On December 12th the Ka Wai Hāpai team had an all-day in-person meeting focused on making plans for 2023. As our grant term will conclude this summer, it was important that we met together to ensure that we were both feeling confident about where we are in the project and how we would be spending the next several months.
This meeting also gave us a chance to share back some of the connections we made between our project and others like it during the fall, as many of us attended conferences during this time. These included the Archiving the Cook Islands in a Pacific Context forum, International Conference on Indigenous Archives, Libraries, and Museums (where two of the team leads hosted a well-attended roundtable), the Association of Information Science & Technology annual meeting, the Tribal College Librarians Institute, and Connecting Communities and Collections: Asian American and Pacific Islander Cultural Stewardship.
Photo from the Tribal College Librarians Institute including team lead Keahiahi long.
The primary work of our meeting was discussing the ʻāina ontology that will become the core of our knowledge organization system. We discussed what kind of connections between ʻāina we want to bring out at this stage of the project, and what enhancements we could see being added in the future with other experts in different kinds of Hawaiian knowledge.
We also discussed the way that data visualizations can communicate the ethos and application of our project, and where additional information or framing narratives might need to be added to convey our aims and the choices we have made to accomplish them, often with some compromises due to time or technology limitations.
An important topic was the expansion of the vocabulary to further domains, or fields of knowledge, such as hana (works created by humans) and ʻohana (people, families, Aliʻi and Akua), and where we’d like to embed connections between these domains in our system. This will be one of our greatest challenges in the coming months, but one which will enhance the reach of and relationships within the system we are building.
As we begin to think about the end of this phase of our project, we reflected on how much work we have done, but also how much there is left to do. We recognize the support and inspiration we have been given by our communities and hope that our two-year project will be just the beginning of creating a system that truly/more accurately reflects Hawaiian and Indigenous ways of knowing and experiencing the world.
