Partnership with Hamline University and Hawaiian school is preserving a rare native dialect

NINA MOINI: There is a really cool partnership happening with Hamline University in St. Paul and a school in Hawaii. The students at the school speak a Native dialect of a nearby island, which only has 200 Native speakers. 10 years ago, the only book published in the dialect was a Bible. Now, thanks to a partnership with Hamlin's Center for Global Environmental Education, there are more than 400 books.

Joining me now to talk about this partnership is Tracy Fredin, the director of Hamlin's Center for Global Environmental Education. Thanks for being here, Tracy.

TRACY FREDIN: Thank you so much. Pleased to be here.

NINA MOINI: And also joining us on the line all the way from Hawaii is Tia Koerte, who is the principal of the school. Tia, thank you so much for being here as well.

TIA KOERTE: Aloha, and good morning. Happy to be here.

NINA MOINI: Tia, could you start by telling us about your school and who it serves?

TIA KOERTE: Sure. We are a pre-K through 12th grade public charter school, whose vision and mission is built around the preservation and perpetuation of Olelo Ni'ihau, which is a specific dialect related to the island of Ni'ihau, which is about 13 miles off the south coast of Kauai, the major island.

NINA MOINI: OK. And what about the history of this dialect? Like, how meaningful is it for people in the area?

TIA KOERTE: The island of Ni'ihau, at its max, I would say, had a population of about 200. And over time, families migrated over to Kauai. We had zero published resources in our language, like you mentioned, except for the Bible. The Bible was the main written text. Other than that, the language has been perpetuated orally from generation to generation.

As we're well into the 21st and heading into the 22 century, passing the language on orally has become a challenge in that as families migrate over to Kauai, we begin intermarrying. And before you know it, households are speaking English to their children and not having the chance to transfer our language to the next generation.

NINA MOINI: Sure. And what is the name of your school, can I ask? And what ages does it serve?

TIA KOERTE: So our school name is Ke Kula Ni'ihau o Kekaha. And we serve children 3 years old through 18.

NINA MOINI: OK. Wow, that's a great broad range. Tracy, how did Hamline get involved in this partnership?

TRACY FREDIN: Well, we were very fortunate on so many levels. You might say happenstance is the first start. I started going there with my wife, who was a professor at St. Thomas, and they had a long relationship with the school. And I came along and got to meet Tia and other teachers and the students and was enthralled.

Our center has focused on learning about watersheds and the water for 30 years that I've been the director. And there's a very interesting framework from the Hawaiian culture called an ahupua'a, which, in its simplest form, is a pie-shaped watershed on an island that starts at the mountain and runs down to the sea, actually out into the sea. And it was a political structure 200, 300 years ago, but it also was an ecological framework.

We also, then, as we got there, realized it is a great place to teach any school student in the United States or in the world about radial adaption or evolution. And because there are so many unique species on the island, it also has become the extinction capital of the world. It makes the Galapagos look kind of like a playground because it's the most remote archipelago in the world.

So why is a kind of a science education, environmental education, helping to restore language? And one of the things that became quite clear is that if you don't protect a culture, how can you protect the biotic component that's on that island? So we felt it was really important to engage with the Ni'ihau community.

NINA MOINI: Fascinating. Tia, this partnership has been around for seven years. How has it grown and evolved that you've seen? How did you get to the Bible to 400 books?

TIA KOERTE: It really started for me in 2016. It was my second year as the school director principal, and I really needed direction. And it was important for me to gather my community. And I used the card of being a young person, [CHUCKLES] a young new leader of, like, hey, guys, I really want your input. And could you please come out for a two-day community and school-wide retreat that will basically set the tone for the rest of my leadership, if you may?

I really wanted to know and hear from everyone in the community what it is they felt should be the priority for the school. And basically, it was unanimous that our Olelo Ni'ihau, or also known as the Ni'ihau dialect of Hawaiian, needed to be prioritized at all times, no matter what, and to never, ever stray away from preserving and perpetuating our dialect of Hawaiian.

So that retreat gave me what I needed to set out, then, by around 2017 on this mission to do just that. The very first thing that was evident was that there were no printed materials in our language. So up until 2017, we really relied on every Native language teacher and speakers that we had on campus. And then the program was based off of each individual person. So you might have had five different experiences while at the school, you know?

NINA MOINI: Yeah.

TIA KOERTE: So I got some help from other Hawaiian language immersion friends who their movement traces back into about the '70s, the mid to early '70s, in the overall Hawaiian language movement. So a few interactions and meetings with some key people then allowed me to recognize that we didn't have even a foundation to our language. And so that's where we started.

I gathered the Native language speakers at the school who were present at the time, whether they were teachers, my bus driver, my cook. We all sat down and said, OK. I told them what should we develop and produce as our foundation, because we need a foundation. In order to preserve and perpetuate our language, we need to create a foundation.

NINA MOINI: Right.

TIA KOERTE: And so I also do want to make a note that all of these resources, the foundation of our language-- which we call now [? Kiyala ?] [? Pito, ?] which would be equivalent to the ABCs-- all of this is developed specifically for the school. By no means am I trying to say that this is the foundation of our language, because that's a conversation that hasn't been had yet in the larger community and with the larger population of speakers.

NINA MOINI: OK. So through this collaboration, all of this work has come to fruition over the past seven, eight years. Tracy, where do you hope to take this partnership in the future?

TRACY FREDIN: When Tia and several of her educators came over to start this, we went to several first grade classrooms in Minnesota, in Minneapolis-St. Paul. And I noticed, as I looked around, there was over 1,000 books in one of those classrooms. They had tons of reading material.

And I kind of joked to Tia-- and I guess you should be careful what you joke about. I says, let's get 1,000 Ni'ihau books. And we laughed because there weren't any at that point, and how could you possibly start to write them?

So we are at 400 now, and it is exciting to see. I guess you'd have to say our goal is to fulfill that wild dream of 1,000 books. And the only way that we have been able to do this is to facilitate the students at the school to writing their own story. So each of the students at the school has written, if they're a senior, probably four to five books, maybe seven books. And Tia will host authors' workshops.

NINA MOINI: Cool.

TRACY FREDIN: We have a staff member, who has gone over for seven years and maybe gone over three or four times a year, and help with the facilitation. But it is the students either taking the pictures, the idea of them drawing the stories. The preschoolers, the 3-year-olders are making books with their parents.

So we are very proud of this as a way to engage and not be a bunch of foreigners, or, as they're termed in Hawaii, haoles, coming in with a mainland idea because the Hawaiian culture is incredibly strong in the Hawaiian islands. And the Ni'ihau subculture is very strong, both on Ni'ihau and in Kauai and other adjacent islands. So we are just proud to be able to work with Tia and follow her lead with this project.

NINA MOINI: Tracy and Tia, thank you both so much for your time and for sharing your beautiful work with us.

TRACY FREDIN: Thank you very much. Appreciate it.

TIA KOERTE: Thank you. Mahalo for having us.

NINA MOINI: Tracy Fredin is the director of Hamline University Center for Global Environmental Education, and Tia Koerte is the principal in Hawaii partnering with Hamline.