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Imperative Three: Embrace Kuleana to Hawaiians and Hawai‘i

Goal: Model what it means to be an Indigenous-serving and indigenous-centered institution – Native Hawaiians thrive, traditional Hawaiian values and knowledge are embraced, and UH scholarship and service advance all Hawaiians and Hawaiʻi.

  1. UH will reduce equity gaps for Hawaiian student access and success at all levels.
  2. UH will Increase employment of Hawaiians across UH, especially at faculty and executive levels.
  3. UH will create opportunities for all students, faculty, staff, executives and regents to inform their work within the UH System by learning about Hawaiian language, culture, knowledge and Hawaiʻi’s difficult history with colonization.
  4. UH will play an active role in improving the lives of Native Hawaiians across the islands and reconciling past injustices.

Sample metrics: Student success for Hawaiians, employment numbers for Hawaiians, engagement of UH community in this goal; impact of the betterment of Native Hawaiians

This Post Has 6 Comments

  1. RE Item #4:

    Can the UH system actively use its research enterprise resources to create and/or maintain a data home for NH data/data networks/data systems? This will hopefully allow community access to updated data and readily support organizations whose work is to support the NH population.

    Can UH’s active role of “improving the lives of Native Hawaiians across the islands and reconciling past injustices” include informing and actively advocating for the NH community to our State legislature/our local politicians? in the least, to help those politicians understand their kuleana to NHs and this place.

    Mahalo

  2. Re: #1 Actions steps to reduce equity gaps must include UH Schools engaging, partnering with, and supporting local public high school students in their classes, on their campuses, and with their projects/initiatives. Public high school students can also benefit from mentorship/fellowship opportunities, job/skills training, and workshops helping with admission applications, financial assistance applications, tours of classes, or learning about UH programs. Special attention can be given to future critical industries and local labor forces within the context of Hawaiian cultural values (i.e. Ma’o Farms and UH West Oahu).

    #2 Can we have a target or % goal for specific schools and/or sectors with an outline of where we currently are in meeting a specific goal. Do certain sectors have more or less, why or why not, and how do we address/recruit appropriately/locally to support meeting this goal.

    #3 Opportunities to inform UH System work with Hawaiian language, colonial past, and culture abound. Perhaps another opportunity could be to develop metrics for what a culturally informed UH System looks like in action. Is it hiring locally or funding/implementing certain existing programs within UH or the community already doing this work? Is it surveying what individuals within UH are currently doing to center Hawaiian cultural values and possibly connecting them to local counterparts within the community? Is it formally partnering with a designated number of community/local/grassroots groups who are already actively engaged in culturally informing various systemic groups throughout the State and can we specify target numbers or areas of action?

    -Mahalo

  3. Item #4: The UH system is serving Native Hawaiians on the mainland through on-line degree programs like Hawaiʻiloa at WCC. I would like to see this item broadened or, to address somewhere in the plan, the inclusion of this contingency of Native Hawaiians. Many of these students are engaged in gaining a degree to be able to give back to the Hawaiian community. Mahalo.

  4. Do not build your educational telescope of our sacred mountain Mauna A Wakea, and Listen to the people you claim to want to help or reconcile with Mahalo.

  5. I support initiative #3: Embrace KULEANA to Hawaiians and Hawai’i. I have been a teacher in the Hawaiian Immersion Community since 1986. In this conference proceeding, Menchaca, M. P., Yong, D. L., & Hoffman, E. S. (2009). Understanding barriers to Native Hawaiian participation in distance education. Proceedings of the Distance Learning and the Internet Conference (pp. 177-180). Tokyo, Japan: Association of Pacific Rim Universities, NATIVE HAWAIIANS ARE UNDER-REPRESENTED at the University of Hawaii campuses. In Yong, D. L., & Hoffman, E. S. (2013). Technology in Hawaiian Language Immersion Program Schools: Teacher Narratives of Change. World Conference Ed Media, describes Culture-Based Education and technology to educate Native Hawaiians.

  6. Vet some of these non pacific professors classes when teaching indigenous subjects because a lot of them just teach trauma porn as though defining us only by the trauma brought onto us. UH needs to actively take a stand against red hill as well as TMT if you truly seek to improve the roles of hawaiians. UH should implement free tuition for Native Hawaiian students as california schools have done for Native American students especially since many of Hawaii schools sit on illegally occupied lands that were formerly crown lands. UH needs to offer more student housing across campuses and islands. Native Hawaiian mothers are also being left behind, campuses that did have a daycare facility still havent opened back up. Open up student work hours to full time so students can earn the money they need to survive while staying in school at flexible campus jobs while also helping our severely understaffed campus, those jobs should pay more although the $2 recent increse was nice itʻs not very sustainable especially when we are capped at 20 hours a week and its certainly not enough for moms trying to attend college with day care and preschool costing about $1000 a month.

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Last modified: October 19, 2022
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