Indigenous leaders study resource management on campus
First Nations’ Futures Institute fellows, from left, Esther Kia’aina, Aimee Kaio, Noelani Lee and Kari Austin ladled stew onto their plates at a dinner held for the fellows last week at the Native American Cultural Center, which, with the Woods Institute for the Environment, hosted the 11 young indigenous leaders.
BY LOUIS BERGERON
It's a truism that no man is an island, but increasingly, it seems, no island is an island.
As more of the world's economic and environmental problems become global in scale, no place is beyond reach, regardless of the immensity of its moat.
For indigenous island peoples who were first buffeted by an expanding Western civilization several centuries ago, simple survival in today's increasingly complex world is even more challenging than for those raised in its industrialized cradles.
To enhance their modern-day survival skills, a group of young leaders from indigenous populations in Hawaii and New Zealand recently convened on the Stanford campus as fellows of the First Nations' Futures Program, hosted by the Woods Institute for the Environment and the Native American Cultural Center.
"We have to broaden the leadership pool within our communities," said Neil Hannahs, a native Hawaiian and Stanford alumnus who is one of three directors of the program. "The fact that we may have existed for a thousand or two thousand years doesn't really give us comfort and assurance that we're going to exist in perpetuity."
Both Maoris (indigenous New Zealanders) and indigenous Hawaiians are faced with balancing the growing environmental issues of their lands and waters with the need for enough economic development to keep their people financially solvent, among other needs.
"In all statistics—education, health, housing—we're the bottom of the pile," said RangiMarie Takurua, one of 11 fellows in the program this year, summing up some of the challenges the Maori are facing. Takurua has worked in economic development for more than 15 years and now runs a consultancy specializing in assisting Maori organizations. Like all the fellows, she was chosen by her people to attend the program based on her past accomplishments and future potential.
The first part of the program, an institute held at Stanford, brought the fellows together with business and academic leaders, along with experts in communication and environmental and development issues, for a series of talks and workshops.
Topics included business case studies in both the developing and developed worlds, along with sessions covering interacting with the media, dealing with nongovernmental organizations, scientifically assessing marine resources and achieving sustainability. Some of the sessions and workshops involved Stanford students, including Mehana Vaughan, a doctoral candidate in the Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources in the School of Earth Sciences and a native Hawaiian, who was sponsored by the Native American Cultural Center as one of this year's fellows.
"This program offered a lot on the business and economics side," said Noelani Lee, executive director of a nonprofit organization on Molokai in charge of two large fishponds, each about 30 acres in size. Lee said her enhanced business acumen will make her a more capable director and better able to consider different approaches to achieving sustainability for her organization.
The emphasis on economics "gave us a pretty black-and-white reality check about how the rest of the world is thinking," said Jamie Tuuta, who has been involved in tribal governance for the past 12 years, since he was 18 years old. "Often we hole up in our little world and we don't even realize what's happening more globally." One of Tuuta's current challenges is helping assess a carbon emissions trading plan for the Maori organization dealing with the New Zealand government's climate change policy.
Now in its second year, the First Nations' Futures Program is a joint venture of the Kamehameha Schools in Hawaii and Te Runanga o Ngai Tahu, an organization of Maori tribes of the southern islands of New Zealand, charged in part with administering the lands, fisheries and other assets acquired in a 1992 settlement with the New Zealand government that compensated the tribes for past treaty violations.
Kamehameha Schools, a nonprofit organization charged with educating children of Hawaiian ancestry, is where the idea for the program was born. In the 1990s, the school was seeking new ways to further its mission. Hannahs, who is director of the schools' Land Assets Division—which oversees the 347,000 acres bequeathed to the schools in 1884 by the last of the Hawaiian royal family, Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop—volunteered to be part of the team planning new strategies.
The quest for new approaches prompted the schools to join with the Maori tribal organization for the southern islands in creating a program to enhance leadership skills among both their peoples, with an eye on sustainable and responsible development of their natural resources, incorporating traditional values.
Hannahs knew of the growing emphasis at Stanford on the environment and diversity, and got the Woods Institute interested. In collaboration with the University of Hawaii-Manoa, Kamehameha Schools, Te Runanga o Ngai Tahu and Stanford created the academic consortium behind the first part of the program, the First Nations' Futures Institute. Instrumental in the project was Peter Vitousek, the Clifford G. Morrison Professor in Population and Resource Studies in Stanford's Department of Biological Sciences, who had been doing field research on some of the land that Hannahs oversees.
"He's been very receptive to reciprocal enlightenment," Hannahs said of Vitousek, who is also a program director and was born in Hawaii. "[He's] eager to learn things that may come out of our culture or our other knowledge that help him better understand what he's trying to understand in his quest. We respect not only his academic work but his values, his heart."
"[Stanford] thought having a relationship through this program with indigenous peoples had the potential to change Stanford, change how things are looked at there," said Mawae Morton, the third director of the program. "It was just a great honor to hear that. They value what we brought; we value what they brought. It's been a very rich relationship." Morton, originally from New Zealand, is strategic resources manager for Kamehameha Schools.
That appreciation for traditional knowledge is critical, Hannahs said. "We have an environmental crisis that really cries out for the kinds of sustainability values that are reflected in our culture."
"How we treat our environment is how we treat each other," said Lee, whose Molokai nonprofit, Ka Honua Momona, translates as "the bountiful earth."
"Our sea is a reflection of how healthy the mountains are. If our mountains are mismanaged, then the silt comes down in heavy rains and floods our ponds and covers our rocks and there is no algae produced for the fish to eat," she said. "We see that as analogous to the health of Hawaiians today."
"We're not unrealistic enough to think we can just go back to our old ways and it'll be all right. We've got to live in this world," Takurua said. "We know in today's world, if you haven't got money, you've got no power, no sway."
Reflecting on the value of the institute to implementing her future projects, she added, "I haven't got all the answers here, but I've got some tools that I didn't have before. This is just another set of tools that may help us to come up with those visions and then follow it all the way down to the actual action, get it going on the ground."
Applying the knowledge gained at the institute is emphasized in two field projects, in which the fellows will tackle problems in communities in Hawaii and New Zealand over the coming months and report back next year on the experience. This year, two fellows returned to report the results of working on a sustainable tourism project in Hawaii and a water project in New Zealand.
Hannahs says the real hope of everyone involved with the program is that for the fellows in the program it is just the beginning. He envisions the fellows staying in touch with each other and developing networks that include the other professionals they meet through the program.
Hannahs' eventual hope is to "see people of indigenous cultures rise to levels of ability and stature where they can be the heads of the Department of the Interior, World Wildlife Fund, Nature Conservancy, U.S. Fish and Wildlife, Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment. Wouldn't that be wonderful?"
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