 Aloha and welcome to Hawaii Together on the Think Tech Hawaii Broadcast Network. I'm Kaley Ikeena, your host. And although I'm a trustee at the Office of Hawaiian Affairs and the president of the Grassroot Institute, the views that you hear myself or my guests express today are ours alone and don't represent any institution, which is going to make for some very interesting conversation. You know, here in the islands there are so many needs for the Native Hawaiian people and for all of us. There's the need for housing, for jobs, the need for health. These are all very critical needs and they're being met in various ways. But there's one need that is extremely crucial for the future of Native Hawaiian people and for all people here in the state of Hawaii and that's the need for good education. But what constitutes good education? Well, the good news today is I have somebody who has dedicated her life to educating others and who herself is a model of how to bring education from the past into the modern world and how to thrive in doing that. Her name is Verlian Milena Wright. She is both an educator and an administrator. She has an excellent background, not only in the topic matter of education, but in inspiring people across the world to live up to the highest standards of education. And today she's our guest. So please welcome to the program someone I call Auntie Verlian. Auntie Aloha. Aloha. So happy you're here with us today. Thank you. And I need to say to you, Oli Laha now, happy birthday because very soon in a few days you'll be how many years old? Seventy-five. Oh, congratulations. You look wonderful. Thank you. Now, where did you grow up? I was raised actually downtown on Fort Street until they put the freeway through and then we relocated to our first home right next to Bishop Museum. So how about that? For the sake of my guests today, I've chosen not to read through your very lengthy resume because it is lengthy, but it is very incredible what you've done in your lifetime. You're an educator. You're an administrator. You've traveled the world. You have helped to develop educational theory. You in fact are still in the very active world of administration. You're the chairman of the board of two organizations. Is that right? Yes. The American Pacific Foundation. The Pacific American Foundation. And Hawaii Mali. All right. Well, that is something and yet you arrived here at the studio coming from the University of Hawaii at an educational conference, so when do you sleep? Actually, when you get old you don't need as much rest. Well, you'll find out when you do get old. Now, would you tell our viewers why education is so important and as I said in the introduction that there are many noble efforts to advance the native Hawaiian people. And there's some political as well as health-oriented, job-oriented and so forth. But what place does education have in all of this? Well, it first begins with my family. Both my parents were born during the time of the Depression. They both lived on the island of Kauai. My father only achieved an eighth grade education, but he became a captain in the merchant marine and could sail anywhere in the world. And my mother I think would have been a wonderful teacher and she was a housewife and raised all five of us, which was not an easy job. So your parents influenced you? It was in the home that your heart for education came about. And I know I asked you how important education is, but let's personalize that a bit. How important was education to you in terms of becoming what you've become today? You never know what your future looks like. As children, five of us, every Saturday mom would take us to the library or art academy. And this is something that we grew up with and not realizing in her own way she was trying to teach us education in the community. Well, you know, Antivir Leanne, I wonder if we had the same mother. My mother never graduated from high school, but she took the lead in making sure that each one of her five Kiki got a strong education and on the weekend she would take us to the art academy. And if we behave, we would get the 10 cents colored popcorn from Chris Store and she was just a great motivator if you didn't behave, you didn't get your popcorn. How about that? You know, you have been an advocate for the advancement of Native Hawaiians and yet you have been remarkably international, global in your exposure to the arts, to learning, to science and so forth. From those days that you went to the Academy of Art, you've been very much exposed to the international. What really constitutes a good education for Hawaiians? I think a good human being. So it starts with something universal at first. Yes. That all humanity, all natural resources in animate and animate are valued and not only on this earth but throughout the universe. So there's something we have in common with the rest of humanity and the universe that brings us a kind of unity that we begin with. Now while you have advocated for Hawaiian identity, you've also integrated that identity with the modern world. In fact, when I look at the title of one of your organizations, Pacific American Foundation, it beautifully integrates what some are now taking apart and that is the relationship between what we are in the Pacific and as Hawaiians and what we are in political structures as Americans. What are your thoughts about that? Well, Pacific American Foundation was formed by many graduates from Kamehameha School. David Cooper was one of them. Many of these graduates went to the academy, some military academies, traveled all around the world and were afraid that many of the students that left Hawaii would not remember their cultural roots and so they established in Virginia Pacific American Foundation for American and Pacific Islanders throughout the Pacific. Well I want to ask you further, how important is it to understand our roots so to speak, our indigenous origins? Well, when I work with indigenous people from around the world, it has been an education process. We come from education at Kamehameha Schools in the University of Hawaii in Manoa. I was fortunate to have a global education at UCLA. I was the only Hawaiian in the College of Education and I was 31 years old and I was very lonely and sad. But I did not dare fail my family and I know I had an obligation to come home with the credentials and I did. Ironically, my interest was in business economics education so my dissertation was on the hotel industry. And this is how I met George Conahaley, Dr. Conahaley. Oh, how about that? Now George Conahaley, he's the author of a book called Kou Kanaka and I know of your fond appreciation for him in a course in the philosophy department that I have taught at the Hawaii Pacific University on Hawaiian philosophy, I've required the reading of that book because George Conahaley understands the indigenous values of Hawaii and so forth. And yet George, like yourself, was firmly committed to business advancement, to tourist development, to many of these things in the modern world and how do you bring them together because you want to have an education, I hear from you, for our keiki that is steeped in our heritage, in the indigenous origins and yet you want them to be connected in a bridge to the modern world and much a part of it. I think, you know, Hawaiians were marginalized many indigenous people because their language was not written and so the focus on content was an area from Western society where you had to be competitive. You had to understand content and you had to be able to use it to your advantage to get educated and to become employed. But when you study from an indigenous lens, you're looking at context, which is more than what's written, it's what's seen and not seen, as the queen said. And this is where over a period of time, it's literally woven the vili lei of how one perceives the importance of education, not only for now, but in the next hundred years. And so having the foresight of our lei to set the trust aside for the beneficiary of the Hawaiian people, imagine now that we have the responsibility to grow that trust and we can no longer have this entitlement perspective of being a beneficiary. That's an interesting statement, no longer have this entitlement perspective of being a beneficiary. That word beneficiary is a very important word, especially at the institution you taught at, Kamehameha Schools, where we learn and I have learned as an alumnus and as my four children who are alumni have learned that there was a benefactor, Bernice Pauahi Bishop, the princess. She left a legacy and we are beneficiaries of that legacy. I see that term also at the Office of Hawaiian Affairs because our beloved beneficiaries come to the table and we as trustees are committed to serving them and our whole mission is to advance the welfare of our beneficiaries. But you have some caution, I detect, on an exclusive use of that word beneficiary. What are your thoughts? The mind shift has to occur in today's society that you not only have to take a look at a beneficiary context but you also have to grow out the trust resources to service more individuals without having to keep tapping the resources yourself. In other words, there has to be a shift from being a beneficiary to becoming if you will a benefactor. Absolutely. That is something that is news, I think, or a new way of thinking. You say a mind shift for some people because while it is wonderful to have these legacies left for us, the elite trust and the benefits of the Department of Hawaiian Homeland and the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, when we educate our young people we want them not only to be beneficiaries, we want them to aspire to be benefactors. Absolutely. How would we motivate? I think when I took over, for example, both the Pacific American Foundation, we already had a tremendous education model from preschool to PhD in marine science and environmental sciences and natural resource management. But we also knew that in my hypothesis is by 2019 there will be less and less revenue available for nonprofit organizations including government. And so we need to take a look at social enterprise models in which we can generate our own income and become benefactors ourselves to become grand tours to other community organizations that we work with. The hardest shift with Hawaii Maui, which was an organization established to help Hawaiian civic clubs and Hawaiian community organizations, was to move into a for-profit, nonprofit, public philanthropic partnership instead of just simply being a non-profit entity. Now you're talking about the organizational level that we need to move from being organizations that are begging for money, so to speak, going to the legislature or going to the public and instead being coming organizations that are entrepreneurial, that are able to succeed financially and then become donors, basically. Would you say this also applies in the personal life of individuals as we educate them? Well, in particular for the state of Hawaii and the American government, the American nation and nations that are free. We have a responsibility, I think, for the first time in looking at our trust funds, looking at government funds, that we don't have all the resources to do what we used to do. If that is the case, then how do we harness new resources to complement, supplement, extend the reach of our current entities? It sounds as though you see resource building as being key to the accomplishment of any educational mission, that it's not merely the expression of a philosophy or the teaching of content, that we have to be deeply concerned about the building of an institution of education. I use the word very broadly, institution. And I think also that I was pondering in preparation for this program, what is the difference between charity and dependency? We do want to have a social enterprise. We do want to be able to improve the lot of our communities that we live in. But we also have a responsibility to teach the individuals that we work with to become entrepreneurial themselves instead of dependent. And I look back on the history of the great society and all the things that we thought were good things for America, and yet those programs have built tremendous amount of dysfunctional and dependency within entities that have not been able to survive and succeed. So you see that education should definitely raise people out of this condition of dependency into what we might call a self-determinism. And when we come back from this break, I'm going to ask for some of your loving views as a kupuna on efforts of the Hawaiian people to achieve self-determinism. Certainly education needs to be part of that, but you have some thoughts to share. I do. Thank you so much. Well, my guest today, Ante Verlian Molina Wright, who is a preeminent educator and scholar, somebody who's given her life toward building the education of so many others, will be right back on Think Tech Hawaii's Hawaii Together in just a moment. Don't go away. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. Guys, don't forget to check me out right here at the Prince of Investing. I'm your host, Prince Dykes, each and every Tuesdays at 11 a.m. Hawaii time. I'm going to be right here. Stop by here from some of the best investment minds across the globe. And real estate, finances, stocks, hedge funds, managers, all that great stuff. Thank you. Welcome back to Hawaii Together. I'm Keely Akinah, president of the Grassroot Institute and a trustee at that large in the Office of Hawaiian Affairs. Now one of the most blessed sayings that we have here in the state of Hawaii is a pule kakou. Let us pray together. And I'm especially fascinated, always have been with the kakou part. That means when we pray, let's pray you and me, he and she, we and they, all together. It's not exclusive. It's something that's totally integrative and inclusive of all people. Well, one of the things that we believe at the Grassroot Institute is that we should also ehana kakou. Let's work together. Let's work together for a better economy, government and society. Think of how terrible it would be if we didn't work together. And that's one of the reasons I've invited, as my guest today, Verliana Molina Wright, because she has shown a real spirit of being able to bring people together to cross cultures in order to work for a better government, a better economy and society. And that's partly what we've been talking about in terms of education. Matthew Verlian, you have been observing for many decades efforts to advance the Native Hawaiian people, particularly self-determinism, which is sometimes called the independence movement or the sovereignty movement. And I know that you have cheered people on, but at the same time, you've had some thoughts and some concerns. What might that be? Well, I think that in terms of the sovereignty movement, there are many, many areas of agreement based on the history that we were not taught, but there is also the context of which we live in today. And so how do we bridge the arching together and whether it becomes parallel or integrated and that this kind of discussion continues to take place, I think, in a cultural context. And so I wanted to share two stories. Working with the Mauderis in New Zealand, it took a Maudy ten years to have an advisor for a PhD program. And when we came in and we formed the World Indigenous Nations Higher Education Consortium with nine nations, in five years, 500 Maudis were sent abroad. And they came home with PhDs and they took back control of their educational system. With that language, culture, protocols, ceremony, restoration of land, economic resources. And so with that in mind, we also took a look at working with First Nations people as well as Native American Indians. And it is through those contexts that I came back and reviewed what I should be doing as a kupuna and in particular as a Hawaiian kupuna. Now that's where the kupuna part comes in, not merely educational administrator because in some of these stories which you had shared with me before, some of the students were very discouraged. They didn't know how they could really hold onto or be true to their Indigenous past and their heritage and even questioned whether they should pursue this Western notion of a PhD. How did you kupuna them? This was a National Science Foundation grant. We were funded with the Indigenous Education Institute. It's Navajo driven and we were asked, I was asked to fly up and meet with students that were PhD students in physics, extraordinary Native American students and they wanted to know more about Hawaii and in particular exactly the same questions that you asked us. And so we did different cultural activities and the students knew ceremony, they knew language, they knew protocol, they tilled the land, they believed they could make a living off the land. They were physics majors and they were in a Western university. All 12 of them wanted to quit and they were in their second year. So NSF flew us down to work with these students. And in the ending they said, Auntie, you never asked us a question. I said, I have only one question for you. Why are you so sad? And they cried and they cried and they cried. And one student said, I remember my grandfather holding the hand of his grandfather when he was shot in the head for the bounty of an Indian scout. I came back and asked myself about historical trauma. I went to Pokai Bay where I was working with the homeless there and I asked myself as an alumni of Kamehameha schools, how could I have missed this? And so I started to do the research on epigenetics in DNA. And I found out that in epigenetics, this is the code for the DNA, although Western science looks at the 3% that makes up the DNA. In the epigenes, when genocide occurs or trauma occurs, in the brain, the adrenaline is completely destroyed. And this coding is recorded from the beginning of the time of those incidences. And so I asked myself to what extent would the overthrow of the monarchy also have bearing, even those these individuals probably don't have the context or reference. And so I started looking at the epigenes and also the coding. And then I found out that in the epigenes, our histories and who we are are still there. So our ancestral knowledge of our kupuna are still there. And so what do we do? We need to restore it. We need to call it back. And I've been so fortunate to work with Kukani Loko to begin learning about the sacred space of where Ali'i were born. Well, that is something. Yeah. Isn't that something? This is really something. And not everyone is going to necessarily agree that there is a biological basis to historical trauma. And not everyone is going to agree with the sociology that actually people groups go through that. But what I love about your story is that your focus ultimately was how we move beyond. And you see one of the concerns that I have sometimes is that regardless of what the story in the past was, we mustn't let our future be held hostage to what may have happened in the past. And what are some of the ways you see us moving forward? And I'm bursting at the seams here. So I've come up with a curriculum model in which content is important. But because of the internet, we're just imploding. I mean, you know, when you look at research studies, there are 8,000 research studies in cancer every day. There are 400 YouTube videos every day. The mass of data is going to have to learn how to be synthesized. And I think research, reading, writing, arithmetic and research is going to be a very, very, very important skill for our people. And then content is taking place in context. So Aloha Aina movement, Malama Aina movement. It's the awareness of applying content in our environment. Well, with that, what is missing and it has bothered me immensely. And now I come out and I feel comfortable saying it is that we need to address spirituality and everything we do. And so within the DOE system, using the term consciousness is sort of a metaphor for spirituality. And so content, context and spirituality, to me, that just raises our level of thinking and perspective is such a way that we take a look at complexity, that we as individual humanity have many, many world views. And this complexity allows for diversity of thought. Now you talk about spirituality and some people may think, oh, there's religion. And we can't have religion in the schools, whether it is Christian religion or whether it's ancient Hawaiian religion because the quote unquote wall of separation that exists between church and state. But when I listen to you carefully, I'm not hearing religion. I'm hearing what you said was complexity. Consciousness. The consciousness. And so we're talking about a dimension of humanity and it doesn't necessarily require us to call it something that traditionally has been dogmatic or religious and so forth. But it's an openness to all that there is out there in the complexity of who we are. I go back to what you said at the beginning, that there is a commonality to humanity, that we can't see ourselves as merely isolated with our own tradition and our story. We're part of the great humanity of the universe. So in that complexity, then we really become simple. And that's the irony of it all is that in the simplicity, we realize that we are all interconnected. We are all interrelated. And in that simplicity, we also have a chance to reflect on where lo kahi, where things form and behave. And so with my two, I wish I listened more when I was little, but when she took us in bed during the summers, when we visited her, she would say, Aloha, I love you with Aloha. And her definition was, I give you my final breath of life. That was her Aloha. Before we leave, I want to also pick up on a conversation you and I had earlier today. There are things of our past that are worth cherishing. They nurture us. And there are some things that we have to recognize needed to evolve into change. One of those you mentioned that's dear to you was the idea that women should be subjugated to men, which had been codified in the Kapu system of the Hawaiians. And you had some thoughts on that. Maybe we could. Yeah, I think that one of the movements sometimes in the Hawaiian movement is that the role of the female is not clear. I really think if you look at Kahanmanu or if you look at my mother and my tutu, there is no question about who ran the household. And tutu would just raise her eyebrow and you know exactly what that meant. And so I think that in the sharing together, there are two things that I'm concerned about leadership. One is the role of women as leaders in the Hawaiian community, because I think that we have much to contribute alongside our male counterparts. But the second thing is that there's also an arrogance that has begun to show itself about fluency and language. And I have seen in different community meetings where Kupuna will ask the individual speaking in Olalo, would you mind translating what you said? And these young ones will shame the Kupuna for not being able to speak the language. Glad you gave your loving Kupuna thoughts to that. Oh, I did in absolutely no uncertain term. So unfortunate that we've ended our time here in the studio. But what I hear you saying is that there needs to be aloha, not arrogance. And the Kupuna paved the way for these young ones. You have been an ideal Kupuna. You are a role model to so many. Auntie Verlian, much aloha, much mahalo for being with us. My guest today, Verlian Molina Wright, a superb educator, but a deeply loving Kupuna for all of us. I'm Kili Akina on Hawaii Together, on the Think Tech Hawaii Broadcast Network.