Feb 21, 2024 Callie Avondet, Fall 2023 DM Undergraduate Intern, Nā Lei Poina ʻOle (The Children Never Forgotten)

Briefly describe your project and the challenges, lessons learned, and obstacles overcome in the execution of it. What were the professional, academic, and personal motivations underlying your project?

I am currently helping with part of Dr. Maile Arvin and Dr. Derek Taira’s larger project, Nā Lei Poina ʻOle (The Children Never Forgotten). We hope to explore and (re)member the histories of institutionalizing children in Hawaiʻi. Beginning in 1865, “bad” children, disproportionately Hawaiian, could be sent away from their families to these institutions that claimed to turn them into “respectable” (conforming to white American middle class norms) adults typically through manual and domestic labor. 

During the Fall 2023 semester, I contributed by creating a digital map of the reformatory for girls from 1929-63, Kawailoa Training School. I began conducting research on Kawailoa over the summer as I worked with Dr. Arvin through the Office of Undergraduate Research’s Summer Program for Undergraduate Research, focusing on the rhetoric surrounding girls who escaped. When I visited the former Kawailoa Training School site (currently the Hawaiʻi Youth Correctional Facility) in July, there was a special feeling to enter these spaces where incarcerated girls experienced so much of their lives and an added layer of respect for the barriers the girls overcame to escape. As the research team and our fantastic community advisory board discussed how to connect the public to the physical spaces these reformatories existed in, creating a digital map of the Kawailoa site immediately resonated with me.  

How did the Digital Matters internship dovetail with your academic pursuits? What interested you in applying for this grant?

I was initially interested in Dr. Arvin’s project because I am interested in the history of education, especially concerning race. Generally, where there are training schools, industrial schools, or juvenile detention centers, people of color are overrepresented because institutions that create and control these centers are imbued with white supremacy. Understanding these locations of punishment and white supremacy throughout history interested me because the better we can understand how racism and oppression worked, the more clearly we can understand and dismantle it today.

What insights have you gained in regard to your specific field as a result of your project and grant experience?

While I came to the project relatively unaware of the work happening in digital humanities, making this history accessible to the general public and Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) has always been an essential part of Dr. Arvin’s agenda. As I worked more with her and eventually began working on the project through Digital Matters, I began to see more clearly how digital humanities can be used to help people access historical sources without having to make their way to the archives and to understand history without wading through books written for academic audiences.  

What would you tell potential intern applicants to help them shape their own digital scholarship project?

 Don’t let the “digital” part of Digital Matters scare you away. The field of digital humanities is more expansive than I ever could have imagined, ranging from story maps and websites to podcasts to data management. The options are endless, so be open to having your ideas about what a digital humanities project is change. This array of options means that it is okay to come into Digital Matters still figuring out exactly what the best medium for your project is, and there are people here who can and will help you make those decisions.