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This epilogue details recent efforts by a number of Hawaiians to both celebrate the Hawaiian history of the steel guitar, as well as to rejuvenate interest in playing the instrument in Hawai‘i. It details Alan Akaka’s continued efforts to teach the steel guitar through his Hawaiian music school in Kailua, Ke Kula Mele Hawai‘i, as well as his involvement in a legislative battle over naming the state’s official musical instrument. It examines the recent installation of a statue of Joseph Kekuku in Lā’ie’s Polynesian Cultural Center and the efforts of Ka‘iwa Meyer, a descendant of Kekuku’s sister, to teach steel guitar to children in the community. It also features steel guitarist Ron Johnson, a resident of Kahana, who treats the steel guitar as a kuleana, or cultural responsibility, much like tending to his taro.

This chapter introduces the struggles between subsistence and cash economies on Moloka‘i, Hawai‘i. It highlights how the Kānaka ‘Ōiwi spiritual values of aloha (love as reciprocity), kuleana (responsibility to community), and mālama ‘āina (stewardship of the land) are threatened by the globalization of Moloka‘i by corporate development projects. Kanaka ‘Ōiwi on Moloka‘i stress the importance of traditional Hawaiian knowledge and practices in their social and economic life. Even though they may not always agree on strategies for political action, these shared values contribute to their ability to resist detrimental economic forces that threaten the balance between subsistence and cash economies on their island.

The introduction offers a brief history of schooling in Hawaiʻi from the 19^th century onward and outlines existing conditions of injustice. The theoretical frame is established by discussing key concepts: settler colonial logics of elimination and containment, “cultural kīpuka,” “safety zones,” indigenous resurgence and aloha ʻāina (understood as a multiplicity of land-centered literacies). I also provide a description of the methods of counter-narrative and portraiture that I utilize in this book.

This chapter situates the Hawaiian charter school movement within the broader struggles for land and sovereignty in post-1959 (statehood) Hawai‘i. I describe the fundamental tensions embedded in Hawaiian culture-based charter schools by charting the intersection of the two distinct movements that produced them: 1) a Hawaiian cultural/political nationalist movement, and 2) a US-based educational reform movement based on “choice.”

The contradictions between Hawaiian educators’ aims and settler regimes of accountability are foregrounded, as I explore the gap between articulations of “self-determination” in teachers’ and in US legal understandings. NCLB Restructuring worked to reinscribe HKM’s educational program within mainstream American notions of schooling, within a “safety zone” of acceptable difference.

Chapters three through five explore the ways ‘āina (land)-based curricula allow participants to resist confinement within the boundaries of settler state-inscribed safety zones by rebuilding generative Indigenous structures: the ‘auwai (irrigation ditch), the wa‘a (canoe) and the leo (voice). This chapter focuses on the revitalization of kalo (taro) cultivation, and it elaborates the Hawaiian notion of “kuleana.” As frame for learning, this concept allows people of different positionalities (gender, nationality, indigeneity) to establish meaningful connections to land and to each other without glossing differences in power, privilege and genealogy.

Chapter four provides a portrait of HKM’s interdisciplinary wa‘a (canoe sailing) education program. I attend to the ways Hālau Kū Māna’s wa‘a program enables processes of “world enlargement” against limiting and belittling views of Indigenous cultures and peoples.

This last chapter looks at the ways student voices have been cultivated through engagement with relevant political issues and broader Hawaiian social movement. The Hawaiian concept of “ho‘omana” is used to describe the ways students came to see themselves as important actors within genealogically-situated movements for self-determination and sovereignty.

I reflect back on the costs of striving after AYP and remaining within a settler colonial school system. I summarize key features of the sovereign pedagogies described in the book, and I re-emphasize the need to rebuild the Indigenous structures that channel resources toward more just, sustainable, and ʻāina-centric ways of life.

This chapter examines the impact of the Mahele and Kuleana Act on landholding in Hā'ena. It first explains how Hā'ena was awarded to Abner Pākī, a powerful ali'i closely allied with the Kamehameha family, by virtue of Mahele 1848. It then discusses Pākī's appointment of Kekela, a close relative, as konohiki of Hā'ena. It also considers how maka'āinana can receive an award of land under the Kuleana Act of 1850; selling of ahupua'a to groups of maka'āinana who organized hui kū'ai 'āina (cooperatives to buy land) as a means to raise the cash necessary to purchase lands being offered for sale; and the kinds of hardships faced by maka'āinana as they adjusted to the new property regime.

This chapter focuses on Hui Kū'ai 'Āina o Hā'ena (Hā'ena Cooperative/Company to Purchase Land), one of many hui (organizations, gatherings together of people) formed by the people to buy land in the aftermath of the Mahele and Kuleana Act. The manner in which hui organized themselves, as indicated by the bylaws they drafted to guide the activities of their organizations, is a reflection of their desire to retain some features of the traditional life ways of the ancestors. This chapter first considers the original shareholders of Hui Kū'ai 'Āina o Hā'ena before discussing its purchase of the ahupua'a (land division). It also considers the legal wranglings that led to the partition of hui lands, resulting in the fragmentation of the communally based system that had served the Hawaiian people so well.

In this chapter, the author considers some of the methodological foundations that have been laid by late twentieth and early twenty-first-century scholars who developed contemporary Hawaiian studies. The author explores four concepts to illustrate the need to use a Hawaiian studies methodology when conducting research: lāhui (collective identity and self-definition), ea (sovereignty and leadership), kuleana (positionality and obligations), and pono (harmonious relationships, justice, and healing). These concepts are central commitments and lines of inquiry that are hallmarks of Hawaiian studies research, and each could also be seen as ʻaho, single cords, that when braided together form a “rope of resistance” connecting the scholar to the scholarship. In discussing Hawaiian studies methodologies, the author interweaves the life of her maternal great-great-grandmother, Ana Kaʻauwai, with her own journey as a Kanaka ʻŌiwi scholar navigating the emerging discipline of Hawaiian studies. She also gives examples of selective promiscuity in articulating and practicing Hawaiian studies methodologies.

In this chapter, the author reflects on her journey to kuleana through Hawaiian place-based education. She begins by telling the moʻolelo or history about one of the most beloved aliʻi nui of Hawaiʻi, ʻEmalani Kaleleonālani Naea Rooke, and her empowering journey to the summit of the highest mountain in Hawaiʻi and the entire Pacific: Maunakea or Mauna a Wākea. The author highlights the ways in which this mele by Queen Emma served as a significant theoretical framework for her doctoral research on Hawaiian place-based education programs. She explains how Queen Emma's mele and moʻolelo ultimately helped her to see her hālau hula as her first experience with Hawaiian place-based education.

In this chapter, the author explains how the work of influential scholars has changed the way we view research and has broadened what constitutes academic scholarship. The author shares how she arrived at a framework grounded in ʻike kupuna that guides the way she engages in research. She also considers the relationship of research to mālama ʻāina, laulima, and puʻuhonua. She recalls her interviews with two Kanaka ʻŌiwi scholar-activists to offer her perspectives on inquiry that shows how ʻŌiwi pursue research and carry kuleana. The author concludes by reflecting on her journey as an emerging scholar of education in the process of developing her Aloha ʻĀina research methodology derived from her work at Ka Papa Loʻi ʻo Kānewai, the Native Hawaiian cultural garden at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.