Dr. Nicol Russell’s inner child is an introverted bookworm from Waiʻanae, Oʻahu. Throughout her 26-year career in early childhood education, Russell, 46, has kept her younger self – and the stigmas she faced – top of mind.
In Waiʻanae, “we had such a bad reputation for being all the things people associate with Native communities,” Russell said. “My whole life, it really was feeling like I had to disprove what I was hearing people say about this place that I loved.”
Today, when she trains teachers as the chief academic officer at the education technology company Teaching Strategies, she emphasizes the importance of relationships with students.
As Kānaka ʻŌiwi pupils, “the way that we were treated has just haunted me forever,” Russell said. “It was such a negative experience that I don’t want that for other kids.”
Instead, she’s focused on uplifting youth in the lāhui and on the continent. And it all started in Waiʻanae, which generations of her ʻohana have claimed as their own.
Russell grew up as the middle child, with three sisters and two brothers. They spoke English, ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi and Pidgin. Under the eye of Russell’s grandmother, a kumu hula, Russell and her sisters learned how to dance.
“As soon as I could walk, I could hula,” she said.
Russell reminisced on days spent at the beach and at lūʻau. Her grandfather played bass guitar, and her grandmother ensured Russell learned how to prepare dishes like laulau and lomi salmon.
“I have such an Indigenous worldview because I was immersed in our culture,” Russell said.
Then, when she was 13 years old, her mother, Ashlyn Piʻilani, passed away from cancer. “Like a lot of our people she was sick, and it went undiagnosed,” Russell said.
Responsibilities soon fell on her young shoulders as Russell helped her father, Lester Walker, with her younger siblings. Walker, who is from Birmingham, Alabama, arrived in Hawaiʻi as a Marine and never left.
Every day after school, Russell lost herself in books at the library, reading The Sound and The Fury and The Color Purple. As a Waiʻanae High School student, she imagined a writing career and gravitated toward journalism.
Russell was accepted to several colleges on the continent, including the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. However, she stayed in Hawaiʻi to help take care of her family. At the University of Hawaiʻi, Russell decided against pursuing journalism and pivoted to English.
The summer before her sophomore year, she got a job at Kuaʻana Native Hawaiian Student Services Center. Russell recruited future haumāna from other islands and organized community service events, including beach cleanups and protests. “That was the most important thing I did at the university,” Russell said.
In college, she also learned more about her father’s experiences as a Black man – and what it meant for her to be a Black woman in the U.S.
“I was finally coming to understand who I was as a person fully,” Russell said.
After graduating with her bachelor’s degree in May 2001, she moved to Maryland that summer, then married her first husband. Russell is counted as the first in her ʻohana to leave Hawaiʻi. “It was like landing on Mars,” she said.
There, she encountered a new kind of diversity, surrounded by immigrants from Africa and South America. Although no one recognized her as Hawaiian, she felt she could fit in.
Russell decided to pursue teaching and, from 2002 to 2008, she taught kindergarten at Bradley Hills Elementary School in Bethesda, Maryland.
During that time, she and her first husband divorced.
In 2008, Russell moved to Arizona, spurred by a desire to be closer to Hawaiʻi and her sister and started working at Bright Horizons in Phoenix as a teacher, which served as her entryway into early childhood education. “I probably did the most growing [there] as a professional than anything else I ever did before that and since then,” Russell said.
She rose up the ranks from teacher to program coordinator to assistant director. Eventually, Russell became director of the center, hiring and training staff until she left in 2012.
Russell accepted a position at the Arizona Department of Education as its professional development coordinator, talking to thousands of teachers around the state when she presented trainings. In 2013, Russell was promoted to director of early childhood special education.
In 2015, Makena Hōkūleʻa – Russell’s daughter – was born. Russell refers to her as “an unexpected blessing” after her firstborn, Nainoa, passed away as an infant.
That year, Russell became the deputy associate superintendent, overseeing a team of 28. “Everything was thriving,” Russell said.
She welcomed a new challenge in 2018 – pursuing a doctorate in education at Northern Arizona University. In 2019, she transitioned from the government sector to work at Teaching Strategies. Russell was initially hired as the director of Head Start research and support, then promoted to vice president of implementation research in 2021.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Russell proposed a project in her doctoral program about how the shift to online schooling was affecting the Kānaka Maoli community. She interviewed teachers and students before graduating in 2021.
Even with her busy schedule, Hawaiʻi remains on Russell’s mind. She visits often with her 9-year-old daughter, a sociable and easygoing child who dances hula at a hālau in Arizona and is learning the lunar phases in ʻōlelo.
“Waiʻanae is still home,” Russell said. “I still feel like I’ve got work to do here on the continent, but I will be home again.”
