Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1991. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 473-513) / Microfiche. / ix, 513 leaves, bound 29 cm

Farm to school programs are becoming a popular intervention to address childhood obesity. The hope is to prevent later chronic illnesses such as diabetes and cardiovascular disease that can result from eating high-fat/high-calorie diets that are low in consumption of fresh fruits and vegetables. This study explores the impacts of one such program, Farm to Keiki, on students, their families, and teachers at two Native Hawaiian preschools on the island of Kauaʽi, Hawaiʽi. This program combined lessons about plants and nutrition with gardening at school and tastetesting in the classroom. Rooted in critical medical anthropology, this study utilized a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods to understand these impacts, as well as the historical and cultural contexts that have contributed to dietary changes among Native Hawaiians. Through in-depth interviews and focus groups, families and teachers described how the program encouraged the children to try new foods and eat more produce, and how the children demonstrated new knowledge about plants and healthy eating. Participants also spoke of ways in which their own knowledge and eating habits changed, and families reported carrying over many of the program's activities at home by gardening and preparing meals together. Additionally, participants offered valuable feedback on ways the program could be improved. This study, which appears to be the first of its kind to involve a Native Hawaiian farm-toschool program, demonstrates that an anthropological approach can provide critical depth and understanding of how programs like Farm to Keiki affect students and the people close to them.

<p>  </p> <p>Many viewers—especially those from the continental United States—have praised Disney for such recent actions as casting Pacific Islanders in the animated feature film <em>Moana</em> (2016) and assembling a group of cultural advisors (named the Oceanic Story Trust) to guide the filmmakers’ creative decisions. However, my project contends that Disney continues to play a significant role in the maintenance of settler colonialism in Hawai‘i, despite these seemingly progressive attempts at challenging Hollywood’s whitewashing. In this project, I argue that Disney creates and replicates the structures of settler colonialism in Hawai‘i through a mechanism that I term <em>imagineered imperial tourism</em>. In my formulation, imagineered imperial tourism involves commodifying historical narratives of colonization to serve the Disney brand by “innocently” repackaging them for the purpose of settler tourist consumption. To signal a Disney-specific branding and reproduction of settler colonial tropes and ideologies, I use the term “imagineered”—a play on Disney’s trademarked term <em>Imagineering</em>, which names the work of the creative team tasked with engineering the company’s most innovative devices, built environments, and technologies.</p> <p>Through a sustained study of Disney’s relevant productions—from the feature films <em>Lilo & Stitch</em> (2002) and <em>Moana</em> to its built environments at the Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, FL, and Aulani, A Disney Resort & Spa in Ko Olina, Hawai‘i—I suggest that over time, Disney has normalized a version of Native Hawaiian people and history in US popular culture that reproduces common settler colonial discourses which have structured popular perceptions of Hawai‘i. The company’s almost century-long history of media production has cemented these discourses into a set of public pedagogies that have been reproduced across generations. Disney’s Pacific Island-themed productions and attractions are rife with tropes of native primitivism and imperialist nostalgia. They also reveal the primacy of the discursive framework of hegemonic multiculturalism vis-à-vis the commodified “spirit of aloha,” a sentiment which is superficially rooted in Native Hawaiian epistemologies and branded as a key selling point by the tourism industry. Furthermore, Disney has actively colonized Hawaiian lands since 2007, capitalizing on the Islands’ exploitative tourist industry while also obscuring longstanding battles over land ownership and denying Native Hawaiians sovereignty over their stolen lands. Ultimately, I suggest that Disney’s ostensibly “innocent” repackaging contributes to the violent erasure of Native Hawaiian history in popular culture. </p>