Kuʻi ʻai (pounding taro) with our Nohoʻana family was always fun and fulfilling
My practical experiences working on a taro farm during the summers of 2015 and 2016 shaped my values and goals. Working there brought feelings of connection and I saw a direct impact on my community. It has been my favorite place to discover new ideas and things about myself. Back at Smith, I tried to maintain that feeling of connectedness to the land community. I looked at pictures I took, watched videos of people pounding and harvesting taro, and kept myself updated about political movements ensuring the rights of taro farmers were upheld.
A portion of Wailuku River before a 100-year flood event that occurred this past September of 2016. I would spend time here reflecting on the day’s work and rejuvenate my body in the cold waters.
All of this was not a part of me before, and now it is one of the biggest aspects of my life and I firmly believe in the perpetual need for activism to uphold the rights of farmers to practice traditional methods of farming. At Smith, I learned to analyze power dynamics, ask questions about my place within cultural structures, and to critique the world around me. Equally as important, I learned how to use my own skills to impact others. Even though being far away from home made me feel frustrated and homesick, I began to ask myself how I can manage my studies in a way that would inform my own goals and values.
Our solid group of summer 2016 interns with our mentor. From left to right: Noelani Reyes, Hōkūao Pellegrino (mentor), Kealohalani Kaaikala.
I had to go to Hampshire College to take a U.S. Imperialism & Hawaiʻi course because there were no Hawaiian studies courses offered at Smith. However, there were other courses at Smith that directly related to my interests and the concentration: Gender, Land, and Food Movements and Intro to GIS (Geographic Information Systems). In these courses, I was fully invested in the work and became especially attached to GIS projects because it allows you to synthesize and present spatial data and images alongside more descriptive data. At Smith, GIS was used to create StoryMaps, which can be used to present complex data to a variety of audiences.
ʻUlu (breadfruit) was another traditional staple food that holds symbolic meanings of abundance and prosperity.
One interesting story about GIS happened this past summer. I was with internship colleagues representing traditional agriculture at a STEM conference. I saw in presentations by real estate and sugar companies GIS being used to present the ways they were colonizing and appropriating land. Their maps were very simple and did not tell dynamic stories, but the young presenters were seen as being innovative and tech-savvy. I realized that I knew how to use this tool because I learned it at Smith. I decided to dedicate my senior year to improve my GIS knowledge so that I could come up with creative uses of GIS to resist the corporate use and represent the farmers’ interests in an equally tech-savvy but more creative way. When I returned after my internship, I worked with professor Lisa Armstrong to develop a special studies. I wanted to use spatial data alongside historical documents and information to tell a story about where I work and the deeper issues that are connected to the experience. We created a StoryMap to tell the story of how sugar business has negatively affected taro farmers and taro farming practices since the 1800s. This spring, I will do several public presentations of this project.
My goals at this point are to try internships that allow me to use my GIS creativity, constructing StoryMaps for different organizations and agencies to be able to teach and educate others. I am also interested in law and activism for low-income communities to advocate for access to farming traditional foods and healthy agricultural practices.