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Girl Scouts aims to foster leadership by encouraging girls to discover themselves, make connections, and take action to make the world better. This paper chronicles the five-year journey of eight p... more...

For centuries, Indigenous and historically oppressed communities have been studied by Western researchers whose claims have been accepted without question and, in many instances, have led our communities’ continued oppression. With increasing numbers of individuals from historically marginalized communities entering higher education and becoming researchers and teachers of research ourselves, we are challenged to consider whether and how the research stories that we tell will be different from the research that precedes us. In this article, I draw from the Hawaiian concept of ho‘oku‘iku‘i (to stitch or piece together) and the French notion of bricolage to discuss how my graduate course in qualitative data analysis equips researchers from Native Hawaiian and other Indigenous and historically oppressed communities with new analytical tools to challenge oppression and tell both more critical and more empowering stories about the schools and communities in which we work and live. more...

Amidst late 19th-century efforts to emphasize modern medicine’s transition to a more scientific approach, physicians seeking to represent themselves as scientists began wearing white laboratory coats. Today educational researchers are likewise urged to don metaphorical white coats as scientifically based research is held up as the cure-all for our “failing” schools. However, given science’s vital role in justifying and extending Western imperialism, for members of many indigenous communities, brown bodies and white coats are an uneasy fit. In answer to Linda Smith’s call for decolonizing research methodologies to remedy the distrust between indigenous peoples and scientific research, this article considers how educational research in indigenous and historically oppressed communities could be transformed by replacing the metaphor of the lab-coat-wearing scientific researcher with the trench-coat-clad detective or private eye. more...

This article contemplates the rights and responsibilities of non-indigenous participants in programmes for indigenous education. Drawing from Native Hawaiian early childhood examples, the author relates a series of counter-stories or cautionary tales which demonstrate how even well-intended, non-indigenous newcomers to indigenous education programmes can unwittingly alter these programmes with their dominant styles of interaction and participation. The article calls for careful consideration by non-indigenous individuals who seek inclusion in culturally based programmes for indigenous education, and considers a number of possible roles that could be assumed by non-indigenous participants. Arguing that different indigenous contexts may require different solutions to non-indigenous involvement, the author concludes that truly supportive non-indigenous participants in indigenous educational programmes will understand, and even anticipate, when it is their place to step forward, step back, or step out. more...

‘White men are saving brown women from brown men.’ Gayatri Spivak suggests that this phrase is for her as fundamental for an investigation of colonial dynamics as Freud’s formulation ‘a child is being beaten’ was for his inquiry into sexuality. Through a deconstructive interrogation of elementary Hawaiian history textbooks, Hawaiian studies curricula and Hawaiian studies classroom conversations, this paper examines how the colonial myth of oppressed indigenous women who were liberated through colonization continues to be perpetuated and sustained in postcolonial classrooms today. Drawing from traditional Hawaiian and Foucaultian methods of genealogy, the author disrupts the dominant narrative of progress and increased civilization for Hawaiian women through colonization, and proposes a counter‐narrative of traditionally powerful Hawaiian women, whose political and domestic autonomy were severely challenged and gradually eroded with the imposition of Euro‐American forms of government and Christian‐American... more...

This article uses a Native Hawaiian example to raise difficult questions about the role and responsibility of non-Indigenous educators in teaching and supporting Indigenous studies. It challenges educators and educational researchers to think closely about how they might serve as allies in Indigenous struggles for self-determination. more...

In this article the author uses an example from a Hawaiian education program in postcolonial Hawai‘i to argue that educational investigations into the colonialist and oppressive tendencies of schooling, in Hawai‘i and elsewhere, should employ defamiliarizing analytic tools borrowed from literary and critical theory to peel back familiar, dominant appearances and expose previously silenced and potentially disturbing accounts of the oppressive conditions in our schools. With the use of these defamiliarizing tools we see that within the context of historically oppressed and traditionally marginalized communities, seemingly benign or progressive instructional efforts can have unanticipated, counterproductive effects. Moreover, we find that even the most well-intentioned teachers and administrators can unwittingly be complicit in the operation and perpetuation of oppressive hegemonic dynamics. more...

In this article I question the efficacy of (post)colonial Hawai‘i's seemingly progressive Hawaiian studies curriculum by proceeding through a detailed textual analysis of the curriculum's core textbooks and instructional guides. Building upon Foucault's work in discourse genealogy and new historicism's technique of reading a text alongside an unlikely partner from another genre, I demonstrate how the images of Hawai‘i and Hawaiians represented in the Hawaiian studies curriculum are strikingly similar to the images that were first projected upon Hawaiians by early colonial voyagers and have since been perpetuated through Hawai‘i's visitor industry. By juxtaposing the school texts with documents used for the training of tourist industry workers, I explore how the material interests of the visitor industry are expressed in a curriculum that attempts to interpellate young Hawaiian students as low-paid tourist industry labor. In giving an example of how a well-intended curricular inclusion effort has had unintended, paradoxical effects, I raise difficult questions about the inclusion of underrepresented minority groups in the school curricula of (post)colonial societies in which colonialist economic- and psychodynamics continue to exist. Turning the logic of visibility politics on its head, I send a warning to all indigenous and disadvantaged groups engaged in parallel struggles across the globe, cautioning them to think closely before lobbying for inclusion in area studies curricula that may ultimately do more damage than good. more...

Indigenous families are often perceived by teachers and school administrators as disinterested and uninvolved in their children’s education. This article aims to complicate that longstanding stereotype. A detailed, qualitative case study of two Native Hawaiian preschool families reveals compelling counterstories of Indigenous parents who are deeply concerned about their children’s education, but are limited in their family-school involvement by a range of (post)colonial, social, psychological, and economic challenges that make it difficult for them to engage with schools in conventional ways. The study raises awareness of the skillful resolve with which Indigenous families employ their limited resources to support their children’s education. It challenges educators and policy makers to imagine creative possibilities for drawing Indigenous families into collaborative activity with contemporary schools. more...