Brown Bag Biography with Derek Taira

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The Center for Biographical Research presents: / “Imua Me Ka Hopo Ole - Kānaka ‘Ōiwi Survivance and Colonial Education in Territorial Hawai‘i, 1900–1941” / Derek Taira, PhD, Historian of Education and 20th Century Hawai‘i and US, Department of Educational Administration, College of Education, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, and Affiliate Faculty, Center for Pacific Island Studies and Indigenous Politics Program, Department of Political Science / Based off the book, Forward, Without Fear, this talk will discuss how Native Hawaiians in the first forty years of the territorial period (1900–1959) imagined a different existence in their present and a different path for their future. Taira will explain how many Native Hawaiians of this era neither subscribed nor succumbed to the aggressive efforts in the public schools to assimilate and Americanize, but actively engaged with American education to help envision and support an alternate future in which they intentionally sought to exclude themselves from settler society in order to maintain their cultural distinctiveness and protect their Indigenous identity. Framing their engagement with public schooling in this way places great emphasis on how they would have understood their actions—as flexible and productive steps for securing their cultural sovereignty and safeguarding their future as Native Hawaiians. Doing so reshapes historical understanding of this era as one solely focused on settler colonial domination, oppression, and elimination to a more balanced and optimistic narrative that identifies and highlights Indigenous endurance, resistance, and hopefulness. / Derek Taira is a historian of education and 20th century Hawai‘i and U.S. in the Department of Educational Administration at the College of Education here at the University of Hawai‘i-Mānoa. He is from Kailua-Kona and received a joint PhD in U.S. history and educational policy studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. / Cosponsored by Hamilton Library, Conflict and Peace Specialist, Hui ʻĀina Pilipili: Native Hawaiian Initiative, the School of Communication & Information, the School of Cinematic Arts, and the Departments of American Studies, Anthropology, English, Ethnic Studies, History, Political Science, and Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies / Thursday, October 17 / Kuykendall 410 / 12PM to 1:15PM HST

Event Sponsor
Center for Biographical Research, Mānoa Campus

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