Only at UH Hilo: Budding environmental scientist adds global language revitalization and documentary filmmaking to her toolbox
Inspired by Justina Mattos’s local-based drama course, environmental science major Zoë Whitney is producing a documentary film on the global movement to revitalize Indigenous languages.
By Leah Sherwood.
It’s not unusual at a liberal arts university for students to explore seemingly unrelated fields of study. Such is the case for Zoë Whitney, an environmental science major at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo who, as part of her core requirements, took a class in performing arts, which in turn has led her to embark on creating a film documentary on the global movement to revitalize Indigenous languages.
Whitney’s film project started through inspiration born on a campus fully dedicated to Hawaiian language and culture revitalization. These revitalization efforts are not limited to the university’s Ka Haka ʻUla O Keʻelikōlani College of Hawaiian Language—programs throughout the campus are infusing Indigenous language, culture, values, and activities into curriculum, research, and community outreach.
Inspiration from drama prof Justina Mattos
Inspiration for Whitney came from Justina Mattos, an assistant professor of drama and performing arts at UH Hilo who began directing performances of three popular children’s plays in ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi (Hawaiian language) in 2018. Students in Mattos’s course, Acting Troupe (DRAM 421), performed the plays, which Mattos had translated from their English versions into Hawaiian language. The performances took place at the Hilo Public Library and five Hilo elementary schools during the spring 2018 semester.
The touring production was titled ʻEkolu: Three Plays for nā Keiki. The three plays were “Nā Kao Pūkalakī ʻEkolu (The Three Gruff Goats)”; “Nā Puaʻa Li ʻili ʻi ʻEkolu (The Three Little Pigs)”; and “Nā ʻIole Makapō ʻEkolu (The Three Blindfolded Mice).”
The characters in the plays spoke their lines in the Hawaiian language, while a narrator translated for the audience in Hawaiian Creole English, commonly called pidgin.
“I decided to tell these familiar stories with a pidgin-speaking narrator in order to make the Hawaiian language dialogue more accessible to the students,” says Mattos, a UH Hilo alumna. “It was an experiment for us to see how much Hawaiian language was retained by the elementary school students that we performed for and how much was retained by the UH Hilo college-age performers, most of whom had no background in the Hawaiian language.”
The documentary film
Mattos’s work and the performances inspired Whitney’s film project, which she began in 2018.
Whitney, a senior from Kula, Maui, who, in addition to her major in environmental science is earning a minor in English and certificates in Teaching English as a Second Language and Energy Science, had been a student in Mattos’s earlier classes. The professor invited her former student to film the DRAM 421 class and their touring production. The initial plan was for the film—still in production—to focus on Hawaiian language revitalization, but the budding filmmaker soon decided to expand its scope to include other language revitalization efforts around the globe.
“Professor Mattos invited me to film the progress her students in DRAM 421 made as they went from knowing either very little Hawaiian or very little theater to combining both,” says Whitney.
“As I watched them grow from behind my camera and heard that Professor Mattos was inspired by the language revitalization efforts in New Zealand, I realized that what was happening in front of me at UH Hilo is part of a global movement,” she continues. “The logical next step was to film similar stories there and weave them together as a documentary. As an academic, Professor Mattos was able to guide me in conducting this project as a form of international cultural research.”
Whitney spent the 2018-2019 academic year at Uppsala University in Sweden, where she documented efforts to revitalize the Sámi languages, which are endangered Indigenous languages spoken in Scandinavia and Northwest Russia.
Whitney is currently in the process of editing her documentary, which will include segments on Yiddish in addition to Hawaiian and Sámi.
UPDATE April 2020: Watch Zoë Whitney’s documentary ʻEkolu.
Update: In 2020, Whitney also produced short film Hoʻihoʻi Restore on Mattos’s children’s play
Story by Leah Sherwood, a graduate student in the tropical conservation biology and environmental science program at UH Hilo. She received her bachelor of science in biology and bachelor of arts in English from Boise State University.
