Decolonising the University: Lessons from Oceania

In October 2013, students and staff at the University of Hawaiʻi painted this mural on their campus in Honolulu. The mural was painted in protest of the University’s involvement in plans to build a thirty-metre wide telescope on Mauna Kea, a very sacred place for indigenous Hawaiians.

This mural captures a moment in which students and staff call their institution to account. Their demand that the University operate as a “Hawaiian place of learning” reveals an implicit obligation for their institution’s administration to not just respect the indigenous people on whose land their campus lies, but to integrate their ways of knowing and being more deeply into everyday campus business.

The University of Hawaiʻi has a history of politically-engaged scholarship on Hawaiian history and culture. Activists claim that it is hypocritical to create research and teaching problems learning about Hawaiian culture, but then fail to truly ‘walk the walk’ in terms of how they engage with the community.

We might compare this to a university teaching the horrors of colonial exploitation of Africa but still hosting a statue of Cecil Rhodes, or a university researching climate change yet holding shares in fossil fuel -related industries.