Instructor interview for Place-Based WAC/WID writing instruction in Upper Divison English, clip 9 of 12

Abstract

Brief excerpt from interview: The difficulty for anybody is determining what is your kuleana, what is your responsibility, what is your area of expertise of authority to speak on a subject? We're trying to foreground positionality, trying to foreground relations of power and how we locate ourselves in those relations of power. So in writing about land, I ask students to think about it... We all have kuleana, we just have to define what it is, and knowing our position... that positioning is important. The problem happens when people don't recognize the differences between indigenous peoples and non-indigenous peoples and assume that we're all the same, and they don't understand land issues over ceded lands or seized lands. The big thing right now is the question of how the ceded lands are now called Public Trust lands. So who is the public, and who has a claim to that land? That's where you see the problem emerging, when there's not a distinction between who is indigenous and who is not. Indigeneity we define in terms of genealogy, not about blood quantum or that kind of thing. What are the stakes in all of this? You begin to see so much irony when people point Bishop Estate as being this landowner - this big bad land owner. But when they had a forced lease to fee-conversion law in place, who acquired the land? It was wealthy whites and Asians in Kahala and in the Hawaiʻi Kai area. They're the ones who gained land, so what is the irony there between this trust that's for a patrimony for Native Hawaiian children and who actually got the land? I think that's why positionality is so important, and I struggle with it when writing about land. I think we all struggle with it... how not to make ourselves the center of it... and how to be respectful. How we compare a capitalist economy with an indigenous economy, how one is based on accumulation of capital and how the other one is based on the production of food, how to grow food... We do talk about the impact of globalization on these places. It's kind of creepy, the interconnectedness of it. Obama had a meeting of the APEC leaders here, right? So you have these countries that are trying to engage in this sort of neoliberal version of trade. You lift all the regulations protecting the environment and labor and land use laws. You lift all those protections in order to make that sort of free trade possible... Then Abercrombie comes in with the PLDC, the Public Land and Development Corporation, and those kinds of ideas about developing lands and leasing land to these multinational corporations. So I try to get students to see those kinds of global-local connections. We're also talking about climate change... Waiau is drying up. The lake's drying up... and students sometimes are very depressed about that. I say well, we just do what we can. Protecting these places and learning about them and sharing that knowledge and making it publicly available - that's all part of a process. I think if people can see that there are alternative economies... through mapping, what alternative economies can we decipher? These alternative economies are going to be really important in reenvisioning that kind of industrialization that's leading to that kind of climate change