The Seeds We Planted

Abstract

Sovereign pedagogies provides an ethnographic study of Hālau Kū Māna, a public charter school that makes ʻŌiwi Hawaiʻi (Indigenous Hawaiian) culture its educational foundation. I chart connections between the work of teachers and students at this school with broader Hawaiian social struggles for cultural persistence and political power. Under a settler state system made possible through the seizure of Hawaiian national lands and institutions a century earlier, 21st century Hawaiian charter school operators articulate pedagogies of survivance and self-determination while limited by contemporary structures of settler colonialism, such as the No Child Left Behind law. What struggles emerge when teaching Indigenous cultural knowledges within institutions built to marginalize and displace them? What educational possibilities are produced when teachers and students try to reside in and learn from these tensions rather than ignoring or attempting to transcend them? How do an Indigenous people use schooling to maintain and transform a collective sense of purpose and interconnection—of nationhood—in the face of forces of imperialism and settler colonialism? What roles do identity, race, gender and place play in these processes? This book shows the ways the provisions of the NCLB law have significantly limited the transformative power of Indigenous educational initiatives. As a reassimilative and disciplining force, NCLB perpetuates ongoing settler colonial logics of elimination and containment. I illustrate why the construction and maintenance of Indigenous educational enclaves within settler colonial structures is insufficient to changing persistent historical injustices.

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