The Seeds We Planted (First Peoples: New Directions Indigenous)

In 1999, Noelani Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua was among a group of young educators and parents who founded Hālau Kū Māna, 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 Hālau Kū Māna 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-Ka‘ōpua 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 remarkable—and largely suppressed—history of Hawaiian popular learning and literacy.

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

• Everyday Acts of Resurgence: People, Places, Practices
• Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States
• Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples
• We Are Dancing for You: Native Feminisms and the Revitalization of Women's Coming-of-Age Ceremonies (Indigenous Confluences)
• Dancing On Our Turtle's Back: Stories of Nishnaabeg Re-Creation, Resurgence, and a New Emergence
• As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock
• Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime
• Fully Automated Luxury Communism
• Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance
• Kids These Days: The Making of Millennials