Responsible Digital Stewardship of Hawaiian Knowledge

Systems with roots in colonial cultures tend to create artificial classifications of people, cosmologies and resources in attempts to define universal truths. Digital platforms carry this legacy by distilling how information is transferred into a few restrictive interactions, limiting the breadth of expression. By contrast, many Indigenous and non-western epistemologies recognize all sources of knowledge (across practices, individuals and the natural world) as connected and interdependent, and acknowledge that truth is pluralistic and subjective.

When indigenous knowledge traverses digital spaces, it typically does so through western gatekeepers, fundamentally redefining it. Digital systems are thus complicit in rarifying many complex and nuanced epistemologies, some of which may be key to healing colonial damage to social and ecological systems. As such, creating digital systems and interfaces that are both culturally translative and responsibly steward indigenous knowledge is a fundamental step to perpetuate cultural and ecological health.

Recognizing the important role of positionality, this thesis explores the shape of responsible digital indigenous knowledge stewardship in a specific and personal context: as a designer of western ancestry whose cultural roots are in Hawaiʻi. It explores the history, values, and systems that inform a Hawaiian place-based approach to design, and chronicles a community project intended to apply those explorations in the design of a digital platform that transmits ancestral knowledge responsibly.