Advertisement - Click to support our sponsors.
View Point
ONE of Hawaii's finest minds and visionaries died on Sept. 14 (Star-Bulletin obituary, Sept. 16). George Kanahele left Hawaii a better place, but he left us too soon. Kanahele helped
indigenous people
find new livesHe was one of the rare people who could combine academia and entrepreneurial vigor. He was my business partner for 12 years, as well as my mentor and role model.
He taught me to think globally and always to think excellence. We had spoken Indonesian together before we had spoken English, and I was compelled to get to know him from our first meeting at the East-West Center.
Most people don't know that George helped start numerous organizations in Hawaii and throughout the world. One was the Hawaii Entrepreneurship Training & Development Institute, a nonprofit that we co-founded. We did work in 10 different countries helping indigenous people get into business for themselves.
We took a theoretical model out of the East-West Center and, with the help of Dick Morse, made it into the first entrepreneur training program in the nation to put the unemployed into their own businesses. This scheme has since blossomed over the world.
George's love and practice of the entrepreneurial spirit was an inspiration to indigenous people everywhere.
"You've got to exorcise the spirit of inferiority
out of you before you can do
anything in this world."
George Kanahele
HISTORIAN, TEACHER AND HAWAIIAN
CULTURAL EXPERT
He was a charismatic trainer and drilled a simple message into each spirit he came in contact with in our entrepreneur programs, especially among Hawaiians, Maoris, Eskimos, Aleuts, Chamorros, American and Canadian Indians. "You've got to exorcise the spirit of inferiority out of you before you can do anything in this world," he always told them.He should know because of his own ghost up at Kamehameha Schools. In his senior year, George's teacher told him that, since he would never amount to anything, he'd better apply early for a job at Hawaiian Electric or the fire department.
GEORGE was so incensed at this perception of his Hawaiianness that he vowed to get a Ph.D. and show this man and the world who George Kanahele was and what Hawaiians could accomplish.
His message to every Hawaiian, especially those in small business, was that there were no barriers save those shackles you place on yourself. He had a way of teaching native Hawaiians to believe in themselves without making them angry at haoles.
His book "Ku Kanaka" or "Stand Tall" was a classic call to Hawaiianness, and was basically the written version of what I saw him teaching and practicing in our entrepreneur training programs.
George has fallen asleep much ahead of the finish line he had set out for himself. I grieve for the race without him. But his contribution lives on by way of his prolific writings.
We owe it to our future to read the words of George Kanahele, and keep the ghosts of inferiority from our islands.
Gene Ward is a former member of the state
House of Representatives, and was the executive director of the
Hawaii Entrepreneurship Training & Development Institute
(HETADI) while George Kanahele served
as chairman of the board.