Haunani-Kay Trask : PRACTICE QUESTION 1 : When do students have power?

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Transcript

There's a part of my syllabus in my modern Hawaiʻi class(1) on the university, on student government. I was probably the only faculty member who kept saying to Hawaiian students, "Take over student government. It has money, it has offices, it has stature. Take it over, take it over." Nobody votes at the University of Hawaiʻi. It's uncontested, you know, 200 people vote. Nobody cares. Part of it is a working campus, part of it is "They don't have any power, so why should they care?"

Au contraire, they have a lot of power. And in the last four or five generations that have gone into student government, we finally captured the student body president, and then right after that was a Hawaiian woman. Then we captured it with another Hawaiian woman, and the Hawaiian woman who was the first student body president went on to the GSO, the Graduate Student Organization. So at one time, for the first time in the history of the University of Hawaiʻi, they had one Hawaiian woman president of the Graduate Student Organization, and one Hawaiian woman president of the undergraduate student organization.

And to me, that's all part of their education. It raises issues about participation in the public world. You know, sounds like a civics class writ large. Get out of the classroom and figure out what has power and and controls your life. And where does your student fee money go?

And can you organize students to say we want to get rid of the mascot,(2) which we finally did. There is no little Hawaiian chief running around at football games or at basketball or volleyball games.

They spoke up very strongly and were effective in preventing increased tuition amounts.(3) They did a sleep-in at the university student services building and then went to the Board of Regents meeting and held the Regents ransom for hours. Hours. They had the best news coverage ever.

I teach them how to do press releases - how to write them, who to contact. The press is lazy. They sit there all dressed up waiting for a phone call. They don't go anywhere outside of the square block of the news building and the television stations and the legislature. So if that's the case, you too can learn to use the press. You too can learn how to write a press release, get the contacts, cultivate the press.

When they did the renaming of Porteus Hall - Porteus(4) being a scientific racist from the 19th (sic) century - there's a building named - was named Porteus - from the 60s. And a previous generation had gone through a big struggle and they lost. They didn't rename the building. So in my classes, I'm teaching them about racism and I said, "And by the way, there's a campus building named Porteus, you know, a scientific racist after the old sort of 19th century…" The cranial measurements, the guy is a complete wacko. He used to think, for example, that people in the center of the Earth around the equator had different elongated heads because of the swing of the Earth on its axis. I mean, this is how completely gone this person was and, you know, his tests and all this stuff came off the plantations, too. He was looking at people and saying the Japanese are sneaky like this and their heads are this way, and that Filipinos are like this and the Hawaiians are like this... Well, that had entered the general Hawaiʻi territorial attitude towards People of Color, and the university - because the Porteus family paid the university - named the social sciences building after this racist. After three tries, various generations of students did it, and it was my students. It was our women, and they did some great things. They learned how to call the press. They stuffed all of these ethnic-looking dummies and hung them by the neck off the social sciences building and said, "This is what Porteus stood for."(5) They got coverage in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The press is essentially lazy, right? They're passive. They wait. So, Mānoa is right here. It's in Honolulu. The press was there every day. I mean the president was getting caned by the students. He was just completely out of his depth.

What does that teach students? It teaches them to be engaged. It teaches them to be articulate. It teaches them the press is a tool, not to be afraid of it. It teaches them when they go up against power, they have to be quicker, smarter, more astute about how to deal with things like Board of Regents meetings. All the campus is there. So, I teach them exactly how to organize in their place. What is the principle of organizing a space? First of all, you learn who controls which buildings and then you learn what to do in those buildings. What goes on in those buildings? It was their idea to hang these dummies over Porteus Hall. It was a fantastic press dramatis personae.

See, and once that happens, then they're on their own. Then I'm on to my next generation because I only have a couple years with the students. So, is it wonderful? Yes. Is it empowering? Yes. 

I'm so tired of that word because people use it, but they don't do it. They say to students, "You need to be empowered," or "I empower my students." No, no, no = empowerment means empowerment. It doesn't mean lecturing. So, I see myself as giving what kūpuna(6) give, what elders give. Wisdom, experience, love, support. Just keep going, you guys. Just keep going. And it works.

And they only have such a short time here, and then they're gone. I also encourage them to go to graduate school. Figure out more things, get scholarships. I'm constantly raising money for them or trying to with the legislature. 

Then our third go-around was taking students from the campus to the legislature. Oh, that fun. Figuring out who's the chair of the committee and packing his office. So, he locked himself in his own office. He wouldn't come out because all the press was there. So, we kept pounding on the door and pounding on the door, and finally he came out in sort of his puffed up, arrogant sense, and it didn't matter. Students don't care. So, he started to say something, and they were screaming and yelling and screaming and yelling at him, and there they were on the evening news. They just loved it. The bill was killed for tuition waiver, and they went and filled up a room, a committee room, held the two Senate chairs hostage, screamed and yelled at them and said, "We want that bill alive! We want that bill alive!" And they just refused to move. So, they got seven signatures and the bill stayed alive. The legislature did not kill that bill until 12 o'clock midnight when the legislature expired, because everybody was so afraid of the students. 

So, that's my idea of what the word empowerment means. It doesn't mean standing in class and using the word "empowerment."

Notes

(1) Modern Hawaiian History class: (HWST 390: Issues in Modern Hawaiʻi) This course analyzes political issues in Hawaiʻi ranging from the 1893 overthrow to the present sovereignty movement from the Native perspective. Themes include colonialism, racism, Native resistance, Native rights, and sovereignty. Topics include analyses of corporate-based tourism, the U.S. military, Hawaiian Home Lands, student organizing, prisons, land struggles, and the United Nations.

(2) Native Hawaiian Chief mascot: Until recently, the official mascot of the University of Hawaiʻi was a racist caricature of a “Native Hawaiian chief” – that is, a student dressed up in a “swollen muscle suit,” styrofoam helmet, and brightly colored (polyester) cape, strutting around at sports games. Only after years of Native Hawaiian student protests and a change in the football coaching ranks did the university finally retire the mascot. Echoing the cruel and demeaning depictions of Native Americans as sports mascots and logos on the U.S. continent, settler institutions in Hawaiʻi like the university commodify Native Hawaiians and their culture, history, and politics for their settler use and profits.

(3) Preventing increased tuition: Native Hawaiian students led a protest against rising tuition costs for all students, and support for tuition waivers for Native Hawaiian students. The arguments they presented were based on a wide range of facts and arguments:

Fact: Hawaiians are 23% of students in the public school system. But on the [U.H.] Manoa campus, Hawaiians are only 8.8% of the students. Is this because our people don’t have money to pay for tuition?

Fact: 25% of Hawaiians attending [U.H.] Manoa drop out by the end of their second year for reasons including tuition costs.

Fact: The graduation rate for Hawaiians in the UH system with a four-year degree is only 48% while the rate is 75% for Japanese, 68% for Chinese, and 62% for Filipinos. Is the high cost of education preventing Hawaiians from graduating?

The University of Hawai‘i controls 16,000 acres of valuable ceded lands on all islands. Hawaiians have never received any benefits from those ceded lands. Why doesn’t UH waive tuition for Hawaiians as partial payment for their use of ceded lands?

(Hawaiian tuition waiver fact sheet. Center for Hawaiian Studies, 1999.)

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If UH can waive tuition for foreign students, for the mascot, band and orchestra, and, of course, for the athletes, then why not for native students? Since no money changes hands for these existing categories of waivers, why must money change hands for Hawaiians?

Is it because free tuition for Hawaiians acknowledges and thus attempts to repair the wrong done at the overthrow - a wrong that includes stolen lands that UH now occupies? Is it because in this alleged paradise, there is continuing and unrecognized injustice against the native people of Hawaii?

(Excerpt from Haunani-Kay Trask. "Hawaiian Students Deserve Free Tuition at UH." Honolulu Star Bulletin, April 9, 1999.

(4) Stanley Porteus (1883-1972): Australian psychologist and faculty member at the University of Hawaiʻi, most well known for his controversial and racist arguments regarding human intelligence, including his 1926 study Temperament and Race. In this work Porteus asserted that races had measurable and hierarchical differences in intelligence and “social adaptability.” The University of Hawaiʻi as a settler institution honored Porteus by designating the social science building in his name. After years of student protests, the last and most successful by Native Hawaiian students, the building was renamed "Saunders Hall."

(5) Student action for the renaming of Porteus Hall: In November of 1997, a group of Native Hawaiian students protested the naming of the social science building after UH faculty member, Stanley Porteus. The students hung life-sized dummies over the edge of Porteus Hall where each dummy represented one of the different races in Hawaiʻi. The large signs read "ABOVE ALL NATIONS HUMANITY" (the motto of the University of Hawaiʻi) and "END RACISM AT UH NOW."

(6) Kūpuna: an ancestor; an elder.