Featured speakers, panelists, and other participants at the Center’s fiftieth anniversary conference, “Pacific Studies 2000: Honoring the Past, Creating the Future,” will address four main topics:
We would like to widen these conversations and invite your comments in preparation for the conference, 14–18 November. You may go directly to the discussion board to post your points or questions for discussion and read the comments of others, or you can read on to see what our Friday afternoon panelists had to say. The topics are open ended and reflect challenges and opportunities not only for Pacific studies but indigenous studies, area studies, and cultural studies programs more broadly.
During September and October, Vilsoni Hereniko, the conference convener, organized Friday afternoon panel discussions and potlucks on these topics for interested students, faculty, and community members. Soon we will have a message board where you can post your comments on these topics. So far, we have had two of our planned three conversations. We encourage those who are interested in new pedagogies and technologies to join us on Friday, 27 October, from 4 to 6 pm at EWC Club Cottage for a potluck and discussion of the challenges of distance learning and related issues.
The following are synopses of the comments of our panelists on the topics of decolonizing Pacific studies and interdisciplinary approaches.
Decolonizing Pacific Studies
Terence Wesley-Smith moderated the panel on 1 September with Kanalu Young (assistant professor in Hawaiian Studies, UH Manoa), Mere Roberts (Assistant Dean for Maori, Faculty of Science, University of Auckland), and Vilsoni Hereniko (associate professor in Pacific Islands studies, UH Manoa) presented their views on decolonizing Pacific studies in a panel on 1 September 2000.
Young began by reflecting on the Center for Hawaiian Studies and the staff, students, and ancestors that he serves. He does not see the role of the center as exclusively academic or intellectual, nor does he see it as focused on the past or contemporary times to the exclusion of the other. He sees the common thread running through Hawaiian studies as the spiritual guidance, support, and strength of the ancestors. This springs in part from the life-changing experience he had of reinterring the bones of Hawaiian ancestors that were disturbed by the construction of the building housing the Center for Hawaiian Studies. He draws from the spiritual aspect of Hawaiian life in his teaching, and his goal is to prepare students for their own spiritual walk—he sees his teaching not only as passing on of information (course content) but contributing to individual lives and to how students feel about themselves. This personal connection between students’ lives and what is taught by the faculty and staff is the true soul of Hawaiian studies. He sees decolonization not as an internal individual process but a shifting process in relationship to the ancestors, the land, and the sea, for example, and a process that takes place in the context of gripping economic and political realities.
Roberts began by considering some common forms that colonization takes, including physical space (land), but also intrusions into language and religion. She was primarily concerned, in her talk, by the silent but equally pervasive colonization by western science of intellectual spaces; a colonization that has had the effect of marginalizing indigenous knowledge systems. She sees gains being made in various place in regaining land and revitalizing language, but decolonizing science is a problem. Western science claims a universality by asserting that it is democratic and is value-, culture-, and gender-free. As a scientist, she sees great value in western science but she also sees a need for a decolonization of intellectual space and a need for western science to make room for indigenous knowledge systems. The Treaty of Waitangi makes it a moral imperative for universities to teach indigenous knowledge but the pragmatic value of this knowledge to western science also makes this teaching imperative.
Roberts noted that in Aotearoa New Zealand they are making small inroads, mainly with the teaching of students in the medical school where the benefit to doctors, and indigenous patients in particular, is most obvious. Other sciences and engineering at more difficult. Part of the process of decolonization is for indigenous people to teach their own knowledge systems, but this does not resolve all the problems. There are real questions about how and who can be taught this indigenous knowledge and where (can it be taught in a classroom or must the students go to the land, to hear what the land has to teach them), as well as how to prepare students for the very different way in which indigenous knowledge is taught and learned. The key to this decolonization effort is partnership among indigenous and nonindigenous teachers and practitioners, and the goal is to create options for indigenous students: to enable them to maintain and strengthen their cultural identity and still get a western degree.
Hereniko proposed questions for discussion rather than answers. He began by following up on Roberts’ focus on intellectual spaces with the proposition that the mind, once colonized, can never be decolonized; once you learn to read and write you can never unlearn reading and writing. He then went on to engage the audience both emotionally and intellectually with three stories—one of an early encounter between an indigenous islander and a missionary, one about a Navajo filming experiment, and one of a contemporary encounter between Islanders and anthropologist Ward Goodenough in The Humbled Anthropologist. Through these stories he raised questions about the inadequacy of nonindigenous accounts of native peoples to produce portraits in which native people can recognize themselves; about our ability to understand the very different stories native peoples have to tell; and about the mutual tolerance and understanding that a collaborative process between academics and indigenous people might entail.
Interdisciplinary Approaches
Moderator Vilsoni Hereniko opened the discussion of interdisciplinary approaches on 29 September with a quote from Roland Barthes. Barthes proposed that engaging in interdisciplinary studies is not just the arranging of several disciplines around a research topic but the “creation of a new object, which belongs to no one.” He then invited the discussants to address questions of what it means to be in an interdisciplinary program and how does one carry out interdisciplinary research.
Miriam Sharma, a professor of Asian studies at UH Manoa who teaches classes that focus, among other topics, on gender, tourism, and development, titled her comments “A Celebration of the Margins.” She spoke from the perspective of her own intellectual migration and the courses she teaches. She described how she switched from discipline to discipline as a student (history, anthropology, political economy) as her intellectual interests changed. And she described her growing dissatisfaction with the way traditional disciplines dealt with the issues of class and gender she was uncovering in her research in India. For her, an interdisciplinary approach, the interaction between disciplines that takes place at their margins, is the most productive way of dealing with issues that arise at the margins of society. She sees perspectives arising from feminist and cultural studies approaches as beginning to blur the boundaries between disciplines. She also suggested that working at the margins helps create new questions, as well as new answers.
Caroline Sinavaiana-Gabbard, who teaches Pacific literature, comparative literature, and creative writing at UH Manoa, also described her intellectual migration, through English, psychology, folklore, anthropology, to her home, as a doctoral student, in American studies, a department that recognized the confluence of literature and history. She described her realization that history, culture, and politics are inseparable from the essential task of “talking (or writing) story.” An interdisciplinary approach most closely approximates her worldview as a Samoan person and makes it possible for her to have a “home” in the university. Aware, as she is, of her privileged position as a member of the academy, she also feels a responsibility to model social change. She does this by bringing indigenous interests and worldviews into the university and working to impart indigenous ways of knowing to her students, a process that is facilitated by her ability to take an interdisciplinary approach. An interdisciplinary approach also increases points of contact with students; by drawing on different disciplines she insures that her students need not come just from the English department. For her, bringing new voices to bear on issues of importance is at the heart of an interdisciplinary approach.
Rob Borofsky, professor of anthropology at Hawai‘i Pacific University, expressed dissatisfaction with the ability of traditional disciplines to deal with key social concerns like the politics of empowerment, the politics of inclusion, and the nurturing of democracy. He is not content to frame a view of interdisciplinary studies as an endeavor that leaves the disciplines essentially intact, and he returned to the Roland Barthes’ appeal to “create a new object, that belongs to no one.” Borofsky feels we should start with key issues and engage these issues head-on; and the more broadly these issues are contested,the more broadly they are engaged with, the more likely we are to find answers, in the humanities as well as in the sciences. This engagement between different perspectives is the very essence of academic life.
New Technologies and Pedagogies
Speakers at the 27 October panel discussion, “Distance Learning Narrows the Distance,” were Paula Mochida, Special Assistant for Distance Learning, Office of the UH Vice President for Planning and Policy; Eric Kapono, Title III Project Coordinator, Hawa‘i Community College; and Judith Kirkpatrick, Assistant Professor of Language Arts, Kapi‘olani Community College.
As a facilitator of distance learning programs throughout the University of Hawai‘i system, Paula Mochida gave an overview of distance learning activities at UH. She explained that the term distance learning refers to off-site teaching as well as telecommunications-assisted courses using interactive television, teleconferencing, Web- based teaching, and even one CD-ROM course. It is internet-assisted courses that are increasing at the greatest rate, however. Of the 500 “distance learning” courses that are taught at UH, three-fifths are being taught by communication college faculty. A number of courses service the Pacific, particularly areas in Micronesia and American Samoa, but Mochida sees much more potential for the region. In the meantime, distance learning is increasing the partnerships between 2-year and 4-year institutions in Hawai’i, and between the UH system and universities on the US mainland.
Eric Kapono project coordinator of “I Ola ‘o
Haloa” described his unit’s goal on the Big Island as narrowing
the distance on that
island. The goal of the Title III grant
is to expand program access to Native Hawaiian students. The
grant’s four components are:
1) expand access to the university from the farthest reaches of the
island;
2) develop an AAS degree that combines courses in Hawaiian cultural
activities with
traditional college courses (eg, business, accounting, science) in order
to graduate
Hawaiians who can combine subsistence activities with other education and
training to
create more options and flexibility in their lives;
3) develop a facility on the UHH campus that Hawaiians can call their own
and in which
they can support and help one another; and
4) develop activities for the university as a whole to make people more
aware of who
Hawaiians are as a community.
Through the grant they are hiring Hawaiian studies instructors to teach
on-site in the outer
districts, but they are also implementing an ISDN-line video-conferencing
technology that
enables the instructor in Hilo and three other classrooms in other areas
of the island to
interact with one another at the same time. They expect this system to be
on-line in January.
Realizing that just because the technology is interactive doesn’t
necessarily mean that the
students will interact, they are preparing the instructors to create an
environment that is
truly interactive.
Judith Kirkpatrick, who teaches composition courses, is head of committee that advises the administration at Kapi‘olani Community College on the uses of technology in instruction, both on-line courses and ‘Olelo Community Television courses. Most instructors are not comfortable on television, but they have embraced internet courses that use Web-based technology for student-student and student-teacher interaction. Kirkpatrick, who teaches only on-line courses now, has always favored a student-conferencing technique of teaching. However, she encountered certain obstacles with this style of teaching, that she can use technology to get around: problems like the tendency for certain students to dominate interaction, the inability of the teacher to listen to more than one group in the classroom at a time, difficulties in getting students to interact, and the lack of a record of the interactions. She thinks students interact more, and become more engaged in the subject, in on-line courses than in regular classrooms. She also feels she gets to know her students better in on-line courses than in a regular classroom setting. Another advantage is that she is turning out students who are more computer literate than their classmates. These students are turning their computer skills into jobs, as well as taking their skills into low-income housing projects to do service learning activities with the residents and their community technology leaders.
In response to a question by moderator Terence Wesley-Smith about technology possibly leading to greater inequalities or the silencing of certain groups, all respondents felt that making use of the technology would tend to level the playing field and open doors to those that had formerly been “locked out” of the university.