Student Histories and Surveys

In 1926, William C. Smith, a visiting sociology professor at the University of Hawai‘i from the University of Southern California, distributed a research questionnaire to students at ten public and private intermediate and senior high schools, the University of Hawai‘i, and the Territorial Normal and Training School. Composing over several dozen questions, Smith asked the following: when and where students were born; the size of their families; their parents’ occupation, educational history, and ethnic background; student attitudes on the languages spoken and customs practiced at home; their life ambitions; their views on race; and how they conceptualized their political identity as Americans. However, while seemingly mundane and straightforward, this survey was anything but simple.

The inspiration for Smith's questionnaire came while he was a researcher for the Survey of Race Relations on the Pacific Coast. A two-year research project (1924–1926) led by University of Chicago sociologist Robert E. Park and funded through the Institute of Social and Religious Research, the survey investigated the assimilation process and lived experiences of “Orientals” in states along the US West Coast.Footnote ¹² Smith, like Park, considered Hawai‘i the “ultimate racial laboratory”—a “fantasy island” perfect for observing the racial “hybridization” occurring among the various ethnicities in the islands.Footnote ¹³ He was particularly fascinated with the second-generation Asian experience and their feelings of alienation and marginality in non-Asian social environments. As a result, he sought personal narratives capturing the overall feelings, impressions, and reactions of Asian students to language- and assimilation-related issues. His methodology provided him with samples from a wide age range between thirteen and twenty-four.

Smith sought to explain how American life contributed to the formation of a distinctly “Oriental American cultural consciousness.”Footnote ¹⁴ Pulling snippets from student survey responses, Smith pieced together extensive quotes to portray student feelings of being “caught between two worlds” as “holistic representations” of second-generation Asians. In this way, he transformed singular moments of marginality in numerous students’ lives into a “defining characteristic of racialized existence” for all Asians in America.Footnote ¹⁵ This category of analysis, supported by his selective use of “Oriental American” student narratives, formed the basis of his publications during the 1920s and 1930s.

Smith was less interested in analyzing the Native Hawaiian experience with Americanization and marginality. Nevertheless, he amassed dozens of Native student survey responses, thus providing one of the few extant sources describing how Native Hawaiians experienced schooling during the territorial period. These student writings make up a significant component of the data for this article. Native students penned 10 percent, or 130, of the roughly twelve hundred questionnaires. This article focuses on 20 of the 130. No data source, of course, is perfect. While teachers encouraged students to write autobiographies as part of the survey, the students often chose not to compose their essays as personal memoirs. Since teachers solicited these papers for a famous white continental researcher, they possibly, either directly or indirectly, pressured students to project pro-American and/or pro-English-language positions. In addition, these papers do not take into account the number of students who forgot their assignment, were absent, or felt too embarrassed about their English-language skills to complete their autobiographies.Footnote ¹⁶

While these twenty student accounts offer rare and critical insights into the educational history of Native Hawaiians during the territorial period, they cannot be viewed as representative. Of the tens of thousands of Indigenous students who entered the public schools, the twenty surveys chosen for this article only reveal the experiences of a select few during the late 1920s—those who achieved advanced English-language proficiency, received positive familial and community support for their schooling, and either pursued post-secondary education opportunities or expressed their ambition to do so.

Despite these limitations, the twenty survey responses reveal a collective emphasis on resiliency. Yet this was not the view in the majority of the 130 surveys, which displayed a range of experiences and attitudes. Student replies were often shaped, to varying degrees, by perceptions of what their teachers expected to hear as well as the survey questions’ stress on race and cultural mixing. Over half of the 130 responses are either incomplete and/or brief, possibly due to author indifference to the assignment. Nearly a quarter of these 130 surveys are more substantial in length but offer minimal attitudinal evidence of Indigenous pride. The remaining twenty responses articulate strong visions of Native resilience and survivance in the face of Americanizing efforts and form the core source of evidence for this article.

In these twenty surveys, students produced thoughtful and informative narratives revealing how they navigated and resisted Americanization in ways that challenge the myth of Native passivity during the territorial period. One clear example is how several Native students openly asserted pride in their indigeneity, often self-identifying as “part Hawaiian.” Such expressions were unprompted by any specific question and thus not a focus of Smith's survey. This understanding helps reinforce the serendipitous significance of those who plainly professed their indigeneity as evidence of an assertive Indigenous consciousness that contested Americanization.

This was not the case with all Native students. In surveys not included in this article, students either did not emphasize or embrace their Native heritage. Instead, they tended to list Hawaiian as simply one of their other ethnicities, with some even identifying more with their non-Native backgrounds. That Native students racially self-identified in different ways is not surprising. It's tough to imagine how any Native Hawaiian child's identity could have completely withstood the impacts and pressures of America's fascination with race and assimilation, as well as the diverse cultural values at home and school. Also, they were constantly forced to negotiate their adherence to Native practices, language, and cultural beliefs in a settler-colonial society that devalued such allegiances.

Nevertheless, the twenty papers selected for this article represent a wealth of information. They show the “reality of an existence”—absent in the pages of school records, Department of Public Instruction (DPI) publications, and school officials’ correspondence—in which students asserted their “resistant identities” and refused to be “objects of domination” tied to scripts associating whiteness to civilization and darkness to “savage ‘otherness.’”Footnote ¹⁷ As such, these essays reveal how Native Hawaiians imposed their own objectives, values, and expectations onto the islands’ educational system and its Americanization efforts. Instead of emphasizing how students responded to specific policy initiatives, these writings focus on how students, their families, and communities refashioned assimilationist schooling to strengthen and maintain their cultural identity, obtain language proficiency, and, to the degree possible, determine their own future. To examine these sources is to move away from a policy-oriented emphasis on passive assimilation to a student-oriented analysis of the ways in which young people, as agents of their own lives, in control of their own consciousness, responded to specific schooling agendas and actively pursued securing knowledge and skills to succeed and survive in an Americanized Hawai‘i.

Making Hawai‘i American

Once Hawai'i officially became “American” in 1898, white-settler policymakers set about employing the new territory's schools to enact a pedagogical campaign of erasure to legitimize US acquisition of the islands. They understood that allowing the Hawaiian national identity to persist threatened their nation-building efforts. As a result, white educators, politicians, and administrators designed educational programs to naturalize Hawai‘i’s student populations to nearly a century of Anglo-American intervention. Their goal: demonstrate that annexation represented a positive and inevitable development in America's benevolent march toward progress. This approach required eliminating memories of nineteenth-century US aggression, especially the 1893 overthrow and the dubious process leading to annexation, by presenting those events as the “necessary and fitting sequel to the chain of events” supporting the “incorporation of the Hawaiian Islands into the body politic of the United States,” not as violating American values of freedom and democracy. According to President William McKinley, between 1820 and 1893, the Hawaiian government's “virtual dependence” on the “benevolent protection of the United States” upheld annexation as the “inevitable consequence” of the two nations’ relationship.Footnote ¹⁸ Thus, as the president succinctly put it, “Under such circumstances, annexation is not a change; it is a consummation.”Footnote ¹⁹

Contemporary statements by white-settler politicians and school officials support McKinley's view and suggest that Native Hawaiians happily cooperated in the assimilation process. David L. Crawford, president of the University of Hawai‘i (1927–1941), argued that even before US annexation, Hawai‘i had always been on the path to becoming “American,” as the “ambition of the Hawaiian people was to keep up to American standards in the development of their educational program.”Footnote ²⁰ The dean of the Territorial Normal School (1921–1947), Benjamin O. Wist, pointed to Native Hawaiians as willing participants in making the Americanization of Hawaiians a “success.” Highlighting the “great socializing influence of the Hawaiian race” as an important “quality” in making the “Hawaiian a good teacher,” he added that this “quality” helped render the “Americanization program possible.”Footnote ²¹ Finally, Wallace Rider Farrington, territorial governor (1920–1928) and publisher of the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, described the islands’ public school system as the “greatest destiny controlling institution” for making Hawai‘i American. He believed the schools “must be so intensively and aggressively American” that the “children themselves will combat any alien influences that might substitute in their mature lives … democratic Americanism.” The schools were so successful in this regard, he held, that America had “ceased to worry over the Hawaiians.”Footnote ²²

Farrington and other white educators had good reason to believe Native Hawaiians had been pacified. For nearly a century, white settlers relied on their economic and political power to debilitate and “dismember” Native consciousness by removing and replacing Indigenous culture, language, and identity with Western civilization and white governance.Footnote ²³ Schools represented the perfect tool to fulfill this goal. They ensured the “consummation” of America's civilizing mission by eliminating examples of Hawaiian resistance and cultural identity through assimilation into the broader settler society. Anthropologist and ethnographer Patrick Wolfe theorized that this process was part of the larger project of settler colonialism. As one of a “range of strategies,” assimilation represented a “more effective mode of elimination” that avoided a “disruptive affront to the rule of law.”Footnote ²⁴ Rather than frontier homicide or apartheid policies, schooling promoted the “resocialization” of Natives by guiding their loyalties to the “egalitarian credentials” and “progressive individualism of the American dream.”Footnote ²⁵

Manual training in the public schools played an early critical part in this process. Beginning in the late 1840s, the Hawaiian kingdom's minister of education, Richard Armstrong, a former American missionary, began experimenting with a public educational system that combined industrial and agricultural training for boys and homemaking for girls with basic literacy skills in an effort to promote morality through physical labor. By the 1880s, white American school administrators further refined Armstrong's vision by creating a rudimentary curriculum that combined basic literacy and arithmetic with instruction in a trade to train Natives to be either laborers or teachers of industrial education. The goal was to create a racial underclass of “deferential, hard-working” laborers who accepted subservient roles in American society.Footnote ²⁶ This strategy served the interests of the white minority by preventing the Indigenous population from competing with local whites for leadership positions in government and industry.Footnote ²⁷

Territorial educators maintained this pedagogical approach into the twentieth century but faced new challenges. Large numbers of Asian students, whose parents had been brought to Hawai‘i to work in the islands’ sugar and pineapple plantations, now attended the public schools, stoking white fears of a growing “yellow peril” in the territory. To temper this anxiety, territorial politicians and school administrators attempted to convince skeptical whites both in Hawai‘i and on the continent that the territory was American. They touted schools as key assimilationist institutions for “creating citizens as well as workers.”Footnote ²⁸ School officials explained how Hawai‘i’s schools introduced both progressive and humanitarian American ideals through democratic education (improving the “quality of life for all”), vocational training, and labor efficiency (producing a skilled workforce and increasing productivity).Footnote ²⁹ By instructing teachers to concentrate on American history, “free enterprise,” and democracy to instill “100 percent Americanism,” white educators also sought to root out the “backward” “alien” ways of Hawai‘i’s “dominantly dark-skinned and slant-eyed” students.Footnote ³⁰ They argued that their Americanization process remained uninhibited by the continent's racism and “melted” Hawai‘i’s diverse cultures and ethnicities together into a homogeneous “indigenous American type” that ensured both “racial harmony” and a happy labor force.Footnote ³¹

Despite these noble claims, Hawai‘i’s schoolmen remained committed to limiting Native and Asian students’ socioeconomic mobility. By combining policies of manual training, remedial education, and Americanization, they sought to produce a compliant workforce and docile citizenry that served the economic and political interests of Hawai‘i’s oligarchy.Footnote ³² Their efforts “mushroomed” after World War I, as school officials feared the “Japanizing” of the territory due to the growing presence of Japanese laborers in the islands and Japan's aggressive expansion throughout the Pacific in the 1930s. Thus, during the interwar years, as the public routinely questioned the American patriotism of Issei (first-generation) and Nisei (second-generation) Japanese, white school bureaucrats devoted more and more time and energy to assimilating Hawai‘i’s Japanese population.Footnote ³³ As for Native Hawaiians, school officials had “ceased to worry” about them.Footnote ³⁴ They believed that Natives had been completely assimilated, thereby made into “effective Americanizers.”Footnote ³⁵ As a result, school administrators touted them as the territory's model minority, highlighting their “great socializing influence” as a key quality for other nonwhite groups to emulate on their path to American citizenship.Footnote ³⁶ But how accurate was this depiction of “success” in Americanizing Native Hawaiians?

“Turning the Power”: Locating Resiliency through Student Stories

Native American boarding schools, according to Clifford Trafzer, Jean Keller, and Lorene Sisquoc, represented a “successful failure” in Americanizers’ efforts to assimilate Indian students and destroy the foundational “essence” of their culture and identity.Footnote ³⁷ While the schools provided Native students with an academic and vocational education—saturated with American values of domesticity, consumerism, and rugged individualism—Native students and their families “turned the power” by imbuing their education with their own positive meanings. They converted the destructive cultural environment of the boarding schools into a constructive learning space for their own purposes, such as obtaining skilled employment, English-language proficiency, and new knowledge that would enable them to assert and protect Native claims and cultural identity in white society. Their efforts represented a pragmatic approach to white education, viewing it as a “means to an end.”Footnote ³⁸

This acknowledgment of the importance of American schooling did not mean accepting the white ways as superior. Rather, Native families and tribes began to realize that to succeed in the white world their youth needed to learn how to integrate “alien customs” into Native “lifeways.”Footnote ³⁹ While the white “architects of assimilation” expected Indian children to abandon their cultural and tribal ties and “learn to talk and work like Americans,” these outcomes never materialized.Footnote ⁴⁰ Indian boarding-school students, as Native anthropologist K. Tsianina Lomawaima explains, maintained a “stubborn refusal” to relinquish their Indigenous identity.Footnote ⁴¹ They “turned assimilationist logic on its head” and converted boarding schools and the Americanizing curriculum into “vehicles for cultural survival,” demonstrating they could talk and work like Americans without becoming American.Footnote ⁴² These examples of student resiliency provide a more nuanced and complicated understanding of how students negotiated the ways schools and white society pressured them to assimilate. By defining themselves through their achievements, creating intertribal social networks, and gaining competencies in various subjects useful for survival in white society, Native students asserted their abilities to innovate and resist.Footnote ⁴³

This understanding of resiliency offers an effective means for conceptualizing how Native Hawaiian students responded to assimilationism. Territorial public schools were not federal institutions like the boarding schools that aimed to achieve “education for extinction” in the 1870s.Footnote ⁴⁴ Native Hawaiians were not subjected to the same physically traumatic experiences as Native Americans: forced removal to government boarding schools, military discipline, or twenty-four-hour observation. Nevertheless, they shared strikingly similar experiences. The repression of Indigenous language and culture, subjection to a foreign curriculum, denial of their cultural heritage and history, and the unequal balance of power between oppressor and oppressed experienced in schools and society represented common occurrences highlighting their mutually painful past. And, like their American Indian counterparts, Native Hawaiians also subverted their colonial schooling by defying the goals of white authorities and imposing their own.

Going to School

In stories from schools across the territory, Native students repeatedly emphasized the importance of obtaining a good education to ensure a secure future. They understood that success at school could pave a path to white-collar employment as stenographers, social workers, clerks, secretaries, nurses, lawyers, doctors, and teachers. One Native student said as much when he wrote, “Hawaiian-born children of my group are attending schools and educational institutions for the benefit of their lives.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Mixed in with their optimism, Native students consistently worried about the future of their people. Another student lamented that “everytime” she thought about her people, she felt a “pang of regret that these islands were ever discovered.” Her words captured the grim and poignant reality of Hawaiians, who never envisioned that “someday there [sic] lands would be taken from them,” or “shoved toward the ‘outside’ districts.” Still, despite the gloom, like so many other Native students, this girl expressed hope for the future, believing that, through public education, “Hawaiian children are now being taught how to help their people.”Footnote ⁴⁶

In many autobiographies, Native Hawaiian students describe a collective awareness that personal success as students could help their families. They espoused a strong communal sense of responsibility and duty to improve the quality of life for their families and communities. Thus, they believed their drive to succeed and benefit from an American education would provide benefits for the wider community. This sense of purpose and dedication appeared most often in essays by students considering a career in education, and for good reason.

For many aspiring teachers, the plight of their people drove them to act. One student from Hilo bluntly stated, “I must devote myself to do work for my community instead of helping myself only.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Fearing Hawaiians “gradually fading into the past,” another described his “duty” to give everything within his “power for the rehabilitation of [my] race.”Footnote ⁴⁸ One particular “daughter of the soil,” worrying about her race “dying out” in the face of low life-expectancy rates, high unemployment, and disproportionately high incidences of cancer, alcoholism, diabetes, tuberculosis, measles, influenza, and chicken pox, expressed her frustration that Hawaiian children were “left stranded of many positions” and opportunities to succeed due to the “excess of Orientals” in the schools.Footnote ⁴⁹ She also recognized how immigrant children benefited from active participation in the school system, and she wanted the same for her people, explaining, “I am sure Hawaiian students may be bright also if they put more interest in their studying.” She thus sought to “contribute [her] part to [their] benefit” by becoming a teacher, a common aspiration.Footnote ⁵⁰

While an admirable goal, becoming a teacher would not be easy. In 1926, the DPI managed 187 elementary, intermediate, and secondary schools; employed 2,145 teachers; and educated 72,574 students across the Hawaiian Islands.Footnote ⁵¹ While the total number of students and teachers rose throughout the 1920s, the number of Native Hawaiians in both categories steadily declined. In 1920, Native students made up 18 percent of the total student population but dipped to 10 percent by 1930. This slip was also noticed among Hawaiian normal-school students, as their numbers dropped from 30 percent at the beginning of the decade to 21 percent ten years later. One reason for this shift was increasing numbers of Japanese school-age children and naturalized adults legally able to teach.Footnote ⁵² For in-service Native teachers, their numbers started out at 33 percent in 1920 but slid to 21 percent by 1930.Footnote ⁵³

Nevertheless, between 1900 and 1930, Native Hawaiians entered the Territorial Normal School in droves and averaged nearly a quarter of the overall teacher workforce. By 1929, they represented the largest nonwhite racial group employed by the DPI, as well as the largest group of graduates from the school, “even outnumbering Orientals.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Motivated and determined, many made it clear why they chose this profession: they wanted to be a “great help” to their communities and make the “younger Hawaii … the best they can be.”Footnote ⁵⁵ One ambitious student-teacher equated her future position to a “great leader in a community, solving problems for the people and helping them.” This sentiment was exceptionally strong when she thought of her “Hawaiian nation … dying out.” Believing “I must do something,” she dedicated her “future here in Hawaii” to obtaining an advanced degree in curriculum development from a mainland university after teaching for a few years. Her ultimate goal was to become a “specialist in reading and storytelling” and return home to provide Native students with a “proper education.”Footnote ⁵⁶

Native Hawaiians choosing teaching careers in a school system intent on assimilation may have seemed like an odd choice. As Michelle Morgan points out, American education was an “integral part” of America's empire.Footnote ⁵⁷ Classrooms represented intimate spaces of Americanization, where white American educators (mostly women), trained on the continent, and nonwhite island-born teachers, trained at the Territorial Normal School, facilitated students’ acceptance of the English language and prepared them for American citizenship. However, nonwhite teachers were not mindless automatons. Morgan argues that while many of the territory's racially diverse teachers toed the line on several assimilationist policies, they also enforced their core belief on the importance of education: social mobility.Footnote ⁵⁸ They insisted on schools providing educational opportunities for student success and challenging students to think critically about their world, rather than simply funneling them into employment on the plantations.Footnote ⁵⁹

Emboldened and encouraged, numerous Native Hawaiian public school students pursued their education with the belief that success in school would make a difference both for themselves and their communities. From their writings, they exhibited a clear and strong sense of purpose that success at school increased the chances of a productive and positive future, not only for themselves but for their families and communities. Yet students did not embark on this journey alone. Underwriting their beliefs and supporting their studies, Native families operated behind the scenes, building a solid home environment for their children to engage their American schooling and still retain their Native identity.

Behind the Scenes: Families and Teachers

Native families played a key role in encouraging and affirming their children's engagement with the American educational system. Their supportive influence reinforced a constructive and pragmatic understanding that survival in an Americanized Hawai‘i required active participation at school. Throughout their autobiographies, students constantly referred to their parents’ and grandparents’ efforts to make education a priority. Whether they moved from their rural homes to urban areas (mostly Hilo and Honolulu) for greater access to educational opportunities, their parents often prevented them from taking on part-time work lest it hurt their studies, lectured them on the need to learn English, joined the PTA, or simply helped out with their homework. Native families invested time, resources, and energy to help ensure a successful future for their children. They were not “selling out.” Instead, they viewed American schooling as a necessary investment for promoting their children's chances of socioeconomic advancement.

This complex history of engagement and exchange with non-Hawaiian societies resembles the historical experiences of American Indians and white settlers on the continent. For nearly three hundred years, Native Americans negotiated, adapted, and resisted European and white-settler colonialism across North America. From these encounters, Native tribes “absorbed knowledge” as part of a rational approach of incorporating new learning into their cultural systems. Whether they acquired new languages, literacy, agricultural advancements, equestrianism, artistic designs, or technological advancements (firearms, iron), American Indians demonstrated a pragmatic willingness to “grow, adapt, adopt, and expand their ways of knowing.”Footnote ⁶⁰ These tools and skills allowed them to assert their identity, interests, and physical presence, demonstrating how Native survival itself became a “primary act of resistance.”Footnote ⁶¹

This understanding does not erase the enforced poverty, broken treaties, and often violent relocation and loss of land, as well as death, that accompanied the Native experience with Europeans, all in the name of “progress.” Instead, including survival as a form of resistance helps show how the overuse of “extermination” as a historiographical theme has contributed to a problematically passive and “tidy narrative” describing how Native Americans were “essentially eliminated.”Footnote ⁶² Overemphasis on the theme of extermination “eliminates” any analysis that makes “indigenous persistence … as important as resistance,” thus recognizing only true opposition as acts of “‘doomed’ physical resistance.”Footnote ⁶³ As Joy Porter notes, survival required the “maintenance, often against terrific odds, of the web of social, familial, political, and cultural platforms” that made other forms of resistance possible.Footnote ⁶⁴ Thus, for Native American parents, the “redeeming value” of sending their children to boarding schools was the educational opportunity it provided to secure the necessary survival “platforms” to resist assimilation.Footnote ⁶⁵

Understanding how American Indians faced and engaged settler colonialism provides an important framework for conceptualizing how Native Hawaiians also prioritized learning as a rational means to survive. Throughout the nineteenth century, Hawaiians learned how to incorporate Western skills and ideas on government, literacy, technology, institutions, and white people into their political systems. They in turn used these foreign systems to advance their interests and ensure their survival in an era of increasing foreign encroachment.Footnote ⁶⁶ Even prior to Western contact in 1778, Native Hawaiians were not culturally “static.” Mele (songs and chants) and mo‘olelo (legends and stories) recount a voyaging period during which numerous round-trip journeys between Hawai‘i and “Kahiki” facilitated the exchange of ideas, language, culture, trade, navigation, and technology. They also describe how ali‘i (chiefs) on both sides of these exchanges used intermarriage to establish and maintain political alliances between distant lands.Footnote ⁶⁷

For Native parents, participating in the public school system fits within this longue durée. With an American education, they sought opportunities for their children to “absorb knowledge” as part of a larger effort to advance their individual and familial interests, resist colonization, and prepare for a better future. Like many of their late nineteenth-century American Indian counterparts, Native Hawaiian families often did not promote engagement with the schools expecting students to lose their cultural identity. Instead, going to school offered the chance to obtain language skills and “white ways” in order to guide and assist their survival as Natives. While the loss of language and culture remained a constant worry, many families expressed a greater fear of their children being left behind academically and financially to face an uncertain future as Hawai‘i Americanized. Underwriting this Native anxiety was the sense that parents wanted the best for their children and did not hesitate to let them know that education would play a key role in their success as Hawaiians.

Family support also came at important moments in students’ lives when they questioned the need to continue their education. Some students merely gave a nod of acknowledgment, as one explained, “Many years after I was in school I realized the importance of an education. After graduating from Grammar School my intention was then to work but father said I ought to continue and go to High School.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Others expressed a bit more of their gratitude, as a self-described “Tom boy” explained:

Students identified their families as the most powerful influence on their decisions to continue their studies. In their autobiographies, many described how their parents went out of their way to give them their “utmost” in providing “ample time to study.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Students also noted how parents “boosted” their children's spirits when faced with “many difficulties” over their schoolwork, offering emotional support and even tutoring various subjects.Footnote ⁷¹ One student not only benefited from parental encouragement but also received support from her older siblings, who always remained “interested in my school work” and tried to assist her “as much as possible.”Footnote ⁷²

Such support often contributed to developing students’ “duty to help.” As one student put it, his family was “always helping me to become successful. This has given me sympathy and courage to go through school and … earn enough money to support myself and my parents.”Footnote ⁷³ Another saw parental influence on a larger, community-wide scale, commenting how “parents are helping many young people by sending them to schools” and how this active involvement produced positive results:

Indeed, active parental involvement in children's education occurred regardless of the parents’ educational background. Parents who graduated from high school and even attended college wanted their children to receive “every educational opportunity possible” in an effort to replicate their positive school experiences.Footnote ⁷⁵ As a university student named “Pauline” described, “Our parents, being educated, realize the value of education and have always urged us to take advantage of the opportunities afforded us.”Footnote ⁷⁶ This perception of the value of education was not limited to well-educated parents. In many cases, Native parents born and raised in rural districts, often with only an elementary school education (or less), sought to ensure that their children obtained the educational opportunities they never received. As one student observed, the parents of his community wanted to “solve their children's educational problems by belonging to the P.T.A” in order to afford them a “better education than they themselves were able to obtain.”Footnote ⁷⁷

However, while parents clearly held a vested interest in their children's success, they were not the only ones. Sympathetic teachers often augmented familial support as part of a united push for Native education. A number of students regarded Native Hawaiian educators as positive role models who challenged them to excel in their studies and provided encouragement to advance their schooling, not only for the students’ own sake but also for the sake of their communities. A normal-school student told the story of her “excellent” elementary school teacher in Hāna, Maui, who “influenced [her] several times to study harder and become a teacher so that I could come right back and teach in the country.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Another spoke of how a Native married couple, both teachers, “did everything to encourage” her to perform well at school. Affectionately called “Auntie Norah” and “Uncle Wilbur,” these educators urged her to become a teacher herself. Having “not regretted taking this step,” she finished high school, soon enrolled at the Territorial Normal School, and was “ready to begin real teaching.” She also held high “hopes of going away to specialize” in an advanced degree on the continent.Footnote ⁷⁹

Student recognition of the positive influences of Native teachers and parents on their academic pursuits demonstrated how the Native community saw schooling as a means for success. This acknowledgment did not mean they accepted and condoned Americanization; rather, they viewed schooling as a vehicle for achieving socioeconomic stability in an uncertain time—even if this strategy came at a price. For Native Hawaiians, establishing a stable and productive future within Hawai‘i’s white settler-colonial society required adopting the socially and economically vital, but culturally caustic, tool of survival: the English language.

The Survival Tool

Following the arrival of British naval captain James Cook in 1778, Native Hawaiians quickly learned the importance of English-language literacy. The growing influx of English-speaking merchants, whalers, military personnel, and foreign diplomats in the early nineteenth century symbolized Hawai‘i’s participation in global networks of trade and international relations. In response, many high-ranking ali‘i sent their children to the Hawaiian Chiefs’ Children's School in preparation for roles as either mō‘ī (ruling monarch) or upper-level government positions.Footnote ⁸⁰ Built by Kauikeaouli (Kamehameha III) in 1840, the school prepared young ali‘i to be the future rulers of Hawai‘i by learning English and studying the ways of other “enlightened nations” in order to survive as an independent country within a Westernizing Pacific.Footnote ⁸¹ Numerous maka‘āinana (commoners) also sought and obtained English-language proficiency, either from their time as laborers or sailors on foreign ships or from regular contact with the islands’ small population of English-speaking residents.Footnote ⁸² Yet as Hawaiians prepared to engage with the outside world, foreigners in the islands had other plans.

By the 1880s, a small group of white sugar planters and American businessmen controlled the economy and held positions in the kingdom's legislature and cabinet. Despite the achievements of Native monarchs in modernizing the kingdom's infrastructure, securing international recognition of their national sovereignty, developing a profitable plantation economy, and cultivating a highly literate Indigenous population, this white minority considered Natives and their nation as inferior and backward. They perceived the resurgence of Hawaiian nationalism, cultural arts (hula), and Native-centric organizations (Hale Nauā), under the banner of “Hawai‘i for Hawaiians,” as both threats to white control of government, commerce, and land ownership and confirmation of Native degeneracy. According to this “haole-formulated discourse,” the Hawaiian nation was “naturally doomed,” and its people needed to prepare for new lives under American stewardship.Footnote ⁸³ A necessary first step: replacing the Hawaiian language with English.

Schools represented a critical institution for implementing and enforcing this transition. During the final years of the monarchy (1795–1893), white educators actively undermined the use of Hawaiian at both private and public schools. At the all-Native Hawaiian Kamehameha Schools, the board of trustees and Principal William Oleson forbade using the Hawaiian language on school grounds. By the early 1890s, the North Pacific Missionary Institute began transitioning the language of instruction from Hawaiian to English for students preparing to become missionaries. Even the kingdom's Board of Education (dominated by missionary descendants) sought to reduce the amount of Hawaiian-language public schools by shifting financial support to increase the number of English-language schools. While these policies failed to completely eliminate the Hawaiian language, they limited its use in the public sphere. They also stunted the spread of the language and the number of fluent speakers by restricting the opportunities for both Native students and foreigners to learn Hawaiian at school.Footnote ⁸⁴ Thus, the swift decline of Hawaiian-language schools during the late nineteenth century resulted not from growing Indigenous interest in English-language schools but from a “concerted government policy of neglect and opposition” by white settlers toward ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i (Hawaiian language).Footnote ⁸⁵

This neglect soon turned hostile, as political events in the 1890s quickly sealed the fate of the Hawaiian language. Queen Lili‘uokalani's overthrow in 1893 by white “revolutionaries” and the establishment of a white-minority government (the Republic of Hawaii, 1893–1898) created friendly political conditions for the passage of Act 57 (1896), which reorganized the public school system and, under section 30, established English as the “medium and basis of instruction” for all private and public schools.Footnote ⁸⁶ Any institutions failing to comply with the Act faced losing DPI accreditation and financial support.Footnote ⁸⁷ American officials at the DPI, who were granted complete control of all affairs related to public instruction, including the ability to “regulate the course of study to be pursued in all grades of public schools,” all but ensured the Hawaiian language's demise.Footnote ⁸⁸

This effort to make English the de facto lingua franca exposed the extent to which Hawai‘i’s white elites at the turn of the twentieth century used education policy to assimilate Native Hawaiians into an American ethos. As the dominant ethnic group in the islands, Native Hawaiians represented the greatest organized political obstacle to white-minority rule and the goal of US annexation.Footnote ⁸⁹ Designed under this context, section 30 of Act 57 was not just about replacing official mediums of instruction, it was about subverting the cultural core of Native identity to neutralize Native Hawaiians as a political threat.

Many contemporary Native Hawaiians place great emphasis on section 30 as the root cause for the demise of their language, culture, and way of life. Certainly a powerful influence, this understanding of the Act oversimplifies the era's historical complexity and nuances by presuming that Native Hawaiians remained passive victims lacking any influence or control over their future. In reality, Natives faced tough choices about their economic, political, and cultural outlooks, and adopting the English language represented a painful but critical decision. This was not an easy choice, and it cannot be framed simply as capitulating to white supremacy or “selling out.” Instead, like American Indians, Native Hawaiians “reinvented the enemy's language” for their own uses.Footnote ⁹⁰ While historian Michael C. Coleman warns against overusing the “triumphalist empowerment” argument, portraying the “erstwhile victim as now the near-controller” of a colonizer-colonized experience, in myriad ways Native Hawaiians successfully navigated the imposition of English in the Americanized school system and in this way—and somewhat paradoxically—acquired an important tool for preserving their Hawaiian identity.Footnote ⁹¹ As student autobiographies illustrate, the Native response to English-language acquisition was anything but simple.

Students’ life histories complicate the singular view that the DPI was solely responsible for the decline of ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i in the public sphere. The stories of Hawaiian youth reveal a decision among Hawaiian families to employ seemingly extreme measures to secure a better future for their children. This impulse informed their conscious decision not to teach or speak the Hawaiian language at home and instead replace it with English. Like Indian families who struggled with a similar linguistic “crisis,” no single factor influenced Native parents’ decisions but rather a “host” of social, political, and economic pressures led them to embrace, or at least accept, using English at home and in public.Footnote ⁹² Many believed that surviving and prospering in an Americanized Hawai‘i required proficiency in English and that practicing their native tongue only hampered their children's chances for success. Faced with an uncertain future, Native Hawaiian parents adopted the English language as a necessary tool for survival.

In their life histories, students explain why their parents chose not to speak to them in Hawaiian. The father of a Native female university student named Ernie told her grandmother that his “native tongue … was very seldom heard in the house” because Ernie was “having a hard time learning to speak English correctly.”Footnote ⁹³ In another instance, Pauline's father wanted to maintain a high level of Hawaiian-language proficiency, even though her mother did not understand Hawaiian and the family spoke only English. However, this was not the mother's fault. Pauline's grandparents had deliberately chosen not to speak Hawaiian to her mother and her siblings as they grew up, believing that the “English language would be THE language and that the learning of their native language would make it harder for them to learn English.” As a result, her mother never learned to speak Hawaiian.Footnote ⁹⁴

Other student stories contain more nuanced discussions of their families’ appropriation of English as a survival tool. One student whose parents were both Native ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i speakers described how they naturalized the use of English at home despite their limited comprehension. As she explained, “I must admit that my mother does not speak English very fluently, but in teaching me to speak it from babyhood, she established quite a good foundation for my school life in the grammar grades.”Footnote ⁹⁵ Another expressed how her grandfather, a former teacher at a Hawaiian school on Maui, “realized the importance and advantage of speaking English as he was neglected of that privilege during his younger days.” Despite his rudimentary language skills, she noticed how he used English to assist him in dealings with prominent haole, who eventually paid his sons’ tuition to attend private schools on O‘ahu. Impressed, she worked for a haole family during her summer vacations, realizing that the “more I come in contact with them the better I can improve my English.”Footnote ⁹⁶

These student experiences capture a difficult choice for members of the Native Hawaiian community. Facing a deluge of outside interests and people reshaping the cultural, social, and demographic fabric of the islands, Hawaiian families faced a seemingly impossible dilemma: save their language or save their children. Witnesses to the mushrooming of America's presence and the English language in the islands, Native parents and grandparents were forced to reconcile the uncompromising demands of Americanization with their imperiled cultural values and being. Student stories provide rare insight into how these families wrestled with the bleak reality that the English language and American power were not going away. They establish the Native Hawaiian world view of prioritizing English proficiency over their own language, not as a means of assimilation but as a means of resisting marginalization and asserting the possibility of controlling their own future.

Embedded in students’ autobiographies were complaints about their elders’ strategy to unilaterally deny them their Indigenous language. Many students disagreed with the English-language focus of their families and communities. They expressed disappointment and irritation at their families’ overzealous (but arguably well-intended) decision to learn English at any cost rather than advocate for the return of Hawaiian-language schools or promote using Hawaiian at home and English at school. Many students expressed embarrassment at their inability to respond fluently when spoken to in Hawaiian and vented their frustration at the lack of opportunities to learn their language either at home or at school. However, students did more than just complain: many expressed confidence in their abilities to successfully engage Americanization and adopt English while also preserving their cultural identity.

Ernie's story effectively illustrates this strategy. Writing in the third-person, Ernie credited her father with fostering her interest “in things Hawaiian” and wanting to learn the language. She explained if her father, Mr. Mara, “hand't [sic] been educated to American ideals and standards and kept up with time, Ernie might have found herself balked [sic] at any such attempt.” Both of her parents regularly “looked over her report card with the greatest care, but there was little they could find that displease[d] them.” Such affirmation of the effects of their daughter's American schooling reflected how many Native students viewed their education on their own terms—independently of white colonial administrators’ assimilationist agenda. Ernie wanted an English-language education to make her own life better, at least in material terms. To Ernie, “It has always seemed to me that we were just as good as the haole's [sic] and that our family life was the same as in the Average American home.”Footnote ⁹⁷ This syncretic adaptation of English-language instruction in Hawai‘i’s public schools showed how Native families played a critical role in maintaining students’ cultural identity while supporting their educational development. Ernie's parents created a positive home environment that valued education and instilled cultural pride. They extended their own English-language education experiences to Ernie, fostering a general appreciation for “absorbing knowledge”—knowledge that included both her Native heritage and American education—while also nurturing her pride and “interest in things Hawaiian.”Footnote ⁹⁸

Not all students were as fortunate. Many who lacked such parental involvement expressed a desire for the public schools to teach the Hawaiian language. One Hilo High School student recognized that English “counted more than anything else” and committed herself to improving her language skills by going to the library and getting together with “haoles” to practice speaking “good English.” But not once did she reject her Native identity or abandon her heritage. While acknowledging the importance of English, she also expressed clear interest in her native language, explaining, “If there was a school for Hawaiians … I would go, for I want to be able to speak and write my native language.”Footnote ⁹⁹ Another Hilo High student shared similar frustrations over the “lackness” of her mother tongue despite her parents being “well learned in it.” While claiming to “understand [Hawaiian] well,” she described her ability to speak as “very little and brokenly.” Disappointed, but motivated to learn, she planned to “study Hawaiian in the schools of Honolulu” and expressed a fervent “wish that the Hawaiian language would be taught in every school of the territory.” Believing that her language's survival was of “vital importance” to Hawaiians of all generations, she called on the islands’ public schools to address the interests of her community.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Education and Race

Clearly, many Native students maintained their Indigenous identities despite the goals of Americanization. While denied the opportunity to learn their language at school and relentlessly exposed to an assimilationist curriculum, student autobiographies show that many students continued to see themselves as Native Hawaiian. This sentiment only grew stronger and more pronounced when students specifically addressed Hawai‘i’s “color line.” In their life histories, Native youth shared their candid assessments about the hypocrisy of Americanizers preaching equal opportunity in a nation that practiced racial discrimination. As such, they demonstrated an acute awareness of the “ironic doubleness” of being an American-educated Hawaiian youth. They recognized the disparity between learning the exceptionalist rhetoric of color-blind democracy as American students in the public schools and living the reality of their racialized treatment by haole as Native Hawaiians, and they redirected and articulated that paradox back on to the investigator, William C. Smith. Their stories thus offer testimony to a larger historical experience of inequality, to which they responded by rejecting the language of Americanization and defying the effects of assimilation.

One normal-school student wanted to attend college on the continent but learned that “strong racial feelings in the states” would cause her to be “looked upon as a negress.” The result? She should have “all privilege barred” from her. She then turned to her experiences in Hawai‘i, asking, “Why do the haoles come to our islands and create brotherly love and say, ‘Let us have peace,’ ‘Let us have one heart and mind,’ [but] deep in their hearts they do not mean what they say.” Frustrated with haole who “looked down upon us as browns,” she felt that of “all the races” here, Hawaiians seemed “to be given no chances of advancing so that they too may be outstanding in the face of the public.” As a result, she advocated replacing white teachers with Native ones or, as she put it, “disposing of some haoles,” who held “greater advantages in educational work thereby robbing the others of the same privilege.”Footnote ¹⁰¹

To many Native students, this “greater advantage” simply meant skin color. One angry normal-school student interrogated a hypothetical white person asking, “Why do the White people have private schools for their children?”

His critique of white people did not end with personal experiences of racial discrimination. His criticism expanded to expose a broader paradox in the DPI mission of promoting “racial harmony”:

By exposing inconsistencies in the theory and practice of American egalitarianism, Native students refused to accept second-class treatment. They also resented the importing of American attitudes on racial hierarchy and white privilege that were prevalent on the continent. Upset with the racial double standards and the preferential treatment haole received, one student observed how even ethics and public laws did not apply equally to whites and nonwhites:

Such inconsistencies and double standards extended beyond society and the legal system. Many students observed white privilege in the very institution proselytizing them about the greatness of the American dream: the public school. Hilo High School student John K. Akau felt the DPI was “too political,” its leaders “sponsors of race prejudice.” Even with “all A's,” he believed his brown skin made it difficult to “secure a position … as an instructor.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Echoing this sentiment, another Hilo High student queried, “Why should they [the DPI] import the Mainland teachers while we have lots here that may take their place.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶

These societal injustices rooted in white American racial attitudes exposed Native students to the adversity their skin color and cultural heritage posed to their lives and future in an Americanized Hawai‘i. While obviously frustrated, Native students refused to allow racism to prevent them from embracing their Indigenous identity, culture, and community. Some were explicit about the ways in which racial discrimination failed to affect their confidence. Defiant and self-assured, one student boldly wrote, “I knew even in grammer [sic] grades that I was different in color from the ‘haoles’ but at no time have I even felt myself or any of my other friends inferior to them.” Even when labeled a lazy “kanaka” by various haole, he stood tall, believing that “before God we are all alike and that God does not favor the whites.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Others were even more straightforward: “I am 16 years old and I am a part Hawaiian girl. I'm proud of it.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸

One of the best and most articulate examples of this Native defiance was Charles W. Kenn, cited at the outset of this article. A graduate of Hawai‘i’s first public high school, named after President William McKinley, Kenn exemplified the ways in which many Native Hawaiian students resisted assimilation during Hawai‘i’s territorial years. Like many of his people who attended the territorial public schools, Kenn refused to replace his Native culture, identity, and history with America's. Proud and defiant, Kenn adopted English but rejected Americanization. He thus offered a strong and assertive Native voice at a critical moment in Native Hawaiian history. “I do not want to become a sorry imitation white man,” he wrote. “I want to retain some of my own individuality. I want to know something about my own people, and I want to retain that knowledge for posterity.Footnote ¹⁰⁹”