 Maika lahi kia kala kau, maika houku iaka hala vai, maika hi kapa, ike kai kapa akua kia honoanei. Kevelina a kia loha ia kakoa pau mahalo nui, noka hale anamai kia kaka kai loha i kia, ho ike ike ho ana auau. E pili ana i kai hana nui a maau au wedi, maki kula kai au luo Ava me wai anai ma'o ahua luo. Noka loli ana o kia kula i mea paa ike kua na ike hava i. Aloha mai kako. My name is Ann Rae Paikai, mahalo nui to everyone for coming this morning to hear about how we are working towards building a native Hawaiian place of learning through indigenisation, OER, and specifically through our lands at the library. As I said, my name is Ann Rae Paikai, so I am a kanaka o iwi or native Hawaiian librarian at Leeward Community College. I was born and raised in California, so away from my homeland or my ancestral homeland. And I found my way back to seek my degree in Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawai'i at Hilo, where I got my Hawaiian Studies and Hawaiian Language degree there, and then I moved over to the University of Hawai'i at Manoa, which is on O'ahu, to get my library and information science degree. Along the way I was trained as a hula practitioner, which has really informed a lot of my understanding and relationship to Hawaiian knowledge, although I'm very out of practice, so please don't ask me to dance. And I'm also a mother and very persistent in how my husband and I raise our family in ensuring that we are returning our keiki, our children back to language learning in their schools and in their experiences and relationship with our la hui aloha or our communities. Aloha. My name is Wade Oshiro. I'm a fourth generation settler descendant from people from Okinawa. I was born and raised in Hawai'i. Culturally I was brought up in a mixture of American as well as Asian Japanese culture. I have degrees in history and library science from the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. And I'm also the first generation in my family to be a college graduate. So we just want to start off our talk with this quote that comes from a recently published article by Siwan Matsuda and Kavena Komeiji who are two staunch aloha aina librarians or la hui warriors, our activists, our advocates in libraries who are native Hawaiian from Hana Maui and Nu'u'u'u'u'u'u'u'u'u'u. They are also our colleagues at the University of Hawai'i system at University of Maui College and University of West Oahu respectively. They are also very close friends and colleagues of mine and have really shaped my understanding of what the intersection between librarianship, specifically Hawaiian librarianship can look like to support our communities in Hawai'i. And this was published in Uproot which is a publishing collective that exists to centre the works and knowledge and experiences of BIPOC within the context of the library and the archives community. So the quote is from this publication. As the saying goes, ignorance is bliss and indeed the ignorance of colonisation and continued occupation of Hawai'i has been a privilege to settlers. And you know these authors spoke specifically in the context of libraries and we know that libraries can reinforce oppression as well as colonisation. And so I think for me this reading this was very impactful as a settler. I understand, I'm beginning to understand more how as a settler I'm complicit in some of the oppression and colonisation that continues to this day. And so what we'll be doing today is sharing kind of our journey within the library especially as how we're going to approach quote-unquote indigenisation of our college. So we're going to just share a bit about our context very briefly. So Leeward Community College is one of seven community college campuses in the state of Hawai'i. We're part of the University of Hawai'i system of colleges and universities. We are the only, UH is the only public system of higher education in Hawai'i. Our main campus is at Pua Loa and it's located in the Ahupoa of Wai Awa. Today this area is known as Pearl City and our campus is just offshore of Pearl Harbor. It's in the centre there. On the far west side we have our Waianae Moku campus which is located in Ahupoa of Lua Lolae and that specific west side of the island is where a high percentage of Hawai'i native Hawaiians live to this day. And so Leeward, we are the largest of the community college campuses in terms of enrollment. We serve a large geographic area of the island of Oahu and we also serve, again, the large population of native Hawaiians. So these are just some numbers about our institution. 25% of our students identify as native Hawaiians and as many community colleges have experienced over the past few years, enrollment has declined, but enrollment for our native Hawai'ian students has dropped by double digits. And I'm not sure if anyone really understands yet why that's happening. So out of our 126 or so full-time instructional faculty, 8.7% of faculty identify as native Hawaiians. So they are very much underrepresented amongst our instructional faculty. I wasn't able to get data about our total employees at Leeward, but I wouldn't imagine it be that much different. Maybe a bit higher percentage of native Hawaiians, but clearly native Hawaiians are underrepresented within our faculty. So briefly about UHCC OER, it's a system-wide initiative covering the seven campuses. And we've run various programs that you probably all run. And so since 2015, when we kind of first got started, we estimate student savings of textbooks in excess of $21 million. Currently, 34% of our campuses, excuse me, courses, are designated TXT0 and TXT0 is our course marker and it stands for textbook cost zero. So it's an affordability course marker, it's not a true OER course marker. And we see about 21,000 registrations every semester in these TXT0 courses. So let me talk about OER at Leeward now. Leeward faculty were early adopters of OER in our system and so that's reflected in some of our numbers. So currently 58% of our instructors teach a TXT0 course. 67% of our instructors teach a TXT0 course. 58% of our classes are marked TXT0 and cost savings are there. So just around $10 million since 2015. So if we examine our OER efforts through the social justice principles outlined by Sarah Lambert, Leeward's OER initiative is strongest in that top tier of redistributive justice through our efforts to remove textbook costs for our students. Now we're going to highlight some of our projects that recognize the diversity of Hawai'i's population that incorporate Native Hawaiian values, culture and knowledge and have Native Hawai'ins as either authors or co-creators. So as we heard from this morning's keynote by Kayla Larson, there are a lot of different varieties of what Indigenous OER looks like and thinking about the difference between about Indigenous folks or from or for Indigenous folks. So this is an example of one of our textbooks that is used for our Hawai'in Studies 107 course which is a huge course in that it is a general education requirement and so many, many students outside of Hawai'in Studies also take this course. And the two authors of this reader are Momi Kama Hale Kumu Momi. She was the first one to start, first faculty member to start our Hawai'in Studies program and really advocated for that to be established at our community college as well as Ku'u Ibolosh, who is one of our first instructors that we had. The two of them between them put together this reader and I actually don't have the year. Oh, it looks like around 2008. So this is prior to any OER efforts and it is a reader. It's a compilation of different readings from various previous Hawai'in Studies classes that are four-year universities and they put it together as a way to move forward the curriculum that happens in Hawai'in Studies 107 which is our basic Hawai'in Studies course covering history, geography, geology, politics, arts, many different things are covered in this course. In 2015, the library approached Kumu Momi and Ku'u Ibol to discuss the possibility of adopting a TXT0 approach to their reader and sort of revamping what they had. And while they were very cordial and open in talking about it, ultimately the decision was to not actually move in that direction. One of the major reasons is because this actually is a funding stream for the Hawai'in Studies department and it became sort of an impact or an implication for the Hawai'in Studies department for us to suddenly move to an OER text or an OER resource because the Hawai'in Studies department, which took a lot to sort of establish in the first place, was able to get a substantial stream of funding from students across disciplines who were taking this course because of the general education requirements. But then in 2021, we recently applied and were granted, our college was granted, a Title III grant entitled Te Loa Ke Aho systemic practices re-envisioned for Native Hawai'in students' success. And the Hawai'in Studies department, aside from major discussion with the library, did write in an OER text as part of that grant project. And so one of the major lessons that we had sort of learned and there was never any bad bloods between our Hawai'in Studies department and our library as a result of this discussion. But one of the major takeaways that we found was that faculty really need to be able to have the agency to determine how, when, and why an OER is going to be established into their courses and the way that they operate. And so it was a really powerful example for us and a learning experience. Another example of some texts that we have been working on is called the Botanian Hawai'i Text, which was established by two instructors in our Math and Science department. This is an introductory botany text that is specific to the Hawai'i context. Now these two instructors, Daniela Dutra-Eliot and Paula Mayha Velasquez, they are settlers and non-Indigenous instructors in our Math and Science department. As far as we know, we have no Indigenous folks that are working in Math and Science right now, which is a shame. However, these two instructors in particular have been, even prior to the development of this text, very intentional about taking their students out onto our land-based and establishing partnerships with our land-based non-profit organisations who are trying to conserve and improve our land in various capacities, whether that's at the lo'i or our taro fields or at some of our forests, our dry forests, our wetland forests and our fish ponds. And so they've been intentional in the way that they build their class prior to this point in incorporating Aina-based or land-based practices. And in doing so, realise their real need to have some sort of a text that aligned with what they were already teaching in their course. That being said, they started to develop this course on their own using their own photos, using drawings that they created and using native Hawaiian students to sort of help and support and guide along some of the chapters in the way that they worked through this text. And they also consulted with me at the library. I am very new to OER, so this is not necessarily something that's actually in the purview of my job. However, they had consulted with me because of my work alongside Wade as well as they consulted with our Hawaiian Council, which is a governing body on our campus. And so it was a really interesting and very successful, in my opinion, example of how OER was implemented in a way that really aligned with our practices through consultation and sort of implementing what they were already doing. Sorry, go ahead, yeah. This last example is a more recent example. This is a report that actually was not developed initially as an OER text. It was a report that was in alignment with our strategic planning activities that we've been doing on our campus at Leeward Community College. There was a need that grew from our administration to do some research on the aina or the land that we actually, our campuses, are on. And so myself, along with a councillor over at the Waianae Moku Campus, Christopher Pokipala, and a student alumni who is currently a PhD student who did his dissertation research on the land that our campus sits as a result of his experience being a student at Leeward Community College, we collaborated to create a report. It's still kind of incompletion. We're still tidying it up. But along the way of doing that, I was approached by Wade and some of our OER folks to sort of turn this into a text and be able to allow this to be implemented as a teaching tool for our faculty and possibly something that they can implement in their courses. And so we're in progress of working on that currently. Okay. And so in thinking and reflecting on how our institution can become a native Hawaiian place of learning, which we'll talk about in just a sec, we recognize that OER is a tool for facilitating Indigenous knowledge and values into course curriculum and institutional practices. And so the examples that we've shown demonstrate OER's potential to uplift traditional knowledge within higher education. And in the future, we're trying to figure out how can we wield this tool of OER in a more intentional way that really helps us to feel as if we are grounding ourselves as a native Hawaiian place of learning. We are working to reform a Western education system. But how can we wield OER, a Western education tool, to help support that effort? So what's driving this change are some new strategic strategic plans. Excuse me. At both Leeward CC, there is a pillar titled Native Hawaiian Place of Learning. And at the UH system level, the first imperative is to fulfill kuleana or responsibility to Native Hawaiians and Hawai'i. And so the library has been on this journey predating the strategic plans and looking at how we can participate in this transformation. And so in that being said, the library really is investigating what does it mean for us to participate in this transformation from a Western-centric model of education to one that's more grounded and indentious-centered and grounded in that kanaka oevi or Native Hawaiian worldview. And so there's a couple of ways that we've started to do that predating these strategic plans and that we hope to align with the strategic plan work that's being done on a broader level. So we do have a EDI committee within the library. And so we've been doing a lot of actually learning. And so learning about, you know, the library as a profession and how it is not neutral, even though oftentimes we say that libraries are neutral. You know, there is this report, and now Pū Report, which was authored by Native Hawaiian librarians, including Anne-Marie, that presented the University of Hawai'i libraries with an administration, excuse me, the entire UH administration as well as libraries. And so for the libraries, they identified 10 recommendations for libraries to implement to make libraries more welcoming spaces because in their research they learned that for Native Hawaiian scholars our libraries and our archives were not considered very welcoming to them. So one of the initial projects that us as the EDI committee were able to initiate was a cross-collaborative project to create a mural for our storefront windows at the library in Learning Commons. And so we were able to provide an opportunity to an art student. Well, the whole class was able to participate, but we ultimately chose this piece of work that was done by one of our art students. And this has been an initiative that helps us to improve the aesthetic of our campus but also uplift the stories of our place. And so this mural is a depiction of our shark deities or our shark gods. These are wahanā. As we talked about, we're on the shores of Pu'ulua, commonly known as Pearl Harbor. Before the military occupation of our Pearl Harbor, we had very, very rich stories of our sharks who lived and protected the people of our area. And we wanted to make sure that this is uplifted by this representative way to show our native Hawaiian students that we know that we are on the shores of Pu'ulua and that these are our stories that we need to be reclaiming and remembering. So in seeking a deeper understanding of the historical origins of inequities, in the summer of 2023, the EDI Committee approached one of our political science professors, Dr. Aiko Kusasa. And I know her from some other work I have on campus. She had deep history knowledge about settler colonialism as it is in Hawai'i. And so she suggested that we read her dissertation, which we did. And she was very open to meeting with us on a weekly basis because her dissertation was grounded in political theories and power structures. And these are new to most of us. And so we were having these really weekly discussions with her. And let me just share that Aiko is a settler descendant and she studied under Dr. Haunani K. Trask, a renowned activist for Hawaiian sovereignty and a former professor of the Hawaiian studies program at the University of Hawai'i at Manau. So there was a small group of us, just four of us who were meeting on a regular basis with Aiko. And through our discussions we were able to develop a deeper understanding of the political context and history of Hawai'i and including its implications on Native Hawai'ians. And as a settler who was born and raised in Hawai'i, I knew the history, but then the underlying reasons and power structures behind why Hawai'i is what it is today was relatively new to me. I was learning. This is kind of deep learning. And so I really appreciated having these discussions, these reflections because oftentimes they got very personal as well because we were breaking down some of the ideologies that we've been, you know, that we've learned over many decades. And so these conversations became, you know, a lot about self-analysis on our ignorance of Hawai'i's political history and despite growing up in Hawai'i, you know, it really impacted our world view. And so recalibrating our world view, so these are some things that, you know, we need to recognize, right? Hawai'i is a colony of the American Empire and again most settlers in Hawai'i are comfortable with their privilege to remain ignorant of the true history of settler colonialism. And so one of the major understandings around Hawai'i is that Hawai'i is a melting pot or a racial paradise and in our local culture it's a term used to describe what the multiculturalism is in Hawai'i. But what this narrative sort of leaves out is that Hawai'i and Native Hawaiians are one of many cultures that exist in Hawai'i as opposed to the host culture and the indigenous people of that land. And so it really takes away that ability for us to feel comfortable in our own land to be able to speak Hawai'ian without receiving any kind of judgment or do any of our practices that really kind of are looked upon as being more multicultural, we are looked at as more multicultural and that we are one of many, including Japanese culture and Chinese culture, which are very much assimilated into who we are today. But it really takes away from that understanding that we have a very rich culture that only lives in Hawai'i and that it cannot be practiced anywhere else in the way that it is there. All right, so how can settler support so as a settler-descendant and OER advocate? I'm no longer comfortable with my privilege to remain ignorant or even worse to say that I'm a neutral bystander. I need to do the work to understand the context in which I work and live and so that I do not contribute to the perpetuation of oppression and harm through my ignorance. In my various positions and roles, I can also be an educator to other settlers. I acknowledge OER is a tool that can serve to help indigenise some of our curriculum and that would give Indigenous people more agency and honours Indigenous ways of knowing. So what should settlers do? We should listen. We should do our homework. We should give in addition to take, right? And we need to advocate for Indigenous-led initiatives, not just as it pertains to OER, right? I think we need to be supportive of all areas and be allies to Native Hawai'is. So doing the work, right? So what we're doing, our EDI committee, is we're going to organize a panel discussion on settler colonialism in Hawai'i for our campus. These are discussions that, as far as we are aware, aren't really happening in a public venue. What we hope to do post-panel is to facilitate a collective learning community because our experience within our EDI committee discussions over this past summer is that a lot of this learning can't be done in one day or by reading a book. We need to have deep conversations with one another, create safe spaces where people can be, you know, reflect and do the unlearning that needs to take place. And definitely, you know, for me personally, I want to ally with Native Hawai'ians to support indigenisation through OER, but also through other means that, and when they need the support, you know, hopefully, you know, I can be there to help them. So how do we apply difficult knowledge to our work with OER? And when we say difficult knowledge, we're using the definition as laid out by Deborah Britsman, who says that difficult knowledge is the study of experiences and the traumatic residuals of genocide, ethnic hatred, aggression and forms of state sanctioned and hence legal social violence, as well as the study of any other's painful encounter with victimisation, aggression and violence on terms. Essentially, things, events, histories, things that we cannot bear to know. And so how do we apply that to the work that we're doing with OER? As someone who's very, very new to the world of open education, I've done much of my learning within the past few months to develop this presentation, as well as here at OER Global over the past three days. And it's allowed me to really better think through what the intersection could look like as a large component of this work is educating settlers as seen in the work that we are proposing to develop as a learning community around our political history of US imperialism and colonialism. And we ultimately know that it's a tool, OER is a tool but not an end-all be-all. One of the benefits of OER is that it can give faculty more agency in their work as seen in that example that we talked about with our Hawaiian studies professors. It's just that we need to better know and utilize this tool of OER to sort of help them have the agency that they need to have within this western structure that we're all working under. And so what we plan to do and hope to do from here on out is to apply some of that gained experiential knowledge to future projects. We want to assess our current native Hawaiian knowledge within OERs, possibly partner with our friends here at VYUH and look at our other texts We want to develop a deeper understanding of current research from indigenous communities. People like Kayla are doing such important work within our indigenous OER community that we really need to ground into and better understand and develop a relationship with so that we can see how that looks within a native Hawaiian context. And then what we ultimately want to do is see what are those protocols and best practices for working with a native Hawaiian community, with the faculty and knowledge and content. I know I'm out of time to end with a story. Darian at our keynote this morning, Monday morning, talks a lot about how the Aina or the land is an open educational resource and it really reminded me of the teaching that I learned in my halao or my hulao school that I was trained under. I was taught by Taupori Tangaro who is a descendant who is trained and graduated from the school Halao Kekuhi which is a really renowned hulao school and that was started by Ante Edith Kanakaole and Keokaha. He would always remind us that when Ante Edith would have class she was an educator and a teacher a teacher of Hawaiian knowledge and hulao he would always remind us that she reminded her students that if anyone comes whoever comes you teach them everybody, you teach whoever comes which is a really powerful thing for me to remember as someone who was raised raised away from my homeland from my father's ability to economic opportunities away from Hawaii. So I was able to benefit from that knowledge because of her staunchness in wanting to teach everyone and I think that that can apply to OERs but the other thing that Ante Edith did was develop a halao a learning community, a learning school that had staunch protocols and what we call kanawai or laws and we don't use laws in the same way that we do in the government but guidelines, ways of behaving and acting when you receive this knowledge you ask permission, you chant in before you enter that room you as you're learning you have a set of behaviors that you adhere to as you're listening to your kumu talk you listen, you don't talk you watch and observe and that is how you obtain your knowledge and you don't share unless you've been given explicit permission to do so. I think there are huge lessons here in the way that this school that predates open education systems for generations I think there are lessons here that we need to take and we need to understand as we start to redefine what open means for our entire our community and especially for our indigenous communities. So mahalo if you have any questions please feel free to contact us and we'll be here for a little while kalamai for not leaving any room for questions mahalo