Are Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders Really Illiterate?

I grew up in a town that was known at the time for having the highest concentration of Native Hawaiians with the lowest literacy rates in the state. We were told we weren't smart, we needed to read more, we were a bunch of illiterate natives that could barely read, write, or speak well enough to be taken seriously.  I've learned now, that those notions couldn't have been farther from the truth.

If literacy is defined as the ability to read and write, and having competence or knowledge in a specified area, then who determines if we are literate? Who examines our levels of understanding, and how does this define who we are? 

In my Pacific Island Studies course I took in the Spring of 2017, I read a poem called “The Pacific Written Tradition,” by Craig Santos Perez. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/618437

He challenges notions of literacy and how it has affected Pacific Islanders specifically.  This poem empowered me, inspired me, and reached me on so many levels. It reminded me of how knowledgable our ancestors really were; and further showed me that "Literacy" in it's purest sense is really just the separation of understanding and communication. These two things are very different. 

Perez explains how our ancestors were far from illiterate. Their competence was not measured by the size of their english vocabulary, but by their ability to decipher signs in nature, wind patterns, and star formations. They were not concerned with reading and comprehending words written on the pages of a book. They could read the oceans, and because of this they would never be lost.  Our ancestors ways of understanding the world around them was a practical and all encompassing type of knowledge, one that cannot be measured by any standardized tests today.

It is no wonder that my little one has always had a fascination with symbols, the stars and trying to understand the way everything in this world works. It is rooted inside of him, inside of every young native child; this curiosity that yearns to be cultivated. If only I could teach him to learn in the “old way.” If only I was raised and taught that way. It seems so much more valuable to have this kind of knowledge, especially when faced with the struggles of today's modern world. 

I especially resonated with the last part of Perez's poem where he says, “So the next time someone tells you islanders were illiterate, teach them about our visual literacies, about how we still read and write the intertextual sacredness of all things. And always remember, if you can write the ocean will never be silenced.”  

For one, the point that islanders possess visual literacy skills, rings true to everything I know and understand about who I am as a Hawaiian. Things were understood not because it was read in a book, but because of the way we saw and experienced the world, and our visual interpretations of everything around us. I understand by seeing, and I communicate by showing.  My family has always expressed themselves visually, through some kind of art form, whether it’s through dance, visual arts, or entertaining; and this has always been in my opinion, the strongest most impactful kind of communication; speaking through art.  It moves people, and leaves lasting impressions. This is what I think he means by “intertextual sacredness,” the understanding of the interconnectedness of things on a deeper level, and being able to convey or express them in many different forms that connects us all. 

Secondly, he calls for all Islanders, to write, to communicate, to not only understand all things, but to go out and show the world that we are NOT illiterate. We are a people connected to the ocean, the largest body on the planet, one that reaches and touches every crevice and every shore of the earth. Perez argues that our ways of understanding and visual literacy skills, were even bigger than what we were told or taught to believe by the colonial powers.  

If they said our ancestors were illiterate; well what will they say now; now that islanders have not only learned to read and write, but to also master the western academic curriculum? Now that islanders have finally come full circle, and have embraced their indigenous ways? What will they say when an islander with higher levels of conceptual understanding, have the ability to assess, analyze and explain their roles as involuntary participants of the colonial structures; and the ability to portray and communicate their inner voices in ways that can be understood by all? 

It is not that we were ever illiterate, it is that we allowed ourselves to believe we were.

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