Hawaiians and Technology

I'm hoping, for my first digital artifact, to find some example of mobile or web-based technology that's being used to support Native Hawaiians, but I'm having a difficult time. While there are certainly applications out there that would be relevant to Hawaiians, I cannot - after a couple days of searching - find any particular effort to bring modern technology to Hawaii.

This is hardly surprising. Hawaii has a reputation, on the mainland, as Paradise. It is a beautiful chain of islands with picturesque beaches, scantily clad sun-bathers, awesome surf, and a prosperous, tourism-driven economy. The reality of Hawaii, however, is quite different, and the terrible inequities of Hawaiian society are not publicized - and are certainly not a part of the public consciousness - in the way that issues in third-world countries or in poorer parts of first-world countries usually are. The Native Hawaiians have little use for technology, it seems, because they have almost no access. How can there be an effort to provide a technology to any population in an effort to better its livelihood if that population has no opportunity to use it?

Of all the ethnic groups surveyed on the US Census in 2000, Hawaiians had the lowest mean income. That is hardly surprising, since Hawaiians have had precious little opportunity to improve their socioeconomic status since the conquest and subjugation of their country. Unlike other minority groups in the United States (most of whom are still marginalized, to be sure), Hawaiians have never had a true movement supporting their rights, and therefore have been left essentially unprotected for over a century. The result is a kind of cultural diffusion; Hawaiians have found it easier to simply marry into Japanese, American, or European families, adopting the mores and customs of those places, rather than maintaining there own. The famous Kamehameha Schools were founded, not to preserve Hawaiian culture, but to re-educate Hawaiian children so that they could better fit into Western Society.

What few Hawaiians remain tend to be anti-technology, if only because they associate high-tech with the country that divested them of their sovereignty. And yet the Hawaiians were a scientific and technological people in their own right. Now, more than anything, they are a people left behind socioeconomically and educationally, and they are too isolated and expensive to reach for any meaningful effort to be made to help them (except from within the Islands).

My personal interest is in charter schools, and increasingly I'm hoping to come out of Stanford prepared to return to Hawaii so that I can found a school (or schools, but one step at a time) to better serve Hawaiians. Native Hawaiians are a core part of that goal, but as Kumu Keahi - one of my Hawaiian teachers - tells me, being Hawaiian is not about your blood or your skin. On some essential level, I identify myself as a Hawaiian. But I am no programer, when it comes down to it, and my interest in technology is in leverage, not in creation. How can I leverage technology to build a better school in a place - and for a population - without the money to afford it? What hardware, what software, is available? What is being tried already?

I know the answer to the last question: nothing, or very little. Within the Islands there are efforts, but they are doomed to fail in the face of a 3,000 mile gulf between Hawaii and the mainland (a 3,000 mile gulf between Hawaiian ventures of any kind, and the funding that could support it). Hawaii is not the blot on the collective consciousness of the Western World that Africa is, but just because it is small does not mean it is unimportant.