First Nations' Futures fellows and others gather at the June 25 Workshop on Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems at the East-West Center. – Photo: Lisa Asato

Sustainable futures

By Lisa Asato / Ka Wai Ola

At the tail end of a four-week visit to Hawai'i as part of a fellowship program for indigenous leaders, Kari–Moana Austin said she was returning to New Zealand having learned many new ideas she planned to adapt for the betterment of her Māori tribe, the Ngai Tahu.

Her tribe holds the tribal authority to more than 80 percent of New Zealand's South Island, and faces “similar issues” to Hawai'i, with both populations at the bottom of statistics like education and health, she said.

As one of three Māori fellows and six Hawai'i fellows in the First Nations' Futures Program – a partnership between Kamehameha Schools, Stanford University and several Māori Tribes – Austin spent two weeks in an academic setting at Stanford University before spending time learning about and examining place-based projects for four weeks in Aotearoa, New Zealand, and four weeks in Hawai'i, where the focus was on sustainable food systems.

“Food sustainability is very valid for us back home even though it's a different situation from Hawai'i, an island state quite isolated from the rest of the world,” Austin said after a June 25 workshop on Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems at the East-West Center, where about 35 people representing various sectors of agriculture came to discuss agriculture and food sustainability in Hawai'i. Participants included restaurateurs, farmers, distributors, merchants, a sustainability consultant, a group from Kamehameha Schools Land Assets Division and government representatives. They also worked to identify how Kamehameha Schools and other agricultural stakeholders can play a major role in achieving food sustainability.

One group, which studied the supply side of the process, said it was optimistic that changes like increasing farmers' accessibility to land could happen, but they expressed an urgency for changes to happen. “We should do it now,” the group's leader told the audience, adding that Kamehameha Schools has an “excellent chance to buy local first” and set an example for others to follow.

Speaking after the workshop, Austin, the Māori fellow, said she was in a position to take the experiences she had here – including interviewing farmers, visiting fishponds, and seeing how kalo patches are used as an educational tool – to effect change at home as a policy advocate for Te Runanga o Ngai Tahu Strategy Advocates. The fellowship visit here was timely she said, following her just-completed work on her group's strategic plan for the next three to five years. “We came here and there's all these practical examples of people and communities working together. They work the land and feed themselves,”
she said.