Indigenous Hawaiian marine science factors in humility and community - Kaileia Duriano
Kaileia Duriano, an Indigenous Hawaiian trained in Indigenous cultural practices as well as academic marine biology. She discusses both Indigenous and academic ways of knowing and how to use this information to maintain Hawaii's natural beauty and abundance.
Video conversation with … connect here
What Kaileia talks about …
Kaileia talks about growing up in Hawaii, her love of Hawaii’s natural resources, and her indigenous education. When Kaileia attended a university to study marine science she was inexperienced in rigors of academic science - data collection, graphs, references, etc. While the practice of observation and reporting were nowt new to her, the academic way lacked humility and a consideration for both the communication of the knowledge nor the need to incorporate community into the science. Kaileia hopes as a translator she can bridge the gap between academic research tand the responsibility to consideration that the community in the collection and utility of the data.
Show Notes
00:00:01 Pam Ferris-Olson Today on the Wo(men) Mind the Water Artivist Series podcast on womenmindthewater.com, I'm speaking with Kaileia Duriano, a Hawaiian native from Oahu, Hawaii. Kaileia aims to promote marine and terrestrial healing by exploring conservation issues with an Indigenous lens.
00:00:21 Pam Ferris-Olson Wo(men) Mind the Water Artivist Series podcast on womenmindthewater.com engages artivists in conversation about their work and explores their connection with water. Through their stories, Wo(men) Mind the Water hopes to inspire and encourage action to protect water and all the creatures that depend on it.
00:00:40 Pam Ferris-Olson I'm talking with Kaileia Duriano, a Hawaiian native who grew up nurtured by her culture and family. She is passionate about working with Indigenous communities across the Pacific. She wants to establish best practices centered on Indigenous values and connection for fisheries, core restoration, water management, and data rights.
00:01:04 Pam Ferris-Olson Welcome, Kaileia. I'm honored to have you on this podcast to discuss your beliefs that water is the backbone of community, and that community depends on the involvement of women. You recognize that across time, women have been the keepers and protectors of all things water.
00:01:23 Kaileia Duriano Aloha, Pam. Can you hear me okay?
00:01:26 Pam Ferris-Olson I can hear you very well and it's very nice to meet you.
00:01:31 Kaileia Duriano Thank you so much. I'm so excited to be doing this. I was so happy that your connection through Tracy [Metz] brought us together. That's really amazing.
00:01:40 Pam Ferris-Olson Yes, she's a wonderful woman and you are an amazing young woman yourself.
00:01:46 Kaileia Duriano Thank you so much. I've been enjoying your podcast episodes. It's the first time listening in and sharing it amongst my family and I just really appreciate the work that you do and highlighting so many people's voices and stories. It's a beautiful thing. I really appreciate it.
00:02:00 Pam Ferris-Olson Thank you. That means a lot to me. Kaileia, let's begin by having you discuss what it's like to be an Indigenous woman in Hawaii and tell us how your cultural upbringing influences your view of the world.
00:02:18 Kaileia Duriano Absolutely. [Hawaiian greeting] Mahalo nui, Pam. All right. Great, thanks. Oh, kaila a ko’uninoa. Oh, ahu ku’umoku puni. Oh, ewa ko’umoku. Oh, moanalua ko’u ahupua. Oh, ka‘alau ku’umauna. Oh, kamana nui ku’u kahawai ame awa awa. And opulua ku’akai. I introduce myself in ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi, which is the Native Hawaiian language from where I'm from. And I do that because I think to answer your question perfectly, that I believe is the center of who I am and my indigeneity, really connection. I don't speak on behalf of all Indigenous people, of course, but for me, being an Indigenous woman, and especially in relation to water, is connection simply. I see connection in all things, remaining connected to my lands, my waters, that have held my people and people alike of all walks of life in safety, love, and healing, and remaining connected to my culture and way of life. I think, for me, indigeneity definitely goes way beyond just DNA.
00:03:32 While that it is important to have connection there, I would argue that Indigenous way of life is really the pivotal factor in how I show up as an Indigenous person. I believe that when we're looking at in Native Hawaiian cultures and similarity a lot of different Indigenous cultures around the world, women are the people who bring life, the continuation of a community. They center, they heal, they regroup together and bring the warmth of love. And we centered that because water, especially in an island biodiversity landscape, it is the pivotal essence of life. You can't have anything without water. And that is mirrored beautifully in the way that we uplift women in my community and really make sure that they're the ones who connect it.
00:04:28 Kaileia Duriano They have, when women are pregnant, they carry water in their wombs for their babies. So it's really this idea that this mirroring between women in life and how life also connects throughout what we see when we walk into our island or our rivers and our waterfalls. We see that from the tip of the mountain where the water comes, it follows all the way down to the bottom of our shores and into the ocean.
00:04:56 Pam Ferris-Olson So beautiful. I mean, women throughout every culture are pivotal, but they're not always embraced. And so the idea that there's love among women and an understanding of their role really is impactful. So let me ask you, the community of Indigenous marine scientists is extremely small. I read that maybe less than 1% in the world are marine scientists. So why did you choose to attend a traditional university to study marine science?
00:05:28 Kaileia Duriano Yeah, absolutely. It's a great question. I think I was around age 8 or 9 when I kind of deciding, parents, families are, what do you want to be when you grow up? You're thinking and growing. And I was like, how can I make a living being in the water all the time? And I think at that time I was, hello, marine scientist. I was really fortunate to be raised around really strong community leaders. So in my upbringing, I was raised in a charter school, but one that was led by Hawaiian immersion, which is a lot of Hawaiian language and cultural values.
00:06:10 Kaileia Duriano So we didn't really have a typical classroom. We would go to the beach to learn about hydrology. We would go into the valleys and do gardening and learning biological processes that way. So I actually don't think I conceptualized that there wasn't many people like me in the world who looked like me who were marine scientists, because in my mind, I think I was in a very bubble-like child faith and hope that all scientists saw the world that I did.
00:06:42 Kaileia Duriano So anybody who looked like me, all of us are scientists, that's how I was raised to believe. And of course, when I started realizing and conceptualizing that I need money to survive, that's when I was like, hmm, I definitely want to get paid to be in the water all the time and just do the things that I like to do.
00:07:00 I am the first generation college student, so my parents were pretty shocked when I wanted to go to university. But they were beyond supportive and they kind of already saw in me from a young age that at third grade I never swayed. There was never once in my academic career that I wanted to be something else. I always knew that I wanted to be a marine scientist.
00:07:22 Pam Ferris-Olson So how did your academic training in marine science differ from the knowledge you were taught by your family and community?
00:07:30 Kaileia Duriano In a way, I definitely want to highlight that there's kind of a lot of similarities. The observation of it, the questioning, really the process of the scientific method in general was exactly what we as Indigenous scientists and Indigenous communities kind of already do. We study the waters, draw connections, understanding each variable and how they interact and why. There's a word in Hawaiian language called kilo, which means to observe and to really watch. And that was just embedded into how we do things and operate.
00:08:05 But when it came to university, it was a bit of a whiplash just because academic training has so much formalities. It has to be this specific way, this specific paper, page numbers, paragraph indentations. It was all the things that in my mind I didn't really care about. I really, really wanted to do the research and understand, but I actually also kind of thrived. I really love reporting. I love writing. I'm a data nerd. So I love looking at the calculations and numbers and drawing relationships. But I think I relied on my Indigenous way of knowing, again, going back to that connection that really helped enforce my academic training more in school.
00:08:54 Pam Ferris-Olson How have you managed to integrate the differences between the academic and Indigenous ways of knowing?
00:09:00 Kaileia Duriano I kind of see myself as almost a translator. Because I feel that the main difference between Western science academia and my culture is the connection of our impact to marine science and how we as people are part of that relationship. Western science academia kind of approaches human interaction in nature as always kind of almost a mistake or in a way that we only come in to save or restore things, more of a reactive-based approach rather than proactive. So I saw that there was a big lack of spirituality and connection to marine sciences.
00:09:47 Kaileia Duriano And so, yes, Western academia is filled with graphs, charts and data, tables, which is very needed but I always kind of questioned it as who is it needed for and what is the purpose? So because in Indigenous communities, we have all the same things as well. It just may not be formatted the same way, or we may not call it graphs. Instead, we call them stories. So it could be written in this perfect Excel spreadsheet, but that same relationship and understanding is embedded in the stories that we passed down for generations. So same concepts and procedures, just different executions and processes.
00:10:27 Kaileia Duriano When I saw myself as Indigenous scientist, I was just seeing it as a flip between the two. How can I make the translation in the graphs and data tell the same story that I can talk to my grandma and my aunt about? Because they're talking about the same things. It's more of a translator rather than integration because the graphs and spreadsheets are ways of translating to the Western systems that still hold the power and upper hand in decision-making when we're talking about policies and directions. But I think I rely deeply on my Indigenous teachings for more of the guidance and direction for my scientific research. Focusing on the connection and the ideas of that seven generational thinking, which is the idea of how will this impact the generations after me and what can I do to make that better, which is sometimes left out in a Western science approach. In Western science, kind of tells you that in order to do good science and non-biased science.
00:11:38 Pam Ferris-Olson So tell us about your time as a marine fellow with The Nature Conservancy.
00:11:42 Kaileia Duriano It actually was a big learning curve for me because I came from, just graduated college right into this fellowship. So I was already kind of coming in with that academic approach of I want to research, I want to interview, I want to write all this down. And the Nature Conservancy kind of positioned me of, “You need to work on your people part more rather than your report part.” I think it is something very, a lot of us go through and integrating into the workforce and trying to figure that out.
00:12:11 Kaileia Duriano But rather than showing me how the scientists integrated what they were doing for communities, I kind of positioned myself in a way to just sit and absorb the community leaders' perspective because that's what was missing in my Western academia upbringing. My college sat right next to a large traditional fish pond in Oahu, the Heia. And despite our school being number one in Hawaii to do marine science, we didn't have any connection with that community, who was literally 5 minutes down the road. And it was the Nature Conservancy that really helped me understand that being a scientist, especially a marine scientist working in islands in the Pacific, you can't do anything without integrating into community and showing yourself because you're a part of community. You're working there. They should know your face. They should know what you're doing instead of just coming in and always just, “Oh, I think we should do this graph and I think we should do monitoring.”
00:13:17 That's great, but how can we do that in this idea of making sure that the people of place can also share that responsibility of monitoring by community researchers and community scientists too.
00:13:33 Pam Ferris-Olson So is there a major conflict between the Indigenous practices and non-Indigenous practices? And if there is, what do you see as a workable solution?
00:13:46 Kaileia Duriano I think that's such a great question because that's when we start talking about two different systems. When we're looking at the Indigenous way of practice versus the non-Indigenous way of practice, we're seeing two systems that were inherently designed to be completely opposite of each other, which is really hard when you're thinking about a way to make a solution or somewhere possible. But I believe that the major conflict between the two is humility actually.
00:14:16 I think it's the idea that we are all in the same place, in the same earth for the same reason, to live our lives. So instead of constantly wanting to reinvent the wheel or thinking of my way is the best way, what we should be doing is playing with each other's strengths. We should be able to sit down in a room and listen to somebody who has been there for generations and take the humility to sit down and listen to the lessons they learned, because they probably know a lot more than somebody who has just recently moved there or even in the last 20 years.
00:14:52 So I think the biggest conflicts is wanting to hold each other's way of knowledge valuable and equal as the same. But I do believe that a solution can be placed once we sit down at the table and understand that none of us at the table are higher than one another. We are actively working towards the same goal.
00:15:15 Kaileia Duriano And we're seeing that slight shift happen right now in Hawaii states. The green fee was just passed, I believe. When I was working with the Nature Conservancy, it was through its voting and pushing that it was finally presented to the state where a certain fraction of the cost of a tourist coming to Hawaii will be given to conservation and environmental stewardship in Hawaii. Again, showing that maybe the state doesn't have the direction, but it can fuel the funding. So playing for the strengths. The state can bring the funding, and the community members who are already doing that work will be allowed to touch that funding to perpetuate the projects and resources that they're already doing. That has been proven to work over the last three or four generations from now.
00:16:04 Pam Ferris-Olson So let's talk about a different kind of communication. If you were given the opportunity to talk to tourists as they prepare to come to Hawaii, what do you feel are the important things that they should know?
00:16:21 Kaileia Duriano I think first and foremost, there is this kind of narrative that the Indigenous people of place don't want tourism and don't want visitors coming. And I always like to break that down a bit. I don't think that's the case. It's just that we want people who are respectful and understand the amount of responsibility and care it takes for our islands to look like that. Our islands are beautiful. You can talk to anybody around the world and they'll know Hawaii or where it is and the image of the postcard will come into their mind. But I always like to tell tourists that it's not just that way because it just happens to be.
00:16:59 There has been generations of people who have stewarded those lands and to make sure that those lands are as vital and beautiful and as fresh as they were always once were. So I love to tell tourists, when you come, let the island heal you. Listen to it. That's what it's there for. It's beautiful, it's one of the most unique places in the world. But remember that it's a shared responsibility of the people of place who intend to always have that place beautiful.
00:17:35 Kaileia Duriano So when you're there, make sure that you're being respectful to the local residents and the people who are there who are doing the everyday work to ensure that the beaches are clean, that the water is clean and it's free flowing. But don't let that inhibit you from understanding that Hawaii is not just a playground, it's not a place that people can come and it's beautiful and do whatever and leave. Once you come to that island, you are now embedded into that community and share a responsibility among your trip while you're there.
00:18:05 Pam Ferris-Olson With that, I ask your advice for our listeners on how they can make a difference. What advice do you have for those who wish to make a difference in the marine environment?
00:18:19 Kaileia Duriano That's something, ironically, too, that I kind of ask myself every day of how to be a better person in general. Because I think once you're a better person, then you innately are a better partner, you're a better community advocate. It's a trickle-down effect, right? And when you're looking at the intersections of water protections and environmental stewardship and in general, community; involving Indigenous knowledge reveals that the path forward, I think, cannot be walked alone. It must be built together with humility, reciprocity, and courage.
00:18:56 I think the futures of our waters begins where remembrance meets that responsibility. As we move through, I think, an era of climate uncertainty and social transformation, at least for in the United States of so many things are happening right now. The most powerful act I take as an individual, and I would encourage your listeners to see, is to return to balance, to see knowledge not as a tool of control but as a living relationship.
00:19:26 Kaileia Duriano The future of our waters depend on our ability to honor the past, to represent the future and the present, and build systems that reflect the shared truth that all knowledge, like all life, is interconnected. Because from my work, just whether a marine scientist or even just a community person at home, it's deeply personal. It's a continuation of all my ancestors before me, through story, through spirit. And the lessons of my kupuna, or ancestors, remind me that true leadership and true making a difference is not about control, but care. It's not about being possessive but being present. My aina, or my land and waters, my community and my lineage kind of ground me in that truth, that our knowledge and how we show up must serve life.
00:20:20 So I think it's an invitation and a responsibility to walk together, to lead with heart, to choose a path forward that is rooted in right relationship amongst ourselves and nature. It's letting all of our individual acts of showing up, speaking on what is right, and centering community, whatever that looks like to you, remind us that a path towards a hopeful future is not necessarily a destination, but a continuous practice of balance, accountability, and aloha, love, leading with love.
00:20:56 Pam Ferris-Olson Such wisdom! I'm greatly appreciative of you being on the Wo(men) Mind the Water Artivist podcast and for sharing. And I'd like listeners to know that I've been speaking with Kaileia Duriano, who is the latest guest on the Wo(men) Mind the Water Artivist series podcast. The series can be viewed on womenmindthewater.com and YouTube. A transcript is available on womenmindthewater.com and an audio-only version can be heard on iTunes and Spotify.
00:21:26 Pam Ferris-Olson Wo(men) Mind the Water is grateful to Jaine Rice for her use of the song Women of Water. All rights for the Wo(men) Mind the Water name and logo belong to Pam Ferris-Olson. This is Pam Ferris-Olson.