Haunani-Kay Trask : REFLECTION QUESTION 7 : How do you feel about your work as an educator at this point of your life?

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Transcript

It's very comfortable getting older, I have to say. You don't have to worry about all those things that, in retrospect, were so critical that if they hadn't gone the right way you wouldn't be doing this. Like getting a job, getting tenure. Once you do that, it's the greatest job on Earth. They cannot fire me. God knows they've tried often enough, but they can't. They can't fire me. To make your living being an intellectual. I mean Marx(1) didn't do that. Hồ Chí Minh(2) didn't do that. Rosa Luxemburg(3) didn't do it…I mean they beat Rosa Luxemburg to death, the fascists. I'm a tenured professor and every time I walk into a classroom I'm getting paid to do an analysis of my people's situation. And 90% of my class is Hawaiian. That's why they tried to fire me!

Notes

(1) Karl Marx (1818-1883): German philosopher, economist, and revolutionary, his most widely known works were written with Friedrich Engels - The Communist Manifesto (1848) and Das Kapital (1867-1894) - in which history is analyzed as a result of contradictory economic forces and the resulting war between the ruling classes and the subordinated classes.

(2) Hồ Chí Minh (1890-1969): Vietnamese revolutionary, nationalist, and first president of North Vietnam (1954-1969). His army defeated France in the French Indochina War (1946-1954), and later the United States and the U.S.-backed government in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War (1954-1975).

(3) Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919): A German socialist and revolutionary, Luxembourg fled Poland for Switzerland in 1889 to avoid imprisonment for her political views. In 1898, she moved to Germany and soon became an influential member within the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). She participated in the Russian Revolution of 1905 and later cofounded the Spartacists, the organization which would later become the German Communist Party. She took part in an uprising against the German government in 1919, for which she was arrested and later murdered by German troops. Her written works include The Accumulation of Capital (1913) and The War and the Workers (The Junius Pamphlet) (1916).