Community engagement in Indigenous self-determination in Hawai’i entered a transformative phase in 2000, when a movement for cultural values-driven Indigenous education began spreading across the archipelago. What started with a group of families refusing to send their Hawaiian-speaking preschoolers to racist district schools grew into the first K-12 charter school using a bilingual model centered on Hawaiian cultural worldviews. This evolved into a network of thirteen schools serving diverse communities. NewStories Co-Director Zanette Johnson was part of that initial group, playing a key role in developing the K-12 learning experience, indigenous assessment programs, bilingual publishing, and co-founding an Indigenous teacher education program. The movement’s success highlighted the importance of growing and connecting without scaling or standardizing, instead nurturing local uniqueness. Despite intense pressure from conventional institutions to suppress the movement, twenty-five years later, nearly every corner of Hawai’i’s Department of Education has begun to value place-based cultural understandings for all learners.
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