Elementary school teachers rarely go viral, but this weekend Jasmynn Nakasone of Lāʻie Elementary did.
The rubber-slipper-clad teacher had been sharing videos of her lessons on social media.
A few clips were stitched together by the X account Libs of TikTok and have since racked up more than 200,000 views.
Since then, Nakasone has removed the original clips. And BYU–Hawaiʻi appears to have taken down a faculty profile that listed Nakasone under its Faculty of Education and Social Work.
In one clip, Nakasone suggests that a boy with three moms is “special,” not “different.”
In another, she tells her class that Indigenous navigators were superior to European ones, who were “lost in the ocean.” Newcomers, she says, hurt the land and push out the Indigenous people to get rich.
“I think I can take all their trees,” she says. “Maybe I can go live on all this space. They might have some treasure in their land.”
Public school teachers should not be filming content in their classrooms. They are not influencers and shouldn’t try to be. That is a column of its own, and it will be my next one.
Here, I’m interested in something more common: The view of history Nakasone was teaching.
Her captions capture it well:
- “One less class learning about Columbus”
- “One more class getting true facts!”
- “One more class knowing the real voyagers and navigators”
Her framing is standard in Hawaiʻi today, and especially among University of Hawaiʻi graduates: History is a contest between oppressors and the oppressed.
She is remarkable only for explaining it at a five-year-old level: Indigenous people are good; newcomers are bad.
Nakasone is at least as much a victim of this misreading as she is a teacher of it.
This did not happen by accident. For decades Marxists have worked, patiently, to win the institutions that shape how people think — what the Italian communist Antonio Gramsci called a “war of position.” You do not need to storm the palace if you can staff the kindergarten.
Teachers like Nakasone sat in those classrooms as students first. She almost certainly believes what she’s saying. She was taught to.
One group is sinful and the other is pure. Capitalists exploit workers. Men oppress women. Newcomers take; Indigenous people keep the water and the trees safe. The whole of history reduces to one question for the student. Which group is which?
The problem with this framing is first that it’s wrong, and second that it causes blindness.
First, it’s wrong because all humans are sinful. No ethnic group has a monopoly on sin, and none is pure. Arriving early does not make a people innocent, and arriving late does not make them guilty.
A lens like this doesn’t just blur the view. It decides in advance what can be seen.
For example, Nakasone argues that Indigenous people live in harmony with the land, while newcomers hurt it. “When newcomers came, then a lot of the trees and the mountains got hurt a lot.”
That is true, though not in the way she means. Everyone reshapes the land. The Polynesians were newcomers once, and the islands still bear witness.
Oʻahu’s loulu palm forests were burned, and their decline lines up with the Polynesians’ arrival.
Evidence of fires becomes frequent around A.D. 1000. Patrick Vinton Kirch concludes from the archaeological research that “Polynesians, farmers who used fire to clear the land for their gardens, had arrived on the island.”
This didn’t happen all at once. It probably took two or three centuries of clearing lowland forest for farms, while upland the Polynesians terraced the valleys, diverted the streams, and reshaped the mountains.
The call to cultivate the land is a call that involves planting and watering. But it also means subduing and clearing.
A worldview in which Indigenous people “take care” of the trees has nowhere to put the loulu forests, so it leaves them out. Procrustes used the same method. Whatever didn’t fit in the bed was cut off.
Leave enough out, and you start putting things in, as Nakasone does.
“Our kūpuna, they knew how to sail the ocean when no one else in the world knew how,” she says. “The newcomers were lost in the ocean, they bumped into the land.”
It’s one thing to say that Polynesians were skilled navigators. It’s quite another to say that they were the only skilled navigators.
Here, Nakasone has flipped around Thor Heyerdahl’s incorrect theory that Polynesians drifted to their islands from South America. Heyerdahl framed the Polynesians as inept while Europeans were skilled navigators. Nakasone does the opposite.
Many Native Hawaiian history classes trot out Heyerdahl as proof that Western scholars were racist against Polynesians. But Heyerdahl’s theory was widely discredited even before he set out on a raft called Kon-Tiki to prove it.
A teacher can and should discredit Heyerdahl and praise the skill of Polynesian navigators. That might even belong in a lesson on European ones.
But you can only get from “Polynesians were skilled navigators” to “nobody else was” by ignoring what the European voyagers did.
The Magellan-Elcano voyage was incredible, as were Christopher Columbus’s journeys. And so too were Captain James Cook’s voyages.
These captains led men, read instruments, provisioned ships for months at sea, and braved the elements. They were also proud and sinful, like all men.
A teacher doesn’t need to deny their seamanship to ask what the voyages brought with them in terms of disease, and later, colonization.
Teachers like Nakasone cannot get the facts of a simple lesson right, yet they presume to stand in judgment of history’s great explorers. In this, they ignore their own sin to fixate on the sin of others.
The log must come out of our own eye first. Until it does, teachers like Nakasone will fill the classrooms of Hawaiʻi.
They teach poorly because they were poorly taught.
Author Sterling Higa can be reached at hello@sterlinghiga.com.
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