Student interview for Place-Based WAC/WID writing instruction in Upper Divison English, clip 8 of 14

Abstract

Brief excerpt from interview: My relationship to Hawaiʻi and my connection to Kahuku has grown stronger, and also to all the places we studied too. I just feel a solidarity with the people in their struggle for the land there. You get to know your classmates really well because you get to hear their story and their connection to the land they're from. The mural was in protest to the telescopes on Mauna a Wākea, which is a sacred place, and then the controversy of how it was censored and we talked about the mural as being an example of a map. A Hawaiian-knowledge-based map. It's not your typical map when you think of a map in your head, but it is mapping the sacredness and the moʻolelo... and how Mauna a Wākea is significant to Hawaiians... I think my major being art and then the correlation with this class and what I learned in this class has clarified my focus in what I want to do artistically with moʻolelo and history and land and how it all kind of is connected. The way I see land has completely changed. We talk about how land formations and the mountains... there's a moʻolelo to everything... When I look at the mountains... ʻike Kualoa, I can see the back of the moʻo. Mokoliʻi, I can see that as the moʻo's tail... I don't think I had seen that prior to this class and the depth of research that we've done, but completely when I take my camera out and I'm looking at land, I just see it in a whole other way. I try and think of what could the history be or what could the moʻolelo be? What does this look like to me?