From Waimānalo to the Pae ʻāina: Disseminating Indigenous Research Through Community Sharing

For many Indigenous communities, research has too often been driven by outsiders, serving as a process that extracts knowledge from communities instead of engaging alongside them. In Hawaiʻi, Kānaka Maoli or Native Hawaiian, who are the first people to have inhabited the Hawaiian Islands, are leading various initiatives to elevate community voices in research. Waimānalo Pono Research Hui (WPRH) is a community-academic partnership founded in 2017 by the Hawaiian community of Waimānalo located on the island of Oʻahu. WPRH uses Indigenous methodologies and principles of community-based participatory research to actively engage Native Hawaiian community members in research. Due to its success, other Native Hawaiian communities outside of Waimānalo have requested to learn more about the practices and protocols of WPRH to grow the capacity in their community to support and promote community-driven research. In response, a three-day Wāhine Research Summit was organized and held in August 2024 to bring together diverse Native Hawaiian wāhine (women) researchers, educators, practitioners, and community leaders from across the pae ʻāina (throughout the Hawaiian Islands) to strengthen pilina (relationships), expand Indigenous research capacity, and catalyze epistemological sovereignty. Rather than a one-way dissemination model, the summit itself was a living dissemination space—where the work of WPRH was intentionally shared with participants not only as information, but as an invitation to adapt and carry these practices back into their respective communities. Dissemination planning was embedded in the summit design, using facilitated dialogue, collective reflection, and participatory sense-making to co-develop key messages and materials that could be shared across varied community contexts. Materials produced included a visual summary booklet, infographics rooted in moʻolelo (stories), and guiding principles for pono (goodness, uprightness, righteous) research practices—all crafted to be accessible and culturally resonant for lay audiences. We advocate for dissemination to be reframed not as a final step, but as a circular, relational process in alignment with Indigenous methodologies.