UC Davis

On August 8, 2023, a catastrophic wildfire devastated the town of Lahaina and severely impacted the broader Maui community. Thousands of structures were destroyed, and 102 lives were lost. It was the deadliest wildfire in Hawaiʻi’s recorded history and the deadliest U.S. wildfire in over a century. This disaster was not simply a natural event but the culmination of settler-colonial land transformations that systematically displaced Kānaka ʻŌiwi land management systems, introduced highly flammable invasive grasses, and disrupted integrated watershed systems. This study is grounded in a community-based participatory research (CBPR) project called Hoʻomalu ʻĀina Maui (protecting the land of Maui). Hoʻomalu ʻĀina Maui is a wildfire mitigation and land stewardship program that I co-developed in response to the 2023 Lahaina wildfire in partnership with a high school field ecology teacher, a Kānaka ʻŌiwi biocultural conservation biologist, and a local nonprofit focused on watershed stewardship and cultural revitalization. Relational accountability to community is not only a principle of this project but a methodological commitment that has shaped every dimension of the research. This study asks: How do high school students in Maui, Hawaiʻi engage with and make meaning of multiple knowledge systems as they participate in land stewardship activities for wildfire mitigation? To answer this question, this study draws on Kānaka ʻŌiwi epistemologies, epistemic justice frameworks, decolonial science education, social-ecological systems resilience, and critical place-based education. Data were collected during the 2024-2025 school year through pre- and post-program surveys, ethnographic observations, pre- and post-program interviews, and a student-produced documentary film. Within this study, there are three interrelated sub-studies that explore: 1) what students bring to environmental learning in a post-wildfire context, explored through social-ecological systems resilience and Kānaka ʻŌiwi biocultural knowledge frameworks, before any formal programming; 2) how embodied practice shapes their developing relationships to ʻāina (land) and kuleana (relational responsibilities); and 3) what happens epistemologically when two knowledge systems with different ontologies and axiologies coexist in the same learning context. Findings reveal that: 1) students demonstrate strong systems thinking skills and critical consciousness about social injustices affecting Kānaka ʻŌiwi communities; 2) kuleana emerged not through instruction but through repeated engagement with a specific place, hands-on stewardship work, and relationships with kumu (teachers) who modeled kuleana; 3) students’ grief about the Lahaina fire became the affective foundation for political analysis; and 4) epistemic authority was distributed across a constellation of knowledge holders whose collective expertise —spanning Kānaka ʻŌiwi cultural practice, biocultural conservation, and place-based ecology— created the conditions under which students could engage with multiple ways of knowing simultaneously and in relationship with one another. Overall, this study argues that centering Indigenous epistemologies in science education is not solely a matter of curriculum design but a relational and structural imperative. For educators, program designers, science education researchers, and policymakers, this requires sustained commitment to place, community, and the slow, necessary work of building the conditions under which genuine epistemic justice becomes possible. Implications argue that 1) epistemic justice requires structural attention to the ways in which knowledge is sequenced and validated across the full program arc; and 2) students arrive as knowledge holders whose expertise, grief, and relational accountability to place and community demand an authentic platform for them to teach, share, and build the futures they envision and deserve.