The Seeds We Planted ─ Portraits of a Native Hawaiian Charter School

Goodyear-Ka'opua (political science, U. of Hawaii at Manoa), who co-founded the Halau Ku Mana charter school in 1999 and served as teacher, administrator, and board member of the school, relates the story of the Hawaiian culture-focused public charter school, which aimed to make Hawaiian cultural knowledge and practices the center of cultural revival, community building, and academic excellence, and address inequalities in the mainstream school system and restore the health of Hawaiian communities and nationhood. She describes its struggles, development, and educational practices, and traces connections between the school and broader Hawaiian struggles for cultural persistence, political power, and land. She discusses the tension between these charter schools and the need to remain nonthreatening to settler society and how these schools were produced out of the Hawaiian cultural/political nationalist movement and the US-based charter school movement. She considers how school restructuring under the No Child Left Behind Act reinscribed its educational program within mainstream ideas about proper schooling, limiting some of its innovative indigenous education practices; the ways educators are rebuilding indigenous structures that challenge settler-colonial structures, expanding on ideas of academic excellence and literacy, efforts to revitalize kalo cultivation, and student training to sail canoes; and how students see themselves as actors within the movement for self-determination and sovereignty. Annotation c2013 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)