Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 10, Number 6, 1 June 1993 — Inouye: 'The ball is in our court to raise the money' for Hawaiian education [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Inouye: 'The ball is in our court to raise the money' for Hawaiian education

by Jeff Clark U.S. Sen. Daniel Inouye told those gathered for the Native Hawaiian Education Summit how, when he visited Nānākuli High School 20 years ago, "It didn't take me long to sense that something was dread-

fully wrong on that campus. ... There wasn't a single Hawaiian on the faculty. The only Hawaiians were those men and women who were pulling weeds in the yard. Ninety-five percent of the student body were native Hawaiians, because they were from the homesteads. I thought to myself, Tt must be a terrible experience to get up in the moming, go to school, and realize that something is wrong with his ethnicity, that he's a failure, because not a single schoolteacher is

of the same ethnic group." Saying he was pleased with the goals

votced during the summit, he addea, 1 am happy that it does not only speak of the practical, materialistic aspect of society: you have mueh on the spirit, the spirituality and continued on next page

U.S. Sen. Daniel inouye

lnouye on Hawaiian education

continued from previous page morality of people, whieh is essential." He complimented the participants on their work to devise a plan for Hawaiian education, and said that now "the job will be ours to see if we ean get the resources to bring this about." Midway through the summit, Inouye spoke in an interview about how he viewed the gathering's progress. "It's beyond all expectations. The start has been wonderful. For one thing the conference was able to attract this large a number of important principals in our educational system, yet also if you look at their enthusiasm ... I've been to hundreds of conferences, and about this time of the day one ean sense a loss of enthusiasm, but this is far from it. "I think the conferees have been successful in channeling their high emotional energy toward a productive end. The ball is in our court to raise the money. "Underlying all of this is the realization that education is a powerful instrument. Education ean develop and create, but it ean also destroy. The educational system that we operate is a Western educational system, conceived by Westerners and administered by Westerners, by those who have been brought up under Western standards. And to carry out the Westem standard of education oftentimes you do so at the expense of other cultures. (We told) the Indians, 'Forget about your past, speak English, become Christians,' you know, all of that. The same thing with the Hawaiians. Kamehameha Schools was an example. My contemporaries who eame to this school could not eat poi on the campus — ean you imagine that, me going to a Japanese school and not eating rice? — or speak Hawaiian, or leam Hawaiian history. So without realizing, these good teachers, in all the goodness of their heart, are steadily destroying the culture. So what these people have to now eome up with is a plan to use the Western educational infrastructure to their advantage."