Culturally Sustaining Leadership: A Pacific Islander’s Perspective
Abstract
:1. Introduction
The term culturally sustaining requires that our pedagogies be more than responsive of or relevant to the cultural experiences and practices of young people—it requires that they support young people in sustaining the cultural and linguistic competence of their communities while simultaneously offering access to dominant cultural competence.[1]
Culture, it turns out, is the way that every brain makes sense of the world. That is why everyone, regardless of race or ethnicity, has a culture. Think of culture as software for the brain’s hardware. The brain uses cultural information to turn everyday happenings into meaningful events.[2]
2. Authentic Leadership
3. Authentic Chamoru Leadership Rooted in På‘å Taotao Tåno‘
4. Chamoru Values in Leadership
self-transcendent values (e.g., universal values, such as social justice, equality and broadmindedness; benevolent values, such as honesty, loyalty and responsibility) and positive other-directed emotions (e.g., gratitude, goodwill, appreciation and concern for others) play a fundamental role in the emergence and development of authentic leadership.[4]
4.1. Inimi‘di (Belonging)
Everything is personalized in island society. Everyone has a face and a history. Even if you’re a foreigner, you can’t remain on an island for very long and expect to retain your anonymity; for an islander it’s well-nigh impossible. Life on a Micronesian island, then, is the sum total of a series of interpersonal encounters with people who know one another. There are no shadowlands in which large numbers of nameless people can find refuge from these close encounters, no crab holes into which persons can crawl to escape recognition. There is no faceless crowd anywhere in Micronesia. Everyone, islander or foreign-born, has a name, a social status, and a link of some sort to everyone else in the community.[11]
One of the horrors of disease in American communities, especially with those who have severe degenerative diseases, is that one gets isolated, abandoned, stigmatized, marginalized and falls out of the world. On Guam, I never saw that. People would remain completely part of the family and community, a full person right to the last. If they had to go to the hospital, the whole family would go with them. The hospital was like a village. Everyone is integrated all the while, even before Lytico-Bodig. In this way, they are much more civilized than we are.[12]
Modernity has led to the biggest identity crisis of humankind. The anxiety of contemporary man is an obsession with questions of worth and in response he hysterically collects symbols of desirability. This consumption is materialistic. We collect things to make others love us.[13]
a worry so pernicious as to be capable of ruining extended stretches of our lives, that we are in danger of failing to conform to the ideals of success laid down by our society and that we may as a result be stripped of dignity and respect; a worry that we are currently occupying too modest a rung or are about to fall to a lower one.[14]
4.2. Chenchule‘ (Reciprocity)
4.3. Respect for Manåmko‘ (Elders)
5. Chamoru Temporal Intelligence
A normal reaction to stress is to speed up your velocity. This approach means that after a short while, you cannot recognize anyone or anything not travelling at your velocity and become a stranger to the slower paces of existence. You become afraid of stopping and become resentful of those who are moving slower than you. There is an existential impatience and lack of generosity which comes from this stressful approach to work.[21]
6. Primacy of the Natural Environment
7. Closing
the empirical fact is that self-actualizing people, our best experiencers, are also our most compassionate, our great improvers and reformers of society, our most effective fighters against injustice, inequality, slavery, cruelty, exploitation (and also our best fighters for excellence, effectiveness, competence.[23]
- Ini Na Latte‘
- Ini na latte‘, i haligi
- This latte, the house post
- i acho‘ alutong gi gima‘ ulitao
- Hard is the stone of our men’s house
- I acho‘ tåno‘ i acho‘ tåsi‘
- The stone of the land, the stone of the sea
- Acho‘ alutong i taotao-måmi
- Hard stone are our people
- i taotao, i taotao-måmi
- The people, our people
- Fanaiguihi, fanaiguihi
- Become like that, become like that
- Nā‘ matatnga i mane ‘lu-mu
- Encourage your brothers.
- Hu‘!
Conflicts of Interest
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Hattori, M.T.P. Culturally Sustaining Leadership: A Pacific Islander’s Perspective. Educ. Sci. 2016, 6, 4. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci6010004
Hattori MTP. Culturally Sustaining Leadership: A Pacific Islander’s Perspective. Education Sciences. 2016; 6(1):4. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci6010004
Chicago/Turabian StyleHattori, Mary Therese Perez. 2016. "Culturally Sustaining Leadership: A Pacific Islander’s Perspective" Education Sciences 6, no. 1: 4. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci6010004
APA StyleHattori, M. T. P. (2016). Culturally Sustaining Leadership: A Pacific Islander’s Perspective. Education Sciences, 6(1), 4. https://doi.org/10.3390/educsci6010004