But at least it is something.

A quick look at Keahi's beachmass.org makes you wonder what benefit students are getting out of Keahi's efforts. The benefit is a hidden one. The website, while hardly “professional,” was designed and coded almost entirely by a student – a Hawaiians – with no experience in HTML or Java. The purpose of sites like this one may be organization and dissemination of information, but in their essence, they serve the deeper purpose of getting Hawaiians to interact with and design technologies that otherwise they would not.

Keahi also has taught at Chaminade University, which tends to have a larger Hawaiian population than the University of Hawaii does. One of the classes Keahi teaches is Hawaiian Language, and his site compels his students to immerse themselves in their language, because it is in Hawaiian. Here the lesson is not so much bringing Hawaiians to technology as it is employing technology to better teach a subject. Inside the classroom it is easy to encourage students to speak and read and write in Hawaiian, as much as is possible, but outside the classroom there needs to be some impetus. Posting class lessons and notes in Hawaiian serves that purpose.

If these seem paltry attempts, it is for good reason. Keahi's audience is small (dwindling), excessively poor, and quite wary of all things Western. This is for good reason; the Hawaiians have been treated at least as poorly as – and probably worse than – any indigenous peoples in North America. With no recognized status as a Native people, no rights to Native lands or traditions, and only the efforts of a few individuals and private companies to preserve who they are, Native Hawaiians are deeply distrustful of we “Haoles,” we who are “without breath.”

Broader efforts than Keahi's do exist. There are a handful of online charter schools in Hawaii (see Hawaii Technology Academy), but these do not serve primarily Native Hawaiian students. They may be free, but most Native Hawaiians – without individual intervention by people like Keahi – will not have regular access to a computer, and so cannot take courses online. Nevertheless, these are equalizing efforts, and do serve a broader population that includes many Native Hawaiians: students forced to attend inadequate public schools in Hawaii.

Punahou, Kamehameha Schools, Iolani, Hawaii Pacific Academy, and on and on. These are just some of the highly successful private schools in Hawaii. Most of the finest students – and all of the wealthiest – are plucked from the public school system and sent to these college-preparatory academies. They dominate the cultural and educational landscape in Hawaii so much that when someone asks you where you went to school in Hawaii, they mean High School (and a Punahou education carries more weight than Harvard or Stanford one does). Online charter schools may not be able to bridge the gap between the excellent private schools in Hawaii and the generally poor public schools, but they are certainly a step in the right direction, especially for students who are kept out of those higher level schools for financial reasons.

A final effort to bring technology to Native Hawaiians is the Hawaiian Homestead Technology project, run by the Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement. The goal of HHT is to provide high-tech jobs to Hawaiians, primarily in document digitization. This is hardly an educational opportunity, but it does provide a back-end for the kind of work Keahi does with his students. Many Hawaiians do not pursue a higher quality of life because too often there are not apparent opportunities for them in the job market. How can Hawaiians compete with the wealthy immigrants to their island, most of whom hold advanced degrees and have already proven themselves in the workplace? HHT, and CNHA as an organization more generally, tries to address this issue, but while technology is a part of their effort, it is far from central (the same could be said of OHA, the Office of Hawaiian Affairs).

Which returns me to Keahi. It seems to me that it takes the kind of determination and focus found in individuals to work with a population as marginalized and as small as the Native Hawaiians. It is worth noting that, of all the ethnic groups polled on the US Census in 2000, Native Hawaiians had the lowest median income. Anecdotally, it takes only a drive around the island of O'ahu to see that beaches are littered with tent-villages, mostly filled with homeless and landless Natives. The way out for most of these people, should they want it, is to integrate into the very culture that forced them onto the beaches in the first place.

Kumu Keahi's goal is not to make students into tech-savvy employees and entrepreneurs. His goal is to create leaders. To often successful Hawaiians – having broken into Western society – forget what it means to be Pono. Being Pono means, in essence, being good, doing the right thing, and having dignity. It is, however, a uniquely Hawaiian word with a particularly Hawaiian connotation, and those deeper meanings are too easy to forget. Keahi, in teaching students to build websites, or in teaching them Hawaiian language, is trying to build a community of leaders who understand what it means to be Pono, and who cannot choose but to be anything but.

In my presentation, I cover these technologies, but not before introducing the Hawaiians and Kumu Keahi – through a brief discussion of the banana tree – and then offering the audience a choice. Do they want to hear about “Hawaiian Time,” about the “Kumulipo,” about “Solving Problems,” or about “Mana?” These lessons are the true essence of Keahi's work. The technology, inasmuch as he uses it, is just a tool to help create the kinds of behaviors these lessons try to teach. All four are aimed at inspiring leadership and empowering a sense of what is Pono. These lessons, also, are oral, to be remembered without being written. They are, in short, too important to simply write and forget; they must be carried around and internalized.

From my perspective, each of these four lessons – while all aimed at behavior – can be associated with a particular one of the ABCDs. The lesson about Hawaiian Time is a lesson about Condition, because it informs us exactly what the Hawaiians are up against, and how much strength it takes to be Pono. The lesson on the Kumulipo is about Audience, because it gets to the root of who the Hawaiians are. The lesson on Solving Problems is a lesson about Behavior, as it addresses, directly, what kind of actions a leader takes. The lesson on Mana is a lesson about Degree, not because it is quantitative, but because it reminds us exactly how much a person's spirit must be directed towards betterment, and how important each individual is (and the individual is Keahi's degree; a single student at a time may not be attractive to funders, but it is effective in a way that standardized, mass-marketed “change” never is). Each of these lessons weaves together, and though one of Keahi's students may only hear one of these lessons, the rest are contained within that one.

As for web-based and mobile technology, it is present in the world of Hawaiians because it is present in the world at large. Trying to find an effort to help Hawaiians using those technologies, however, is something of a lost cause, because outside of individuals (or small groups) like Kumu Keahi – who use such technologies as a means, rather than an end – there are none.

Finally, ending with how my presentation begins, Kumu Keahi is fond of saying, “There is nothing that I wish to accomplish that I can accomplish alone.” Perhaps the true potential of technology in Hawaii – and it's actual use – is in a simpler way. Text messages and email make building teams easier. The banana tree is actually a grass, but it is strong because of how it weaves together.