With advancements in AI, it can be hard to understand how to use it ethically. That is why The Learning Observatory has developed a basic course for anyone to follow.

Somewhere in the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands files is an application dated 1952. The person who filed it was waiting for a homestead lot — land set aside by Congress in 1921 specifically for Native Hawaiians. As of the most recent count, that application was still on the list.

Seventy years. That's not a backlog. That's a lifetime.

Every election season, the same explanation gets recycled for Hawaiʻi's dismal turnout: Native Hawaiians don't vote.

It's a tidy story. It's also, as far as anyone can actually show, not true.

Here's a number that looks almost reassuring at first glance.

In 2022, the median Native Hawaiian household in Hawaiʻi earned $81,328. The state median was $92,458. An $11,000 gap is real, but it's not the chasm you might expect given everything else we know. You could read that figure and conclude Native Hawaiian families are holding roughly even.

You'd be reading it wrong. And the reason why is the most important thing in the Office of Hawaiian Affairs' income data.

When people talk about Native Hawaiian health, the conversation almost always lands in the same place: diabetes, heart disease, the chronic illnesses that show up in middle age.

Those numbers are real. Native Hawaiian adults carry diabetes at higher rates than the state — prevalence climbed from about 9 percent in 2011 to nearly 14 percent by 2019 before the pandemic disrupted the data. But focusing only there misses something the Office of Hawaiian Affairs' Native Hawaiian Data Book makes hard to ignore.

For a long time, the story about Native Hawaiian students went like this: they fall behind, they leave school, they don't finish.

That story is out of date.

I'm a man, and reading your account made me sit with a hard truth; men built the world you're describing. Social media didn't invent misogyny; it just gave it a megaphone and an algorithm.

Researchers have long known that income-based poverty measures miss critical dimensions of hardship. People need more than a minimum income; they need affordable housing, access to nutritious food, health care, education, and reliable transportation. When families lack these basics simultaneously, the impact compounds in ways that a simple income threshold can't capture.

Most people reasonably assume that once the Legislature funds a program, the work simply begins. But Hawaiʻi’s budget data tells a more conplicated story.