Noelani Goodyear-Kapua, “The Seeds We Planted: Portraits of a Native Hawaiian Charter School” (University of Minnesota Press, 2013)

New Books in Indigenous Studies · Jul 8, 2013 · 55m

“School was a place that devalued who we are as Indigenous people,” says Noelani Goodyear-Kapua. These were institutions — at least since white settlers deposed the Indigenous government in the late 19th century — that Native students “tolerated and survived…experienced more as a carceral space than a place of learning.”

So she and her community decided to start their own.

Founded in 1999, the HKM Public Charter School in Honolulu enacts a host of educational practices that Goodyear-Kapua labels “sovereign pedagogies.” From the “land-based literacies” of their Papa Lo’i agricultural project…