In our inaugural episode, we orient ourselves toward a meaningful role for ancestral practices in modern society.
In this inaugural episode, we have the benefit of an illuminating conversation with Kamuela Enos, the director of the newly formed Office of Indigenous Innovation at the University of Hawaiʻi. Before that, Kamuela was director of social enterprise at MAʻO Organic Farms. Born and raised in Waiʻanae, he comes from a family of cultural practitioners and farmers committed to sustainable agriculture. A vocal advocate for innovative educational approaches that serve all learners, Enos has turned his lived experiences into a successful post-secondary academic career. He has an undergraduate degree in Hawaiian Studies and a master’s degree in urban and regional planning from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa.
With Kamuela, we delve deeply into the refreshed perspective he brings on the layering or infusion of valuable ancestral practices into modern society. We discuss the importance of being rooted in a respectful relationship with the earth; and, his experience working with Maʻo Organic Farms and its mission to bring health and economic empowerment to the local community, through a re-connection to community based and sustainable farming practices
We begin with a chant well known in Hawaiʻi called E Ho Mai. This oli, or chant, is often used at the beginning of an event or special gathering to help focus energies and properly receive wisdom.
For more info:
Credits:
Created, produced, and hosted by Paula Daniels
Sound engineer: Keola Iseri
Project support: Sue Woodard
Theme music: Caryssa Shinozawa
Other Music: "Monomer" by Leroy Wild, “Kamaniki”, “Sugar Cane Train”, “Makapuʻu Pali” by Pacific Sounds
Logo: Reiko Quitevis and Sue Woodard
Thanks to our sponsor, the Hawai'ʻ Institute for Sustainable Community Food Systems at the University of Hawaiʻi - West Oʻahu
Thanks also to the students at Waipahu High School for sound creation (Caryssa Shinozawa, Landon Guzman, Syd Sausal) and graphic design (Ashley Alfaro, Erika Pagtulingan, Reiko Quitevis); and their teachers, Noelle- lili Edejer and Sky Bruno.
Paula: Welcome to the 30% podcast.
[Music: Leroy Wild - Monomer]
We are a podcast about goals to create a 30% local food system across the country, from New York to Illinois, from Brazil to Boston, and to the Hawai‘i an islands in the mid Pacific. These and similar goals have been long established by state and local governments. What do these goals mean? How can they be accomplished, and why are they important? We'll explore those issues in this series.
In this season, we focus on Hawai‘‘i's goal embedded in its statewide Aloha Plus challenge to double its local food production by 2030. By most accounts, that means to get to 30% local. Why is this important to Hawai‘i ? The island state is currently heavily dependent on imported food to feed its over 1 million residents and to host millions of tourists who annually swell the population by a factor of ten.
This dependency on global imports is a legacy of an industrialized monoculture agriculture system, which culturally dominated the U.S and Hawai‘i in the 19th and 20th centuries. As you'll hear in this season, before the imposition of Western norms in the islands, Hawai‘i was able to sustainably feed a population of nearly 1 million in a holistic and environmentally sound state of self-sufficiency.
What can we learn from Hawai‘i as an example for a reorientation of our global food system?
In this episode, we have the benefit of an illuminating conversation with Kamuela Enos, the director of the newly formed Office of Indigenous Innovation at the University of Hawai‘i . Kamuela is the son of a native Hawai‘ian activist, a community leader who persisted in reclaiming and restoring the then disappearing native Hawai‘i an culture in its own home, once the sovereign kingdom of Hawai‘i . The era in which Kamuela's father made his mark is now known as the Hawai‘ian Renaissance.
[Music Cues: Leroy Wild - Monomer]
The activism at that time led to a constitutional convention in 1978, in which the Hawai‘i state constitution was amended to restore Hawai‘ian language as an official language of Hawai‘i; and to, among other things, create the Office of Hawai‘ian Affairs; and to write into the constitution the Hawai‘i n principles of mālama 'āina - or stewardship of the land - as a doctrine called, in Western jurisprudence, the public trust doctrine. These efforts have led to a landmark state Supreme Court case protecting the rights of subsistence, fishermen and environmental stream flows, and to the rebirth of Hawai‘ian language which was on the verge of extinction, but is now spoken with fluency by modern generations of Hawai‘ians. The 1970s also saw the remarkable revival of the traditional Hawai‘ian method of wayfaring, often called celestial navigation.
What can we take from those aspects of traditional Hawai‘ian knowledge and practices that would be relevant for today? And how are they relevant to our food system? How does this relate to a collective target of a more self-sustaining food system at a level of 30%? We'll discuss this with Kamuela and with our subsequent guests.
With Kamuela, we delve deeply into the refreshed perspective he brings on the layering or infusion of valuable ancestral practices into modern society. We discuss the importance of being rooted in a respectful relationship with the earth.
To prepare us to receive Kamuela's insights. We begin with a chant well known in Hawai‘i, called E Ho Mai. E Ho Mai is an oli, or chant. E Ho Mai was composed by Edith Kanaka’ole, a Hawai‘ian cultural and language expert.
This oli is often used at the beginning of an event or special gathering to help focus energies and properly receive wisdom. And now, as we prepare to listen to Kamuela: E Ho Mai.
[Music: Waipahu High School recording of E Ho Mai]
Kamuela: I think intrinsically the Office of Indigenous Innovation puts out a pretty bold statement. The practices of our ancestors, if applied in contemporary times and being allowed to be deployed in contemporary structures, but keeping ancestral frameworks and intentionality, invariably will be considered innovation.
An example of indigenous innovation is the ahupua'a system. The systems that were created by the kupuna, the elders of Hawai'i as they moved up from the Southern Pacific and settled around the islands, allowed Hawai‘i to be self-sufficient not only on an island, but each valley was a hyper-localized political structure where no trade needed to be happened.
Between valleys people took care of everything in their own valley, their complex carbs, their lean proteins to building material…
Paula: Yeah, they had everything! So you mentioned the ahupua'a, which is a unit, if you want to put it in those kinds of terms, it was a governance unit that went from the mountains to the ocean, right?
Kamuela: It was a governance unit, it was an ecological unit. The governance, the economy of precontact society was your ecology. If we are going to live on islands, we can't practice extractive trade; you have to practice regenerative systems. So. I think the first opportunity for this office is in translation and allowing people to understand ancestral practice as a seat of innovation.
The second and the primary though, is equity; Is this idea of - how do we reposition these practices in sciences and technologies? How do we understand the lineal descendants of these practices and the work that they're doing as vital? And how does the university show up in its research and its spaces of education and all these other facets of it, as a broker between education and industry to normalize that thought?
So basically what we've been asked to do is to - and how I see the work - is kind of identifying the resources external to the state that can come in through the office as research and even within the state, actually, that can come into the office as research and be distributed to our, the multiple facets of the university, to directly invest in community agency.
And, you know, I see that there are two tiers of innovation that we can work with. The first tier is, tier one, is the innovation of the ancestors. The ahupua'a system, the navigation system, the way we understood our lunar and celestial cycles and therefore planted and created resilience. Our water management systems are all innovations.
And the responsibility of the university to that set of innovations is to protect the IP of the community.
Paula: Intellectual property?
Kamuela: Yeah. The second is tier two. It's an understanding how they take these things that no one owns, but are held in trust of the Hawai‘ian people, these knowledge systems. and turn them into programming that can be invested in.
And how does the university show up and invest in these, in these organizations to then: bring in resources; increase their enrollment of students that are entering into the university that supports this type of research; increase the type of resources that are coming into state for this research; but really centering, at the end of the day, in communities owning their ancestry, and deploying it in a way to restore these generative systems that used to exist. And if we reframe this notion of not using the word Hawai‘ian culture anymore, but instead saying the right words in English, I think that are more true is: “ancestral sciences and technologies of integrated biosystems management.”
Then you have, you have a really different orientation to indigeneity, and you have an opportunity to share power with indigenous communities. To build things in contemporary spaces that benefit everyone.
Paula: I think that's such powerful reframing, Kamuela, because it really does help with what seems like a sort of distortion of perception around the value of ancestral wisdom that many in the more dominant cultures these days are grappling with, in terms of how to understand what indigenous knowledge means to the world.
I think one of the perceptions, I wonder if you share this thought, is that of the “noble savage.” I'm wondering if you have thoughts about how that shows up in society right now. And what's different about thinking about things in the way that you've just said.
Kamuela: Yeah. You know, I think the noble savage framework, I think it's better than the ignorant brute. That’s like we aren't even humans. .And therefore, if indigenous people are on the land, they're not really people, they're like animals so people have the right to claim this land. Like, “Okay, well there were people here, but they were ignorant and backwards.”
Paula: Mm-hmm which, by the way, prevailed in the time when my dad was growing up, people were saying that. Yeah. And it's not that long ago.
Kamuela: This is my living memory. And I'm not 50 yet. So it's something that's real. Then the next iteration is, well, the ‘noble savage”. So it’s erasure to acrimony, to patronage, to a patronizing perspective, like “they were so noble and they had done so much with the little that they had” and like, you know, the land of the backhanded compliment or the romanticization of us.
Paula: Right.
Kamuela: I think what is an important opportunity to reframe the practical understanding, equitable understanding of indigeneity…and in the same breath, these are systems that were created in hyper isolation that have hundreds of years of R & D behind them, and as some of the last wild people of America, meaning the last to be colonized.
And, the Hawai‘ian experience is absolutely different than the experience in the Americas, and the complete violent erasure of native peoples there, I hold in my heart and it's really brutal. So we are different in our experiences, not in our relationship of lands, of our landscapes. But I think to answer your question, that “noble savage”, still “others”, and it still creates this idea that - those are nice things, but they are off on the side and museum pieces, or a thing to mourn.
And we want to move into the space like, Hey, we're still alive. We are present in the space and many indigenous people, especially in Hawai'i since the Renaissance have cultivated through fluencies, we are more and more fluent in the practices of our ancestors. And you forced all of us to go to college. We can do business plans, policy, and we can do what our, our beloved chiefs did when they met new things, and they were grounded, they brought them in and they vetted them and they folded them into their practices.
Like they did with the printing press, right. Or the other things that are ubiquitous in our own society. And that's the opportunity, is for us to go into these things that are brought into our spaces as ideas. Physical things and repurpose them to serve in this intentionality, to bring back a localized abundance.
Paula: I want to stay with this point a little bit about this idea of ancestral knowledge and how it fits into contemporary society. And you mentioned the printing press. I know that 'Iolani Palace and Honolulu had electricity – so it was really interesting to find out about that at 'Iolani Palace, which was the palace of the governing monarchy of the Kingdom of Hawai'i, had electricity before the White House in Washington DC did. And that the streets of Honolulu were electrified before the capital of the United States was. So it was living in, a blend, a harmony, these modern technologies and the ancient technologies. Right?
[Music: Pacific Sounds -Kamanaiki
Kamuela: Yup. And that happens because people at the time are still rooted in their food based practices. They were rooted in their connection to land and connection to each other. And when you have this sense of rootedness, you can introduce new things. It also understood that to allow them to continue to be rooted, they had to be adaptive and they not only brought electricity to 'Iolani Palace, which was a seat of the Hawai‘ian monarchy post contact, but they brought hula back at the same time, which had been banned. And that was both a practical, but a highly pragmatic, and a highly political gesture. Like we are not erasing ourselves in the embrace of the new; we're bringing them both back at the same time intentionally, to make a statement, but also to provide substance, to provide a standing in national conversations. And to me, it's the opposite of the noble savage narrative. It is, it's really a humanizing narrative of continuance. Like, we should be allowed to continue our practices and adapt to the new.
Paula: And incorporate it all. It's the very definition of modern, is to not have this extractive (culture-wise), linear process of it's this culture, then that culture and then some other thing, but it blends it all together and provides relevance to it all. You said something also about that, that I'd like to come back to about contemporary norms, circumstances. I think you were talking about: global commercial contemporary norms aren't suited for an island.
Kamuela: Right.
Paula: Can you talk about that a little bit more?
Kamuela: So when we say ancestral sciences and technologies, I follow that up with this idea - and I'm really clear that indigenous doesn't mean brown people. Indigenous is a point of continuity. Everyone's indigenous to some place. When you're in a place where indigenous people are, you have the responsibility to honor your own indigeniety and to honor their systems, which have been proven to work.
So I don't say Western, for example, Western systems – I am as European as I am Hawai‘i an, right? So, so not Western, but contemporary sciences optimize for extraction and they optimize for ownership and they optimize for participating in a global supply chain economy, ancestral science and technologies optimized for calibrating between humans and our living in an ancestral landscape. And they also optimize for regeneration. So when we make the case, when we talk about it, it's not just a rejection of contemporary systems because I'm talking to you on a computer that's made with rare metals from China, and we're able to communicate. This idea of not rejecting modernity, but to be able to calibrate, how are these tools of modernity and the sciences of modernity, which are pretty neat, these are pretty badass stuff. Like quantum physics, machine learning and artificial intelligence and all those other things. But I'm not fixated on it as what will save us. How do we bring these things in and then learn and base our work on the thousands of years of R 7 D that Pacific Islanders have created as we migrated across the Pacific, and then the hundreds of years of Hawai‘ian knowledge that built upon that corpus…
[Music from Waipahu High School ]
…which no one can argue, allowed a group of people to be living in the most finite bio system on the face of the earth and bequeath abundance to generations. So centering it there allows us to have the language to value what our ancestors knew as science, but not to isolate after that, to say, this is the starting point for vetting these new technologies to bring in. And at the end of the day, by understanding what our ancestral sciences solved for and looking for those metrics that our kupuna used, our ancestors used, to gauge the efficacy of the work.
If we hit ancestral metrics, then we are actually bringing and using contemporary tools, which are now incredibly powerful, to solve for ancestral proven end goals of being able to create abundance in an island, in a localized space. Hopefully it's a really practical approach to guiding how we do our work.
Paula: Abundance and thriving. Right? And some people call it I think some terms that are emerging are regenerative.
Kamuela: And this idea was also reinforced by the work of Dr. Alika Maunakea, the Mauli Ola study, where Dr. Alika Maunakea, along with his peers worked with students at Ma'o Farms. Dr. Alika Maunakea is from Nanakuli homestead, a native Hawai‘i an researcher and an epidemeologist studied the gut biomes of the students at Ma'o and found that students who worked on their farm were 60% less likely to develop type two diabetes.
Paula: Wow. That's significant.
Kamuela: So we put in as, okay, let's create a center. The end goal of this center is to provide community organizations the hard data to show the efficacy of their work and the impact it's making toward allowing health to be restored to community, leveraging that hard data, so that: A, we can move more community organizations off of grant funding to become line items; B, we can help the university reframe how it does its research to ensure that it's not extractive and centering the university as the experts, but it's generative. It's co-owned by the community and it's really affirming the validity of what ancestral practice is, and these community practitioners, not just as people off doing cultural practices, but the seat of contemporary innovation and restoration. And the third intention is to reframe how the federal government understands indigeneity, not just through the language of loss and illness, but can reposition itself as patient capital to invest in these spaces and to, to see that as necessary.
Paula: We've been using the word reframing, but let's just say revitalizing and bringing forward some ideas that make sense in terms of community, but are different than the way most governments look at health right now. So one thing you mentioned was how their gut biome was different of the students, the younger people living on Ma'o organic farms.
Talk a little bit about Ma'o organic farms and what that means and why you think it was that their health experience was different.
Kamuela: Ma'o farms is very near and dear to my heart. Ma'o farms is located in the community: founded by community partners, the founders Kukui Maunakea-Forth and her husband, Gary Maunakea-Forth are really, and continue to be pillars of our society and community in Waianae. Kukui is of Hawai‘ian ancestry from Nanakuli Homestead, the granddaughter one of the real matriarchs of the Waianae coast. And for context, the coast of Waianae on island of Oahu is one of the highest, if not the highest concentration of native Hawai‘ians in the world. And many of the Hawai‘i ans who live in Waianae though were Hawai‘ians who were removed from the original context of being tied to these 'ahupua'a systems.
And as the force of colonialism moved in we were dispossessed and then resettled on one of the most arid sides of the island, in communities of homestead. So Kukui's 'ohana is homesteaders and they've been there for multiple generations. Now, so, Kukui is really of the land and her husband, Gary is pakeha, Caucasian ancestry, but came up from New Zealand, which had a really strong relationship with the maori native communities there and a strong farming relationship.
And together they're a real force of nature, they founded Ma'o Farms as a way to reunite the two key assets of any community: the productive land and the productive youth. So from the beginning, it was a non-profit that was designed to generate revenue. The mission was to recruit young adults from the Waianae community to work on a farm and exchange for that they would get a co-ownership and have these different opportunities.
And that over time has evolved. So when I moved to Ma'o after getting my master's back in 2007 …
Paula: What was your master's in?
Kamuela: Urban and regional planning. And my undergrad is in Hawai‘ian studies.
Paula: Makes sense.
Kamuela: Have another degree in being a Waianae high school dropout. [laughter].
The evolution of Ma'o moved into becoming a social enterprise. The revenue generating side of the organization, it's now almost 297 acre organic farm, making it one of the largest, if not the largest organic farm on the highly urbanized island of Oahu. But the social part of the social enterprise is the daily operations of the farm run by young adults from the community while I was there. And we recruited from our local high schools - Waianae, Nanakuli and Kamaile - and we asked young adults to commit to putting in 16 hours a week on the farm and exchange for that sweat equity of running - Monday, Wednesdays and Fridays - running the daily operations of the farm, we provided them a full tuition waiver to college.
And in starting, we offer a stipend of $500 and we asked for a two year commitment because we try to graduate them on time with their associates and move them on to their baccalaureate degrees. The two metrics we tracked on a daily basis of the farms: the sales of product and GPAs of students. So as the farm scaled in both our graduation rates, as well as the food that we're producing, we very quickly moved from angry Hawai‘ians to noble savages, and shot past noble savages to be job creators and degree designers.
And those two gave us, it was not only creating opportunities to grow food and to grow young adults but also create a defensible space around, against highly predatory forces. That college degree isn't perfect, but in communities like Waianae as a pathway out of poverty and back into agency, it also takes them off the market for predatory labor to become fodder for foreigners. Like all the other things that they need brown bodies for. It takes them off of that market.
Paula: Cleaning bathrooms and you know, stuff like that.
Kamuela: Whatever it is. Yeah. Carrying heavy s*** for rich people.
Paula: Yeah.
Kamuela: And never owning the means of production. It also alienated our, our lands from predatory land based practices. It took that off the market to become dumps.
So we start with contemporary agency, but I'll close with: the two metrics of sales of product and GPAs were also the same metrics our ancestors used in the pre-contact society. At the end of every year, there's a ceremony called the Makahiki ceremony. So ancestral society - it had a non monetary economy. People and land were capital, not means to capital. So at the end of every year, chief would come to the valley and there'd be this ceremony where the people would show how much food they produce and how fit they were and how intellectually rigorous they were.
And now it's called quaint. Oh, it was like, oh, it was this fun and games and festival. Actually, if you understand what it really was, it was a year end reporting to your chief, where you could do projected actuals and variance. You say, this is what we said we were gonna do. This is what we did. Here's the variance.
And you got your contract renewed because in pre-contact society, people didn't write grants and two year cycles to do the work. It was really that you – it's easy to talk about how traditional practices worked from the lens of investment in business. But the differentiation was that ancestors in these systems were able to create goods and services of incredible value like kalo, lean protein, and fish and everything. That they're able to create these really robust industries without externalizing the means of product. To impact people in land, in the growing of our staple crops at scale, we didn't pollute the water with waste. We didn't deplete our resources. That translation into English completely repositions traditional practice. And what the scared billionaires of the world looking to drop all their money into invest in, because all their wealth has given them is cues on how screwed up they are. They're looking for investing in things that make sense. It makes zero sense to teach Hawai‘ians about sustainability. It makes a lot more sense for us to reframe the practices and allow us,our community members, to teach outwards. These are the things we know and how do we bring resources to it?
So it can be adapted as equity in other spaces, but how do communities own the IP. How do we not get screwed out of our knowledge? That the kind of space we're in.
Paula: So you mentioned the Makahiki, which was actually quite performance based if we want to use those terms, that the Ali'i were making sure that the konohiki were managing - the managers were managing to a certain level of performance.
And there was probably a lot of adjustment along the way to make sure it happened. One thing I want to point out is that there's quite a body of knowledge that the population in Hawai‘i was fairly, it was a fairly well populated set of islands. This was working, not just for a small group of people, it was working for a significant population. And this technology, this intellectual property, these ways of being were productive and can be good examples for the rest of the world. Right?
Kamuela: Yeah, the pre-contact size was close to our contemporary size and, and we are not orders of magnitude bigger. I mean, the population now is not orders of magnitude larger than a pre-contact population. We're, you know, we had everything needed for communities to expand rapidly. And I think that our ancestors weren't magic. I mean, they weren't like, I super don't want to be in this space of glorifying your ancestors.
That's as dangerous as demonizing them because there are things about them that are…they're humans, but what they were really good at, and I think is important to acknowledge, is they were good what islands taught them and they had to be good. You can argue the relative merits of people, but you can never argue the merits of the land as your best teacher and as your promise, and you're really attuned to listening to the land as hyper isolation makes you attuned to have to listen to the land. Because there was no Costco; it was that or starve. They got really good at things I think out of necessity at first, but it got acculturated to being really adept to listening.
People talk a lot about biomimicry now and that's what they were doing, but I just raise the question back: what's the opposite of what they're doing. I guess if you're not doing biomimicry, then you're doing “necro-mimicry”? Are you mimicking things that have terminal points?
Paula: Yeah.
Kamuela: And that we all die. Which - I think you don't have to answer that question.
Paula: But that's what we seem to be facing right now, right?
Kamuela: Yeah. So that's the value of it and it did work and it wasn't perfect. There was a lot of inequity sometimes I think in class and in gender, because they are people, but the things that did work are, is a really beautiful legacy and it is an opportunity for us to not just co-opt, but also to engage in a conversation of equity with communities. And if just the cultural parts are taken and implemented without the people there, I can almost guarantee you, it's not going to work. It has to be centered and centering in the communities that hold it.
But it also can't be an insular inward facing kind of thing, which locks us up from the rest of the world as much as allows us and empowers us to be peers. To build peerships and to see how it could be replicated in other places. I think that's the hope and that's the responsibility of this office to translate. It gets tricky sometimes cause the line of co-option versus scaling is super thin. But it does require a lot of horizontal eyes on things and creating equitable spaces for people to discuss.
Paula: Well, and I think you're centering this work on health and, centering health in holistic wellbeing, right? As being connected to 'aina, to land and to each other is a really important aspect of looking at it.
Kamuela: That's really critical. I mean, if you take the scientific approach, I would put out there: microbes in the soil and the biomes in our gut evolved together. Then when you split that symbiosis and reposition other things in, the microbes hurt and the biomes hurt. That's what Dr. Alika is seeing, is that when you put them back together, the symbiosis is restored.
That's kind of some of the other work I'm doing and with the same group, we're developing indigenous AI, like, what does that mean to be able to develop these tools of computation that can do radical things quickly, but not have the source language be English. Like what does it mean to have these things that understand Hawai‘ian and are you doing that relative to the restoration? How tracking, how traditional practices restores carbon and restores the living biota of the soil and its intervention can show that when we start practices on the center of indigenous health equity, gut biomes gets restored. And we do the indigenous data science and we're looking at the soils where then microbes get restored. We're building backup native agency in our traditional stories of the Kumulipo, which is our creation chant. It rivals Darwin’s origin of species as 16 periods of time. Eight of them are pre- humanity called Wā and the very first period talks about the microbes. So we're recentering our work in the first Wā of the Kumulipo. Are we ensuring the biomes of our people are healthy and the microbes in the soil is healthy and building from there?
So it's funny, but I figure, hey, we're at the university. We have the opportunity to be exploratory, but also practical. We have a really powerful corpus of knowledge that we have a responsibility to engage, but also to engage equitably. And talk about ownership and who is the ultimate beneficiary of how our ancestral practices are being deployed, should be the lineal descendants and then everyone else after. Not just lineal descendants only, but it should have concentric circles of impact.
But re-centering back on, like when we were removed from the system. So how do we get back to these systems and provide abundance for all centered on our communities?
Paula: It has a lyricism and a completeness to it that really that it really sings.. I think it’s really important.
So one last question - and maybe this comes in the category of vision - so there is a challenge out there called the Aloha plus challenge, about bringing more local production to Hawai‘i and the articulation of a reason for it is it's a matter of self-sufficiency, it's really important for the islands, which are isolated, to be able to feed its own people in terms of crisis. But there's, there's probably more to it than that. And I wonder if you have any thoughts about that and about reaching that goal and why it's important.
Kamuela: I really appreciate goals like that. I think it helps contemporary, it uses contemporary language and governance models that people are familiar with. It puts out really aspirational goals. It puts out some really aspirational intentions. And what I like about that is like, it creates the space for communities to come and say, if you really wanna do that, we have to do it together. Because there's no way it's gonna be solved solely from the top and solely from these mandates.
So it creates opportunities for co-design and, and co-investment in spaces. Whereas before if the end goal is just growing the GDP in this state, regardless of what model we use, you know, there is no - it doesn't really fit well with authentic community engagement. So not being a thousand percent familiar with the details, but having read through it, you know, at the high level…
[Music: Pacific Sounds - Makapu'u Pali]
…I think it points to the aspirations of those types of initiatives, point to the validity of ancestral systems that allowed us to be self-sufficient and it creates a gracious space of inquiry.
If people are willing to do the work to figure out, how do we get there together? If you wanna go fast, go alone. If you wanna go far, go together attitude. I think it really sets up a way to actualize that it requires the community, indigenous communities to be able to meet that initiative on their terms and with their capacities. But I think there is a lot of capacity there. And hopefully, you know, as we continue to have these dialogues, we can figure out a way to have them be co-designed and integrated with the movements that are happening with indigenous restoration of identity and practice. So it becomes really robust.
[bird song, to theme music]
Paula: Many thanks to Kamuela Enos for his wisdom. To our sound engineer, Keola Iseri from the University of Hawai‘i, West Oahu. To Waipahu high school students: Ashley, Carissa, Erika, Landon, Reiko and Syd for their many creative talents. And to our sponsor, the Sustainable Community Food Systems program at the University of Hawai‘i, West Oahu.