Some Manaʻo to my Younger Self: Remarks for College Horizons 2026

I came to xučyun in search of Indigenous abundance and rightful presence in higher education. This search has led me to opportunities to share about my journey to this place and all the teachers that have helped me design what has felt to be a self-determined life. It is a journey that now includes Hekšen (Little Quail), a rematriated land site stewarded by Sogorea Te’ Land Trust in present-day Albany.

My first teacher is my home community Nānākuli. It remains a rural, majority-Native Hawaiian residential community with a reputation for raising strong, stubborn, resourceful, and family-oriented people. While outsiders often perpetuate a deficit perspective about Nānākuli, I know it to be a place of goodness and strength. Nānākuli is said to be a home to the god Maui and his mother Hina. One of the prominent mountains in Nānākuli Puʻu Heleakalā (path of the rising sun) received its name because this is the mountain where Maui ran to the summit, lassoed the sun, and pulled with all his might to slow the sun’s journey so that our days might be longer. For this reason, Nānākuli Valley is known as the valley of the giants, the valley where gods like Maui and Hina live among us. Nānākuli taught me a lot about my own strength, about strength of character, integrity, and perseverance and about the strength of community during good times and bad times. While being away from Nānākuli is always hard and was difficult when I moved to the continental U.S. for college and work, I carry its teachings with me wherever I go and talk about this community that strengthened me and helped me persist in my educational journey.

My second teacher is my family, koʻu ʻohana. I am the only child of Laureen Tauʻa of Nānākuli and Kyle Kawano of Hilo, and I was raised with a ton of cousins in a multigenerational household for the first 10 years of my life. This close, kin-based living not only brought a lot of joy and chaos but also taught me about interdependence and shared responsibility. I am especially indebted to my maternal grandmother Laura Kauakahekili Kealoha Tauʻa for impressing upon me a love for genealogy, history, and research. My grandmother never finished high school, but she was our family historian who self-educated in Hawaiian history and raised her grandchildren to be curious and creative individuals. In the early 2000s, she conducted research on the 1897 Anti-Annexation petitions, and she meticulously went through hundreds of pages of handwritten signatures to identify the ancestors who signed the petitions in support of the Hawaiian Kingdom. Finding her research affirmed the importance of family history and intergenerational wisdom and encouraged me to continue centering Indigenous stories in my own work.

The third teacher are my schools, koʻu mau kula, and all the people and places that I have been privileged to learn from. I am a proud graduate of a Hawaiian-focused K–12 school in Kapālama, Oʻahu, a predominantly white institution in Abenaki territory with a modern commitment to admit and graduate Indigenous students, and a public university in Tovaangar, or present-day Los Angeles. From my K–12 schooling, I formed a foundation in Hawaiian history and culture and a Native Hawaiian identity. From my undergraduate education at Dartmouth College, I came to form an identity as an Indigenous woman through community organizing and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Department, and from my graduate education, I formed my scholarly identity as a critical race resistance scholar in education.

My schooling journey also brought me into professional spaces that helped me envision what it might look like to give back to Indigenous communities. During the summer before my senior year of college, I participated in a Native student internship program with the College Board out in Lenape territory, and this is where I first crossed paths with Kendall Harvey, Monica Sekaquaptewa, Megan Tom, and learned about their firsthand experiences with College Horizons. After college, I was a public high school English teacher, and I taught culturally relevant curriculum to Native and non-native students on Hawai‘i Island. Lastly, since 2021, I’ve volunteered with HONUA Scholars, a Hawai‘i-based STEM education organization founded by high school classmates to improve the retention of Indigenous students in STEM fields.

In my current work at the Berkeley School of Education, I study family relations, Hawaiian culture-based education, and social change through an Indigenous and critical race theoretical perspective. I do this type of work to document everyday reminders of our people’s survival and cultural continuation. Having attended Hawaiian-focused schools since preschool, I position Hawaiian views of teaching and learning at the core of my work and my reason for conducting culture-based education research. During a time when dominant narratives about Indigenous ways are cast as outdated or extinct, when professors or peers might associate our Indigeneity with the past, my research amplifies Emalani Case’s (2021) wisdom that everything ancient was once new, that many of our people’s creations, values, and skills are still relevant for today’s context. I think about pilina, relationships, being the very root of all the personal and professional connections that have helped me transition from high school graduate to college graduate to professor. I think about pono, balance, ensuring we take care of our bodies, minds, spirits, and hearts in school and beyond. Piko‘u, our sense of purpose, in knowing that centering our culture and communities is what helps us show up as our full selves, and hoʻihi, respect, for people and place. These values, while ancient, were once new, and today, they are as important as they were for our ancestors.

Over the years, I’ve come to recognize this truth, that for students, you may not remember everything your teachers taught you, but you will remember how they treated you. One of my close friends from kindergarten and I still talk about an interaction with a high school counselor who told us our dreams of becoming medical doctors was too difficult for us. While I ended up becoming a different kind of doctor, this friend persisted in spite of this counselor’s treatment of our dreams, and today, she is the first Native Hawaiian neurosurgeon resident. A gratitude I have from my teachers is that they not only believed in me, they told me they believed in me. This is the kind of love and care that I hope to model for students, and it is my sincere hope that all of our students here know that we believe in you.

I was raised by a single mother who entered the workforce right out of high school, and I would tell my younger self to be more patient and extend more grace because of the financial literacy learning curve. I remember getting frustrated when I had to do the paperwork for financial aid, and I really should have been grateful because she was willing to take out loans to cover the parent portion of my schooling. I also wish I extended more appreciation for her unconditional support, for never imposing any restrictions on what I could study and what career path I could pursue. And third, I wish I extended more invitations for her to participate in campus life. She only came to campus twice, once to drop me off and then when I graduated and moved out. I wish I had invited her in to learn more about the life that I had built at Dartmouth and UCLA and the spaces that shaped the woman that I became.

I encourage students to prioritize the people and place over the name of these institutions. A remark that has always stuck with me was by a Black American graduate student at UCLA who shared that she decided to attend an HBCU because she refused to apply to institutions that would have rejected her ancestors simply because they were Black. As someone who prioritized the elite names and ranking in high school, I really admire this perspective and I encourage similar refusals that may actually benefit our young people’s college experiences. A second wish is for our students who choose to attend schools outside their ancestral homelands to remember that your responsibilities to community do not stop when you are in college. Your institution occupies the lands and waters of another nation. What might you do to contribute to their goals for nationhood and sovereignty while you are a settler in their territory? And finally, in times when you are in need of mentorship and care, I encourage you to hana ka lima i lalo, turn the hands down by showing up at community events, hands-on learning opportunities, and time outdoors with our more-than-human relatives. That, for me, has made all the difference in my learning and teaching journey.