Alaiyah, Arianie, Dili, Isaiah, Kalani, Merick Dave, Radman, Triccie, and Venyete are students in Clover Park High School’s Upward Bound program at Pierce College. Upward Bound is a nation-wide pre-college program that serves students from low-income families and students who will be first generation college attendees. This year, the Clover Park/Pierce College summer program blends language-learning, English, science, math, and culture, loosely organized around the theme of “wayfinding.” I’ve been getting to know these high school scholars because while I am a Master’s student at SMEA, I’m also an English professor at Pierce College where one of my roles is teaching in this Upward Bound program where we’re focusing on culturally inflected storytelling.

This summer, the Upward Bound students are taking a class about Indigenous wayfinding with Sui-lan Hookano, an Indigenous Hawaiian cultural practitioner and educator.  In this context,“wayfinding” is both a very literal and sweepingly metaphorical term. The students are learning traditional Hawaiian navigation and survival strategies, and they are thinking about how these skills, and the culture and traditions surrounding them, can help them to best navigate their own lives and educations, including their experiences learning about STEM. When I invited these students to coauthor a piece about the experiences of minoritized students in high school STEM education, they didn’t want to talk about hardship or obstacles–they wanted to talk about the way that science has come to life for them this summer in their wayfinding course. Their words appear below as a single, continuous narrative that has been edited for length and clarity.

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Learning about wayfinding this summer has helped us to articulate what is missing from our typical science classes and personal lives: immersion in nature, adventure, and agency as we navigate our own curiosities and academic paths, while being in our relationship with the aiana land and water.  As we were writing this piece, we asked our instructor Sui-lan what she hoped we would learn about ourselves from her wayfinding lessons. Here’s what she told us:

“I think in learning the most important takeaways are for the students to discover they have the ability to create a world that values who they are, understanding what you contribute matters. To understand and feel a symbiotic relationship to everything and all that is around us and to find your place within that…understanding the journey is more than just ourselves and being good stewards as we navigate together.”

The way we have been learning about wayfinding is embedded in the way we have learned about Indigenous Hawaiian culture.  We’ve learned about life on the canoe by learning the meanings of a series of ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi words. These words relate both to the practice of wayfinding, and to the culture and philosophy of which it is an inherent part.

We practiced the words that Sui-lan shared with us, delved deeper into their meanings, and then, on a sunny summer morning, gathered at Foss Landing in Tacoma to launch our canoes and to put our learning into action on the water. Usually Indigenous Hawaiian canoes of this type consist of a “kino,” the canoe shell in which six of us would sit, and an “ama,” or outrigger float, stabilizing the canoe for oceanic travel. For our voyage, instead of binding a kino to an ama with two “iako,” or wooden arms, we lashed two kinos together, so we would stabilize each other in a double haul. Below are the words we built our wayfinding community around. Behind every word are values and lessons. We invite our readers to explore these values and lessons to connect the core subject of this piece to the following descriptions of wayfinding vocabulary.

Laulima: “Lau” means “four hundred” and “lima” means “hands.” When these meanings are combined in “laulima,” they express the value of having a community, a team of people around you to lean on when times are tough.

Laulima is about drawing people together. In its most literal context, wayfinding by canoe requires laulima because no one person can carry a four or six person outrigger to the water, let alone paddle it.  But when an entire team of paddlers carry and then paddle the canoe, it feels almost weightless.

Laulima has a place in both our academic and personal lives. If we apply this concept from wayfinding to our science education, it aligns with the values of project-based, immersive learning. We want to learn in and from authentic community members. We want to work on projects that are bigger than what we could accomplish alone.  We can also apply what we’ve learned about laulima to other aspects of our lives, and the ways in which we’ve come to recognize that we thrive when we can support and align with each other.  For example, when we first went into quarantine we needed each other’s help keeping everyone safe and healthy during a pandemic.

He wa’a he moku he moku he wa’a:  “The essence of the canoe is an island, and the island is a canoe.”

We understand the meaning of this phrase to be that we should care for each other on the island in the same way as we care for each other on the canoe, being mindful that we are together, that we are one, and being mindful of our resources so we sustain ourselves.  We advocate for STEM education that is responsive to these values, and which extends care for classmates to a broader framework which is responsive and accountable to our communities and their values.

Mālama:  “Taking care of each other, even of people we don’t know.”

We need mālama to preserve our peoples, cultures, knowledge, and the earth itself.  Mālama is not just a term that applies to historical Indigenous ways of knowing–Mālama invites us to cultivate our cultures within our communities.  Even those of us who are not Indigenous can learn from the concept of mālama as we apply what we’ve learned about wayfinding to the rest of our lives. For the past few weeks we experienced the true meaning of mālama. We took care of each other as we built relationships in our summer program and in life. We learned to utilize the true meaning of mālama and built effective foundations for healthy relationships.

Olakino Maika’i: “Healthy lifestyle; healthy values”

This is a Hawaiian phrase about maintaining a healthy lifestyle and values. In order to mālama the canoe and the people in it, you have to take care of yourself first. Having healthy values allows you to maintain good relationships with other people on the canoe, making it easy for everyone to communicate and work together to get to the destination.

`Imi`Ike: “To hold or pass knowledge.”

We have been learning this word both in the context of how wayfinding knowledge is passed from one generation of Indigenous practitioners to the next, and in the context of how we can learn from Hawaii’s Native people so that we can be better members and build healthy relationships with Native people and communities. Keeping knowledge of what a plant can do for us is an example of `Imi`Ike, but it is much more than that. Learning about Indigenous Hawaiian knowledge opens the door for us to cultivate `Imi`Ike within our own cultures and our own communities.  `Imi`Ike keeps us human. We would like to learn about science in ways that incorporate our humanity and values or no human relatives as well. This goes back to our symbiotic relationship to everything and all that is around us.

Kuleana: “Responsibility, the relationship between the person and the trust that is given to them”.

Hawaiians use this word as a reciprocal relationship to their land and what the land can provide to them. For instance, Hawaiian people would take care, preserve, and respect the land. In return, the land will supply needs to the Hawaiian people. This “give and take” dynamic sustains a balanced relationship among the community and the natural surroundings.

Loko Maika`i: “Our kuleana to maintain and nourish the things we already know.”

All students are teachers, and the inverse is also true–our teachers must recognize that they are learners too, and that they can learn from our stories.  We all tell stories, whether they’re from our own experiences, or whether they’re stories we’ve learned from others. The stories we learn and the stories we tell will shape the generations after us. We are advocating for STEM education that centers the wealth of cultural knowledge that each of us possesses, instead of marginalizing this wisdom.

Na`au Pono: “Na`au” means intuition, that gut feeling. To be “pono” is to do good to and for all, to be balanced and understanding. Together, this means following our instinct for the betterment of ourselves and our environment.

This isn’t just for people, but for the earth and our non-human relatives. Listening to our instincts is something we need to tap into by connecting with the natural world around us. Throughout much of our education, we’ve learned about science as if it were separate from, or even opposed to, Na`au Pono.  We believe that science and Na`au Pono must be brought back together again, that they are parts of a whole.

Wa’a: Canoe.

The canoe lets us travel, learning about the world and ourselves. We hope our STEM learning can be our metaphorical wa’a.

Wayfinding is not only about life on the canoe but about how the wisdom we learned on the water translates to the ways we live our modern lives. What we’ve learned already has made us curious to keep learning even more. We’ve started asking ourselves questions like, “What will I do if I’m on a hike by myself and I get lost?” and, “What can the plants along the trail do for me in times of need?” As summer ends and we return to our classrooms this fall, our hope is that we can bring our interests and our urgency along with us.  As we find our own ways through high school and towards college, we’ll know how to support each other if we get lost or struggle along the way.

When we first climbed into our wa’a, we worried that it would be unstable. It took us a while to sync our paddle strokes to each other’s, to learn when to switch sides, what to say when we needed everyone else to pick up the slack while we rested.  But as we paddled, we started to figure things out. We started gliding swiftly. Around us, seals arched in and out of the water.  A bald eagle soared overhead as we traveled out of the constricted waterway and towards the ocean.

Authors’ note: We want the audience to know that this is a shortened version of what we experienced, which was more and deeper than could be transcribed on this blog.  This project has inspired us to continue sharing our stories via a blog of our own. It is currently under construction, but will be available here soon: upward.piercedigitaldesign.com.