This past summer, six Kamehameha Schools Hawai‘i haumāna spent five weeks in Oxford, England, studying and working on projects at the Pitt Rivers Museum. 

Founded in 1884, the Pitt Rivers Museum houses over half a million objects, photographs and manuscripts from around the world, including Hawai‘i. It prides itself in “innovative curation,” where artifacts are arranged across cultures rather than by time or region, as a more in-depth way to understand humanity. Marenka Thompson-Odlum, Research Curator of Critical Perspectives at the museum and who worked with the KS Ed Tech team on a previous collaboration, says that from this initial project, “we envisioned a program where Hawaiian youth could actively shape how PRM represents Hawaiian culture – empowered as curators, storytellers and knowledge holders.” 

Thompson-Odlum’s partnership with KS Hawaiʻi continued with the creation of the “Oxford Study Programme, Moʻolelo in Motion.” Aolani Kailihou KSK’87, the director of Pū‘awalau Center for ‘Ōiwi Leadership and Advocacy at KS Hawai‘i, led the campus instructional team and the delegation of haumāna who traveled to England. She approached the collaboration as a way to accomplish multi-tiered goals: “How can the museum serve as a site for looking at critical perspectives, including objects that belong to Native people, and in this case, Hawaiian things,” says Kailihou. Both teachers and students are involved in the Center’s initiatives, which Kailihou describes as “using the landscape of the world to teach instead of just the four walls of the classroom.”  

The three seniors, two juniors and one ninth grader, who came in with a wide range of interests, worked closely with University of Oxford museum staff and faculty, many of whom are leading academics in their fields.  

Kendra Ryan, who is now a junior, describes how the students were tasked with creating their own projects after spending the first part of their visit seeing and learning about the items housed in the museum. 

“We had an activity where it was just find an object that you liked in the museum, and I ended up in the “magic section” of the museum,” says Ryan, whose interest is in theology.  “I found this weird little paper tucked away in a drawer, and that really caught my interest, because unlike a lot of the other items in the museum, this had little to no information on it.  So it started down a rabbit hole where I wanted to learn more.” 

It turns out that the paper, which had symbols and letters and the Star of David on it, was a charm against witchcraft. “I started to research all this stuff because there were so many different parts of this single paper that didn’t add up,” says Ryan.  “I ended up having to talk to someone who grew up Hebrew because there were Hebrewic words on it. That’s when I learned that this paper had the forbidden name of God written on it.  It was a name that shouldn’t be written or spoken.”   

She also learned that the paper was written by someone from Ireland in the 16th to 17th century who most likely knew nothing about Hebrew culture and what that culture deemed as sacred. “I think it’s important for us to recognize the alienation of culture, especially religious culture. In our past, here in Hawai‘i, we’ve lost touch with a bunch of customs, our language, our mo‘olelo, and I think it’s really important to recognize that it happened here, but not just here. It’s happened all over the world to different groups of people.” 

Elle Ayat, who is a senior this year, had a different takeaway. “I learned more about myself than I ever did during school, because they were teaching us in a different learning style that I’ve never experienced before,” Ayat says. “You begin with kilo, where you gather knowledge, and that’s your research stage.” She describes the next three stages as ho‘opa‘a, where the research is developed into prototypes and tested for refinement; then kā, where students revise their models; and finally paka, which involves meeting with a professional to get feedback.   

“It wasn’t just a teacher proctoring the class and you taking notes,” says Ayat.  “You really got to engage with each other. I found myself speaking up more in class, asking uncomfortable questions and participating.”   

“As the program progressed,” Thompson-Odlum says, “I witnessed the students realizing that both these institutions (Oxford and Pitt Rivers Museum) could be problematic and sometimes just plain wrong. But more importantly, I saw how they grew to be more confident in their opinions and in their identities as indigenous youth. I saw students who were proud to be part of the KS ‘ohana, but also future leaders who had ideas for their school to be even more rooted in Hawaiian epistemologies.” 

Since returning from this experience, the students have created a student-led advisory board to replicate this style of learning at Kamehameha Schools.  

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