“I was born into captivity, a Native person in a non-Native world, a Hawaiian in an American colony.

In my own work, resistance to the strangulation of our people and culture is interwoven with

a celebration of the magnificence of our nation: the lavish beauty of our delicate islands;

the intricate relationship between our emotional ties to each other and our ties to the land ….

What we have lost, as a Hawaiian people and as a Hawaiian nation,

shapes my vision and provides the contest for all I write.

De-colonization is all around us.

My work could not exist outside this context nor would I want to write in any other.

We do not need, nor do we want to be “liberated” from our past because

it is the source of our understanding of the cosmos and of our mana”

Haunani Kay Trask.

After reading “This could be the most secure password” (Stifferlin, 2014) I screwed up my face, thinking this is silly. What do we have that needs to be so secure and if we do have things that need this kind of security who is it serving? I’m sure people want to secure things but to what extent?

After reflecting on this article, I thought what if we got students finger prints scanned as being present in class (thinking about tertiary level). The data would allow us to see how well the attendance rates are in classes. This then could lead to research focusing on retention and students performance based on attendance.

If you have an opinion about my questions above please leave a comment.

“We travelled the vast Pacific, the science and methodology is hailed by all scholars as one of the greatest feats of mankind. We traversed the Pacific; a quarter of the globe, and discovered so many of these countries and populated them.

We have an achievement that is now generally recognized … our main problem is to sell it to our own people in order for them to regain and rediscover their self-respect … so more than anything else what we need is to promote self-respect amongst our children. Self-respect can only come from a belief and a wanting, a solace, a refuge in what is meaningful to us: our history, our culture, our stories.

My main mission is to make our values and our poetry speak again to us and to our children … and I need help. I need you to engage in this and to carry the torch, so that by the time God says “come up here,” when I go there I’ll have better accounting to the people who are waiting for me than I would have if I’d done nothing”

His Highness Tui Atua Tupua Tamasese Efi

Hello everyone

I have just created this blog for a short course I’m doing at the University of Auckland. I am a professional staff member and a Master student. I work down at Pasifika Success and I’m looking forward to learning new things so that I can help others and also for my own personal gains. At this moment I’m so excited because this blog makes me feel included.

In the Pacific, it is generally thought that people walk forward into the past and they walk backwards into the future, where the past and future are constantly fused and diffused in the present … this means that the onus of preserving the past and the mapping of the future – whether they be for culture’s sake or the humanity of future generations –rests squarely on our shoulders in the present. Hufanga ‘Okusitino Mahina