2019 Mokuola Honua Symposium

Mokuola Honua , the Hawai’i-based Global Center for Indigenous Language Excellence, cultivates relationships towards the goal of bringing back the prominence of indigenous perspectives in modern contexts from a foundation of language fluency.

Mokuola Honua will be hosting its second symposium at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hio’s Hawaiian Langauge College at the end of the UN-declared International Year of Indigenous Languages. The first symposium engaged representatives from over 25 indigenous communities from around the globe in discourse around the application and impact of indigenous language on policy, education and media.

The driving goal of the 2019 symposium is to provide attendees an opportunity to engage with other indigenous language advocates in experiential learning and discourse to increase our individual and collective capacity to further our language normalization efforts. By way of outcomes, event organizers have developed the program with a focus on the following:

• Creating relationships – personal and professional – between representatives from  communities globally that are actively working on language revitalization and normalization initiatives

• Giving attendees an opportunity to experience and learn about the P-20 educational programming that has become the foundation of the Hawaiian language movement

• Having invitees engage in breakout sessions to identify and analyze strategic priorities for the integration and promotion of our indigenous languages in four sectors: education, government, media and business

• Engaging with Hawaiʻi-based leaders and decision-makers from these sectors of society to get insight on how to refine these priorities in a manner that would facilitate the forming of meaningful partnerships in the broader societies where we are deploying our own individual language revitalization and normalization initiatives

The overarching goal is to enlist attendees to identify the common denominators of success that are duplicable globally in the ongoing work to strengthen indigenous perspectives through indigenous languages.