We are very excited to welcome Kyle Hart to our Ka Wai Hāpai Project Team! Kyle is joining our team as a Research Assistant to help formulate our remaining activities and project documentation before we wrap up on July 31, 2023. In my role as Librarian for the Kamakakūokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies, I have known Kyle for several years as he progressed through his undergraduate and graduate studies. Kyle’s background in lāhui-centered research and his general thoughtful approach to research and community engagement will be great supports to our project. We’re all looking forward to working with him! To learn more about Kyle, check out our brief interview below!
KL: Aloha e Kyle! Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
KBH: Aloha nō! I am a Hawaiʻi transplant from Turtle Island who was born on ancestral Yokuts and Chumash land. I’ve received an AA from Honolulu Community College and my BA and MA from UH Mānoa, all in Hawaiian Studies. Although my family’s connection to the natural world and any specific place was forgotten many generations ago, here in Hawaiʻi, I’m working alongside my Kamaʻāina peers who have given me a community and a place to call home, to forge Kanaka futurities while building my own connections to ʻāina as a hoa ʻāina. My journey as a Hawaiian Studies practitioner has been the most fulfilling thing that I’ve ever experienced, and I count myself fortunate to be sustained both physically and spiritually by Hawaiʻi nei <3
KL: Welcome to Ka Wai Hāpai! You’ve officially been on the project now for 2 weeks. In that short amount of time, you’ve done a lot! Consultation meeting, in-person team meeting, project website editing, all the onboarding, etc. What has it been like for you to join the project, especially considering we’ve only got 9 weeks left until the project ends?
KBH: You know, there was definitely a lot to catch up on and learn in a relatively short amount of time, however, the entire team has been so gracious and welcoming. What I’ve really appreciated is how nobody expected me to understand 100% of what was going on in the first couple weeks (I dare say this would have been impossible). Everyone’s patience took so much of the pressure off, which really helped to create an optimal learning environment for someone new coming in, even at the tail-end of the project.
KL: What are your first impressions of this work to create a Hawaiian knowledge organization system, bi-lingual authority records, and ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi controlled vocabularies?
KBH: If you had asked me a month ago what system is used to organize books in Hamilton Library (or any university library), I would have said Dewey decimal system. I had such a rudimentary knowledge-base of library sciences, and it’s just not something you encounter a lot out in the wild unless you seek it out. This is a problem, I now realize. I never thought about library organization as human knowledge organization. In the few short weeks that I’ve been a part of this project, I’ve come to realize that library scientists are responsible for mapping how we, as humans, conceptualize the world around us; and if that knowledge system is organized according to foreign thought processes, as is the case here in Hawaiʻi, then we exist in a place where still-extant epistemes are relegated to labelings such as “Mythology” and “Folklore.” Knowledge colonization is an especially sinister form of colonization.
KL: Looking ahead, what would you say you’re most excited about in the weeks to come?
KBH: Hands down, I’m most excited about some of these names that I see on the guest list for the upcoming roundtable, Aia I Laila Ka Wai A Kāne. There are so many minds that Iʻve admired from afar as a Hawaiian Studies student, and to know that I will be in a room with them, listening to their ʻike, is amazing.
