Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 26, Number 9, 1 May 2009 — Native faces, facing future [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Native faces, facing future

Visiting Maoh fellows to study resources in Keālia ahupua 'a By Liza Simūn Public Affairs Specialist As a fellow for the First Nations' Futures Program, Iocelyn Doane recently stepped into the coastal waters off Te Waipounamu, South Island, in New Zealand, and was immediately surrounded by marine life more abundant than anything she'd seen at home in Plawai'i. Doane wasn't surprised. The Maori have a major stake in fisheries under a settlement of native rights based on the Treaty of Waitangi, explained Doane, who is an attorney with a specialty in Native Hawaiian law. Along with such differences, Doane noted that Maori and Native Hawaiians have a lot in eommon, such as respect for family and the natural environment: "My trip to New Zealand as a First Nations fellow reaffirmed that because Hawaiian and Maori share similar native values, we ean learn from one another and improve our ability to make decisions for our own communities." Doane's observations underscore the goal of the First Nations' program, initiated by Kamehameha Schools. As the state's largest private landowner, KS sees strategic importance in building leadership in natural and cultural resource management. Its mission to serve Native Hawaiians through education has made it imperative to create "indigenous leaders

able to work in a modern context but still be true to their roots," said Mawae Morton, a KS manager and First Futures program director along with KS executive Neil Hannahs and Stanford University professor Peter Vitousek. By bringing together selected Maori and Native Hawaiian fellows for sitebased learning projects in their respective homes, the fellowship program builds on a special relationship between two indigenous populations. "If you go back far enough, we are the same people. As minorities in our own land, we've gone through similar eolonial histories, so there is compatibility in terms of needs and models to make improvement," said Morton, who enumerates a litany of native losses: sovereignty, land, language and more. In spite of this, he said that Māori and Native Hawaiians bring to the field of natural resource protection a philosophy that ean help the world stave off mounting enviromnental degradation. "Māori have the kaitiakitanga prineiple, whieh is midway between the Native Hawaiian values of mālama and kuleana. It means guardianship and a genealogical link to resources that flips around the (western) notion that land is there for you to consume," said Morton. This month, the Maori fellows will arrive in Hawai'i, where they will evaluate resources in the ancient ahupua'a Keālia in South Kona. Little is known about the current state of thousands of acres that onee comprised this mountainSee NAĪIUE on page 15

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Hawūi'i fellows find on obundonce of shellfish in woters monoged by Moori tribes. - Photo: Courtesy of Jason ieiemiah

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to-sea system of resource management, so the fellows' baseline assessment will be a first step in rebuilding sustainability in Keālia.

The Hawai'i group designed the Keālia project for their Māori counterparts, just as the Māori a few months ago in Aotearoa led the way in tackling issues in fisheries management. The partner on the Māori end of the First Nations' Futures Program is the Ngai Tahu tribe of South Island. Under the settlement of the Waitangi Treaty with the New Zealand government, the tribe has obtained considerable fishing industry and aquaculture connnercial resources, but, Morton said, there is an ever increasing need to balance these interests with customary and recreational fishing After three weeks of site visits and discussions with fisheries industry stakeholders, both native and non-native, the fellows wrote and delivered to the Ngai Tahu tribal leadership a report highlighting the How of eommunication between stakeholder groups as critical to the future heahh of fisheries. The experience showed Hawai'i fellow Jason Jeremiah "the conunereial gains and the customary rights in fisheries that the Maori were able to retain" through reconciliation. Nevertheless, he said, the Maori see increased depletion in their resources, perhaps a sign that generous legal quotas should be re-examined before it is too late. "The strength of the program is the structure that allowed me to develop knowledge from real life and not from a book. I learned more about eommunity interaction as a tool for resource management," said Jeremiah, who expects to take what he learned as a fellow and apply it to his fulltime job as policy advocate for native rights at OHA. As a Hawai'i fellow who has also been involved with ceded lands issues, Doane, the attorney, also found the living classroom approach to be eye-opening. "It makes us see that resources are finite and so to move forward with sustainability we need to make sure that the customary practices are continued," she said. Before field work begins, the Hawaiian and Māori groups receive three weeks of intensive leadership training at Stanford University in California in an academic partnership with the University of Hawai'i. The fellows study strategic planning, dispute resolution, ecology and more. Faculty is comprised of some of "the best minds in the disciplines," Morton said. At the same time, he said that the fellows transformed the Stanford academicians by holding up the indigenous lens on resource management. "Western knowledge and indigenous values ... we are really trying to blend the two in a functional way," he said, adding that this brings up some inherent challenges. "We stress that this is not a 'chief school.' You don't get a certificate. We emphasize humility and what it means in the modern context." Morton said the fellows have had provocative discussions comparing the merits of traditional hereditary system of leadership roles with modern or democratic meritocracies, and concluded that the two are not necessarily mutually exclusive. In a special Stanford module on traditional leadership, UH Hawaiian studies professor Jon Osorio teamed with Maori high court justice Joseph Williams to examine how certain indigenous leaders coped with the turhulenee of colonialism. "For me, as a Hawaiian, this re-grounded me in terms of how tough the decisions were that our ali'i had to make," said Jeremiah. Morton credits the program with launching several former fellows in positions of leadership in resource management. At the UH law school, where Native Hawaiian enrollment has shot up significantly in the last few years, school alumna Doane sees signs that resource-management leadership is attractive to a new generation of indigenous peoples. "There's a lot of work for us," she said. "Our laws say any new (land use) proposal must take into consideration cultural and environmental impacts. For a long time, this wasn't being done effectively. But with more Native Hawaiian leaders, we hopefully will continue to see change." ■

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