Creating New Systems
Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander students are well represented in the University of Hawai’i system’s community colleges. But not at the system’s flagship, the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa.
While 20 percent to 43 percent of students at the system’s community colleges are Native Hawaiian or part Hawaiian, just 14 percent of the flagship’s students are part of those groups — a number that’s out of proportion with the state’s population, which is more than a quarter Native Hawaiian, according to 2019 Census data.
Recent efforts aim to chip away at the discrepancy. In June, the Lumina Foundation gave the University of Hawai’i system $575,000 to pursue a 5 percent increase in its Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, and Filipino student population over the next four years.
But reaching that goal will be a challenge, says Maenette K.P. Ah Nee-Benham, chancellor of the University of Hawai’i-West Oʻahu. The Hawai’i system will need to develop a statewide strategic plan that combats disparities in education and wealth that were put in motion nearly 130 years ago.
“We’re all reaching back and trying to create new systems, which is not the easiest thing to do,” she says.
The Lingering Effects of Settler Trauma
After American sugar growers and businessmen overthrew the Hawaiian monarchy and the U.S. annexed the islands in the 1890s, the teaching of the Native Hawaiian language was banned. A cultural renaissance in the late 1960s and 1970s, led by Native Hawaiian activists, led to the reclamation of the language. It took three years of lobbying from the ‘Aha Pūnana Leo, a small group of Hawaiian-speaking educators, for Hawai’i, which became a U.S. state in 1959, to lift the ban on teaching the language.
Despite the legal change, there was still a reluctance to embrace the Hawaiian language, even in Hawaiian institutions. By 1983, fewer than 50 children under the age of 18 spoke fluent Hawaiian. Ah Nee-Benham says the rejection of the Hawaiian language has contributed to the low numbers of Native Hawaiian students in higher education.
“When you take away people’s language and you take away their cultural practices, that creates a great deal of trauma,” Ah Nee-Benham says.
In 2007, UH Mānoa created the Hawai‘inuiākea School of Hawaiian Knowledge, a college dedicated to Hawaiian language and culture. And in April, the state Legislature apologized to the Native Hawaiian people for prohibiting the language from 1896 to 1986.
Native Hawaiians remain more likely than other residents of the islands to experience poverty.
Many of the Native Hawaiian students within the UH system are first generation, from multi-generational households or can’t afford the cost of living on the island of Oahu, home to the universities at West Oʻahu and Mānoa, and four of the system’s community colleges. These students also tend to be Pell eligible, according to administrators and faculty at UH-Mānoa, and have to work while going to college to help support their families.
From 2011 to 2015, Native Hawaiians living in the state had an income of $20,664 per capita, more than $9,000 lower than the state’s average at the time.
“It is a cycle of poverty,“ Ah Nee-Benham says, and “a generational mind-set of settler trauma.”
College affordability is among the greatest barriers for Native Hawaiian students, says Jon Kamakawiwoʻole Osorio, dean of the Hawaiʻinuiākea School of Hawaiian Knowledge.
When Osorio, who is Native Hawaiian, was an undergraduate at UH-Mānoa in the 1980s, it cost him around $385 per semester. (Adjusted for inflation, that would amount to about $1,300 in today’s dollars.) For the 2022-23 academic year, a full-time student who is a resident of Hawaii pays $5,652 per semester.
“A university education at UH-Mānoa is many times more expensive than it was when I was an undergraduate here,” Osorio says.
Many Native Hawaiian students end up going into debt early on, and because of limits on how much they can borrow, some simply run out of money, Osorio says.
Currently, UH-Mānoa students who demonstrate Hawaiian ancestry, financial need, and meet the GPA requirement can apply for the Kuaʻana Tuition Waiver, but Osorio says that program is still funded at the same level as it was over a decade ago, despite tuition increases. He says that the state, which profits from land that American settlers once took from Native Hawaiians, should provide more money to support tuition waivers for Native Hawaiian students with financial need.
“The overall disappointment with how long it’s taking for us to get up to parity has a great deal to do with the fact that the state still does not acknowledge that those lands belong to us and that, in terms of higher education, our students, especially those who are poor, should be fully supported to attend the university of their choice,” Osorio says.
Elsewhere in the U.S., colleges have announced scholarships or reduced-tuition opportunities for Native American students who are members of federally recognized tribes. But there’s been debate over whether Native Hawaiians should seek similar recognition from the U.S. government.
Federal recognition re-establishes a government-to-government relationship between the United States and another group. It allows that group the inherent rights of self-government and, as in the case of Native Americans, enables them to receive federal benefits, services, and protections because of their relationship with the United States.
Osorio has been vocal about his concern that establishing a Hawaiian government through the federal process would stymie efforts by the Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement to achieve actual political separation from America.
“I have really big doubts of what federal recognition has done for some Native tribes in North America,” Osorio told The Chronicle. “When we call for greater accountability from the United States and point out what really was an armed invasion of our country and the removal of our queen in 1893, I don’t think that the United States should be left off the hook here.”
He says the historical invasion should be leveraged into much greater support than federal recognition would provide for Native Hawaiians.
Becoming an ‘Indigenous-Serving Institution’
In recent years, the University of Hawai’i system has made strides in enrolling and supporting Native Hawaiian students.
Native Hawaiian Student Services, which is situated in the Hawaiʻinuiākea School of Hawaiian Knowledge, was established in 2008 to address the educational disparities among the Native Hawaiian population.
Since then, the Native Hawaiian student population at UH-Mānoa has grown to nearly 15 percent from around 10 percent. And from 2006 to 2018, the four-year graduation rate for Native Hawaiian first-time freshmen increased to 32.3 percent from 10.3 percent, according to the university.
UH-Mānoa has also been working to strengthen its relationship with the system’s community colleges so that it can be a direct pipeline into the four-year institution. This includes transfer pathways to make it easier for community-college students to seamlessly transition, says Michael Bruno, the provost of UH-Mānoa.
In 2012, the university system established a plan to become a model “indigenous-serving institution.” It outlined goals that included enrolling Native Hawaiian students at parity with the state’s Hawaiian population, having Native Hawaiian students performing at the same level as non-Hawaiians, promoting Hawaiian culture and language across all campuses, and increasing the number of tenured Hawaiian faculty by 25 percent each year.
Despite the uptick in activism of the ‘70s, very few Native Hawaiians had the upper-level degrees to teach in postsecondary education, Ah Nee-Benham says. And the few who did teach at the college level were concentrated in the Native Hawaiian studies and Hawaiian language fields.
This lack of representation persists, making it more difficult to retain Native Hawaiian students. Only in the last decade have Native Hawaiian faculty composed more than 5 percent of the general faculty count at UH-Mānoa, according to the university.
Now more Native Hawaiian faculty throughout the system are being hired to cover a variety of disciplines, including political science and STEM, Ah Nee-Benham says.
And last year, Māhealani Quirk, a Native Hawaiian employee who works in Native Hawaiian Student Services at UH-Mānoa, co-wrote a federally funded three-year grant to provide tuition support and professional development for Native Hawaiian graduate students with the hope of producing more Native Hawaiian educators.
As part of the Lumina partnership, the UH system will have to develop a statewide strategic plan that focuses on equity, create a professional learning community for faculty to better support students, develop short-term credentials for opportunities in high-demand careers, and conduct an audit of policies and practices around students’ basic needs.
“If education is the key, then what we need the government and government agencies and the University of Hawaii to do is to invest more in Hawaiians who would otherwise not be able to attend,” Osorio says.
