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| Dee Jay Mailer pauses by a lei-draped portrait of Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop. - Photo: Blaine Fergerstrom |
Fulfilling Pauahi's dream
He aupuni palapala ko'u
This month, Kamehameha Schools CEO Dee Jay Mailer will be honored at the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Awards dinner, along with Polynesian navigator Pius Mau Piailug, for a “lifelong commitment to Hawai'i and its people.”
Just over four years ago she started her post as CEO, an experience that she calls “fabulous.”
“I can't tell you how hopeful I am … I tell everybody in the organization and everybody that cares to hear me that in our lifetime we can change history,” she says, sitting in her Kawaiaha'o Plaza office. “I remind people that have forgotten that it's been a very short time that our people have been sublimated and have lost some of what they had – a very short time in the scope of years of history. So why can't we reverse that in our lifetime?
“It's also a lot of hard work. I don't do it all, but I worry about it all,” she says, with a laugh.
And in her lifetime, she's already seen changes, like a strengthening of language and culture that even the business side of Kamehameha is embracing. At Kawaiaha'o Plaza, the students' artwork hangs in elevators, hallways and reception areas, and in the courtyards, foreign plants were replaced by indigenous ones. “Everybody at Kawaiaha'o had their fingers in the dirt, planting the plants, including myself,” says Mailer, a 1970 Kamehameha Schools graduate. “In fact yesterday I was trimming and weeding the plants because (the unkempt look) bothers me.”
An ongoing project at Kawaiaha'o Plaza is a mural, drawn by artist Solomon Enos and composed of an amalgamation of ideas of Kamehameha Schools employees who answered the question: Why are we here at Kamehameha? Mailer's answer was “very simple,” she says. “And that is I'm here simply because Pauahi had a dream, and I am responsible for fulfilling it in my lifetime. My part of that dream is to make sure that all of the children who are not reached by us at this point in time are. And that means taking Kamehameha to them.
“So you'll hear me talk a lot about our outreach to community, our shoring up and supporting the charter schools and the public schools because that's where a lot of Hawaiians are that never even come through our doors. And you'll hear me talking less about the campus – not because I don't love the students there or the kumu there or anybody. It's because they're well cared for and they're well-served. But the children out there aren't. So everything that I do now is building up that community support so Pauahi is there with the children.”
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