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

In 1999, Noelani Goodyear-Kapua was among a group of young educators and parents who founded Hlau K Mna, a secondary school that remains one of the only Hawaiian culture-based charter schools in urban Honolulu. The Seeds We Planted tells the story of Hlau K Mna against the backdrop of the Hawaiian struggle for self-determination and the U.S. charter school movement, revealing a critical tension: the successes of a school celebrating indigenous culture are measured by the standards of settler colonialism.

How, Goodyear-Kapua asks, does an indigenous people use schooling to maintain and transform a common sense of purpose and interconnection of nationhood in the face of forces of imperialism and colonialism? What roles do race, gender, and place play in these processes? Her book, with its richly descriptive portrait of indigenous education in one community, offers practical answers steeped in the remarkableand largely suppressedhistory of Hawaiian popular learning and literacy.

This uniquely Hawaiian experience addresses broader concerns about what it means to enact indigenous culturalpolitical resurgence while working within and against settler colonial structures. Ultimately, The Seeds We Planted shows that indigenous education can foster collective renewal and continuity.