McNair at a glance
- Enhances chances of doctoral degree attainment by groups underrepresented in higher education
- Provides targeted support for studies in the disciplines of science, technology, engineering and math
- Supports college juniors and seniors committed to completing doctoral degrees within ten years of finishing undergraduate studies
- Assists students in developing research and presentation skills necessary for success in post-graduate study
- Provides faculty mentors to help students complete scholarly research projects
- Coordinates an intensive summer internship program and provides a $2800 stipend to each participant
- Offers workshops, seminars, academic courses and other personalized services to help students qualify for admission to quality graduate programs
- Promotes awareness of cultural diversity by involving students in service learning projects
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Suppression of Hawaiian Culture at Kamehameha Schools
Kāwika Eyre teaches Hawaiian language at Kamehameha Schools Kapālama campus high school. For the past two years he has been on reassignment conducting an oral history project relating to the KS controversy of the 1990s. Some 230 interviews are now stored in the KS Archives, covering all aspects of those times. Kāwika is a member of the Hawaiian Cultural Center Project Committee and a representative of Nā Kumu o Kamehameha. The following article is a speech Eyre gave at a retreat for members of Hui Ho‘ohawai‘i in January of 2004.
Aloha pumehana kākou e nā hoa makamaka o Kamehameha.
The word we are using for this conference, huliau, refers to a turning point, a time of change. Interestingly, another meaning of huliau is to think of the past, to recall what has happened. Coincidental to our topic this evening, Mrs. Pūku‘i gives the following example in the “Hawaiian Dictionary.” “Ua ‘ākoakoa mākou no ka huliau ‘ana.” We are gathered together to recall the past.
I have been asked by the HCCP committee to be our guide on this journey, this huliau ‘ana, that we may know something of whom we have been as we seek a path into our future. Several people have helped me as readers. Their suggestions and enthusiasm have been invaluable. Thank you Randie Fong, Janet Zisk, Ke‘ala Kwan, Nona Beamer and Dale Noble.
Much of the material I will present tonight was gathered during my recent two-year reassignment—as requested by Nā Kumu o Kamehameha and supported in part by a grant from the Parrent Fund. I was asked to interview people and write about the controversy of the mid-to-late 90s. Some of the material that follows is excerpted directly from a manuscript in progress. Much of it traces to archival sources. I am indebted to George Kanahele, Loring Hudson, the staff of KS publications over the years, and others. As they all have affirmed by their work, in our effort to understand ourselves, we must look to our past. Huliau.
In most ways our past begins with Pauahi. Surely the most quoted passage of Pauahi’s Will reads:
“I desire my trustees to provide first and chiefly a good education in the common English branches, and also instruction in morals and in such useful knowledge as may tend to make good and industrious men and women...”
Many have wondered and some have spoken much about what Pauahi may have meant by her words, “providing a good education in the common English branches.”
In Pauahi’s final years of life, 150 or 57% of the schools in Hawai‘i were conducted completely in Hawaiian, primarily using non-Hawaiian content from the curriculum of the common English school. Those of us working in Hawaiian have all studied the anatomy books, the math books, the geography books of this period, most—if not all—taken from the “common English branches” of the day and translated into Hawaiian. But by content, it was “common English branches.”
We might remind ourselves as well of Pauahi’s close relationship to her cousin Princess Ruth Ke‘elikōlani, a physically stern but warm-hearted woman, now widely admired for her staunch, steadfast support of Hawaiian language and culture. The few samples we have of Pauahi’s handwritten Hawaiian come from her letters to Ruth, who refused to use English.
To be sure, in many native families of that time, there was a growing recognition, resignation perhaps, that English was a necessary condition for success in a changing Hawaiian world. In September of 2002, the summer before her death, Gladys Brandt described the attitude of her parents some twenty years after the founding of the Schools: “My father and mother, like virtually all Hawaiians at that time, wanted their children to succeed, and they believed that to do so required their children to adopt Western ways. Unfortunately, they thought this was possible only by leaving behind the Hawaiian language and culture. If they were alive today, they would feel differently.”
And yet Pauahi, in her day, was praised as a woman who took the best of both worlds, a woman of the highest Hawaiian stature, a woman quite perfectly bi-lingual and bi-cultural.
What I am getting at here is that I find it very difficult to accept the notion that Pauahi would have looked on in any way approvingly at what was happening to Hawaiian language and culture at Kamehameha in those first years of her schools. That violence against the Hawaiian world strikes us today as unpardonable. Yet both Pauahi and the will remain silent on these matters: she left no guidelines for the fledgling school. She died before she could know.
Let’s go back in time to those first days at Kamehameha.
On November 4, 1887, King Kalākaua, then the embodiment of Hawaiian cultural revitalization—not the least hula—spoke to the students in Hawaiian at the dedication of Kamehameha School for Boys.
Standing near him and giving the formal prayer that day was Reverend Sereno E. Bishop, no relation to Charles Bishop, but the annexationist son of a missionary. Sereno Bishop was a haole who could speak Hawaiian. He prayed for the Kamehameha boys in their language. In English, whenever the subject of hula came up—and Bishop brought it up often in his Christian newspaper “The Friend”—he ranted.
So from the very start, standing side by side at that opening ceremony, were profoundly opposing views of something so quintessentially Hawaiian as the hula. Kalākaua would celebrate hula; Sereno Bishop would denigrate hula. Confusion, conflict of cultural identity from day one at Kamehameha School. And the issue of hula will run like a jolting live wire through the Kamehameha story.
Kalākaua and the Rev. Bishop stood that day at Kaiwi‘ula. Today, as we know, the Bishop Museum is located on this site. The name Kaiwi‘ula, which translates as “the red bone,” refers to a battle fought on these fields long, long ago.
In the early years of Kamehameha Schools, another battle was to be fought at this site, this one a quiet clash of cultures where teachers and staff of the young school purposely and relentlessly sought to stamp out the native language and all aspects of Hawaiian ways.
The first principal at Kamehameha was a man named William Oleson. The Reverend Oleson was a fervid democrat with no time for monarchies, and he had a particularly low opinion of Kalākaua as a king, saying that he ruled by bribery, corruption, lasciviousness, sorcery and tyranny. In the same year that Oleson took charge at Kamehameha, 1887, he was a member of a haole committee that forced a rewritten constitution on Kalākaua, sharply limiting the king’s power. This was the Bayonet Constitution.
One of the first orders William Oleson gave at Kamehameha was to ban the Hawaiian language. English was the only language accepted for the work time and play time of Pauahi’s school. Hawaiian was forbidden in the classroom and on the playing fields, and the boys were punished if they were heard speaking the language of their families. This was in the late 1880s and early 90s, which means that Hawaiian was banned at Kamehameha well before it was officially outlawed at Hawai‘i’s public and private schools in 1896, three years after the overthrow.
The anti-Hawaiian campaign at Kaiwi‘ula was relentless. Non-stop. For decades. Every teacher was to be a teacher of English. Every incentive was offered, every tactic tried: slogans, “Better English Weeks,” encouragement to sit in the library and read books, praise and prizes for pronunciation, speech contests, oratory at assemblies, discussion groups, debating societies, drama clubs, off-campus passes, free periods, an “English holiday” for anyone not caught talking “native” for a month.
Within three years, student compliance was showing in school statistics. The October 1890 issue of the KS publication “Handicraft” reported: “Thus far the average number of those who have earned the Holiday has been sixty-five percent of the number enrolled.”
In 1894, William Oleson co-wrote a book with a title that said much about this man who had led Kamehameha Schools. Its title: "Picturesque Hawai‘i: A Charming Description of Her Unique History, Strange People, Exquisite Climate, Wondrous Volcanoes, Luxurious Productions, Beautiful Cities, Corrupt Monarchy, Recent Revolution and Provisional Government." His co-author was James L. Stevens, United States minister to Hawai‘i in 1893, who had ordered American troops ashore, effectively guaranteeing the overthrow of the monarchy. Stevens wanted nothing more or less than annexation, and Oleson was with him all the way.
Let us be clear: The boys under Oleson at Kamehameha were not American annexationists. They were Hawaiians, and they were instinctive royalists, reverential to their ali‘i nui. In the first years of the school, which were the last years of the monarchy, King Kalākaua paid a visit to a classroom. The boys stood of their own accord and sang “Hawai‘i Pono‘ï.” When Queen Lili‘uokalani visited and drank coffee, no one would touch her cup afterwards; it was sacred to the ali‘i, kapu.
As George Kanahele relates, following the 1893 overthrow of the kingdom, the boys voted with their feet against this school that was run by annexationists. So many boys left and did not come back that enrollment went down by almost half and stayed down for the next two years.
Newly appointed principal Theodore Richards replaced William Oleson. Richards’ approach to resolving the enrollment crisis was to depoliticize and Hawaiianize the school. He had a good feel for working with Kamehameha boys, and he had a great appreciation of Hawaiian music and language. He put Hawaiian songs on the glee club program alongside Western classical songs, to great success in performance.
That was really the only time in the first decades at Kamehameha when the Hawaiian language was given fuller voice. That, and in chapel at Kaumakapili Church, where the "Lord’s Prayer" was sung in Hawaiian. Other prayers and sermons also were in “native.”
Hawaiian music flourished at Kamehameha. Hawaiian dance did not. Reverend Sereno Bishop, who had given the prayer at the opening of the boys’ school, maintained his relationship with Kamehameha as well as his strong anti-hula convictions. The dance, he wrote, was “one of the foul florescenses” on the “great poison tree of idolatry.” Bishop said hula corroded Hawaiians—and labeled it moral leprosy. This attitude, though more mildly expressed, endured until 1965.
No right-minded principal at Kamehameha would want foul florescence and moral leprosy on his campus. No right-minded Bishop Estate trustee would want it on estate lands either. There were early leases that banned hula along with liquor. And among students it was rumored that language in Pauahi’s will expressly forbade hula. Not true. Hawaiian was not heard in the halls of Kamehameha and, increasingly, Hawaiian students at Kamehameha could no longer hear Hawaiian within themselves: The “Handicraft” issue of March, 1897 carried the following—to us—somber reflection:
“Five years ago the Rev. Sereno Bishop taught a class of Kamehameha boys in the Kaumakapili Sunday School. Then it was necessary for him to employ his excellent knowledge of the native tongue to make himself understood. After this interval, in which he has seen little of the boys, he comes back to preach to them and naturally he chooses the Hawaiian language in which to address them, and for the same reasons as before. It transpired that a census taken after the sermon disclosed the fact that several had difficulty in understanding him, and eleven boys from the Manual, twenty-one from the Preparatory and twenty-one from the Girls’ School did not understand Hawaiian at all.”
We should not be surprised by the success of Kamehameha at dismembering Hawaiian. Early Kamehameha was essentially an English immersion school. As our friends from the Pūnana Leo movement have so aptly demonstrated, immersion is the most powerful of language pedagogies. Since most of the students were boarders, the influence of the Hawaiian home was thoroughly lessened and the opportunity to immerse students in English optimal. Though the prohibition against Hawaiian was in place for many years to come, its existence grew increasingly irrelevant as the language vanished in the children.
But—and perhaps this reflects something of that same confusion we noted from day one at Kamehameha regarding attitudes towards hula—though Hawaiian language was officially banned at Kamehameha, it was never completely rejected. Indeed a cynic—or a careful historian—might detect an increase in the lip-service paid “things Hawaiian” at a rate roughly equivalent to the actual decrease in authentic “Hawaiian things” at Kamehameha. The word tokenism creeps into our vocabulary when speaking of these years.
By 1900, for example, students were permitted, even encouraged to participate in non-and extra-curricular opportunities to learn and practice their native heritage. Kamehameha School for Girl's students took short, off-campus excursions to the surrounding mountains where they sang Hawaiian songs and danced hula, though in sitting position we may presume. The school newspaper of the time, “The Blue and White,” often had articles, in Hawaiian occasionally, highlighting or explaining Hawaiian music and legends. Students from the boys’ and girls’ schools built and entered a float depicting kapa making in the fifth annual Floral Parade of Honolulu. They won the grand prize for Best Decorated Float.
In KS music classes, Hawaiian songs were taught alongside American and European compositions. Well-known composer and alumnus, Charles E. King, taught music at the schools from 1900 through 1902. In his teaching, he placed special emphasis on Hawaiian songs and melodies. Hawaiian mele were practiced and performed for the annual Founder’s Day.
Guest speakers (usually not Hawaiian) addressed the students, encouraging them to practice their culture and language.
For example, on March 22, 1902, the “Blue and White” reported: “On Friday evening Mr. Frank Archer of Pearl City delivered a fine address to the girls in Hawaiian. His subject was ‘Children, Obey Your Parents!’ His points were beautifully expressed and held the attention of every pupil.”
A year later “The Blue and White” reported that “On Feb. 28, 1903, a missionary meeting, conducted by Rev. O. Gulick was held in our Assembly Hall. He told us of the missionary work that is being done among the Japanese on these Islands and also about some of the customs and characteristics of the Japanese. He spoke first in English and, at the close, in Hawaiian. He reminded us of the beauty of the Hawaiian language and that we must not forget our mother tongue.”
Reverend Gulick, in 1908, again spoke to the first grade students at the girls’ school. He closed once again by reminding the children of the beauty of the Hawaiian language, and that they must not forget their mother tongue.
The comment to me almost gratuitously belies the horrific reality of the context of the day. In 1908, all around Hawai‘i, including Kamehameha, first graders were being whacked, yelled at and kept after school for speaking their native tongue in the classroom and on the playground.
The mixture of messages is mind-boggling to us: don’t forget your mother tongue and for sure don’t you dare speak it while at Kamehameha! And we know from kūpuna that the slow pounding in of the unworthiness of Hawaiianess was soul-wrenching for Hawaiian youth.
One kupuna and keiki of those days, Gladys Brandt, in interview late in life, remembered bitterly the sense of shame she felt at being Hawaiian. She was born in 1906 to David Kanuha, who was the tailor at the Boys’ School, and Esther Staines, who was in the first KSG graduating class. As a young girl observing the students, Gladys noticed that they were using lemon juice to rub out the stains from their white dresses, the uniform of their day. The impressionable Gladys sneaked a couple of lemons and, in her hiding place, rubbed the juice hard into her skin. To lighten it. To whiten it. Her shame was not just skin deep. It dug bone deep. It dug down Hawaiian soul deep.
In the early 1920s, the advent of Song Contest provided two or more Hawaiian songs per student per year. We don’t have statistics on this, but we think that very few students by now had even at best more than a meager understanding of their native language. Thus begins a long tradition at Kamehameha of native children singing beautiful Hawaiian songs of which they have little or no understanding. A tradition that extends through most of the schooling years of those seated here tonight, and, to a certain extent, continues today.
Publicly, attitudes toward Hawaiian were often tolerant: one-time principal and teacher at Kamehameha School for Boys, Uldrick Thompson, in a 1920-campus presentation, reminded the students of the beauty and intelligence of the Hawaiian language, culture, and people.
Privately, back in the dorms, attitudes were hardly so upbeat: Zena Schuman in interview some ten years ago, described how Hawaiian language was allowed only in the laundry room on laundry days at KSG. She also described how, on Saturday evenings, having posted lookouts down the hallways and near the front steps, the young women would line up on the beautiful double-curved stairway of the old KSG residence at Kaiwi‘ula. The coast clear, they would whisper their songs and dance gently as they stood on the dark wood stairs.
But there was to be change. In 1924 Lydia K. Aholo, hānaidaughter of Lili‘uokalani, graduate of Kamehameha School for Girls and Oberlin College, became the first formal instructor of Hawaiian language at Kamehameha Schools. A torch is lit in a culturally darkened school!
This 1924-25 school year course in Hawaiian was compulsory for all seniors. Students received three hours of Hawaiian language instruction a week, using as textbooks the Hawaiian translation of the Bible and the "Life of Lincoln." The student paper, “Ka Mō‘ï,” recognized this course as one of the highlights of the year.
However, this first attempt at formal teaching of Hawaiian language lasted only that one year.
In a letter dated April 14, 1978, Frank Midkiff, KS president and later trustee, reminisced: “In the early 1920s, I thought it would be good to help our young people learn Hawaiian. So we got the trustees to make Hawaiian language a required course. The students were very interested in it and happy. But soon several parents came in and objected. ‘Why do you teach our children Hawaiian? We can do that ourselves. Before, here, our children were punished if they spoke Hawaiian. They were required to speak English. That is what they need. Punahou, St. Louis, the public schools don’t teach Hawaiian. You should teach them Latin or French or German. The University of Hawai‘i and other colleges won’t give them credit for studying Hawaiian … to enter or for graduation.’
Midkiff continues: “I hated to give up what I knew was good for them. I took it to the trustees. The parents had talked to the trustees before me. The trustees said, ‘Well, let’s make it elective. Maybe that will be acceptable.’ But before long, after it was made elective, several gave it up and before long the courses had to be withdrawn. All followed the parents‘ inclination and the teaching of Hawaiian language and culture was given up for that time being.”
But Midkiff, a speaker of Hawaiian, did not give up. Later that year, he and Dr. John H. Wise, a professor of Hawaiian language at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, wrote and published a Hawaiian language textbook, “A First Course in Hawaiian Language.”
Nor, it seems, did the students give up on wanting more Hawaiian. This quote is from the KS Archives Memory Book Vol. V 1924-27, but without specific date: “A regular meeting of the combined student councils of the Kamehameha schools was held to discuss the question ‘What should be added or dropped from the present course of study? Lawrence Chang spoke on behalf of the tenth grade boys. He suggested a special course in the Hawaiian language. Abigail Ka‘aloa expressed that the tenth grade girls also desired a special course in Hawaiian...”
One year later, and two years after the first Hawaiian language course was dropped, John Wise was hired and Hawaiian was reinstated in the curriculum, using the Midkiff/Wise textbook. Another cultural torch is lit at Kamehameha.
While Hawaiian language from this date on seems to be finding a modest place in the KS curriculum, hula definitely is not.
In 1929, according to Kanahele, a group of alumni held a fundraiser on campus. For scholarships. The hula was danced. Twice. It was for a good cause. But the principals of the girls’ school and the preparatory school, Maude Schaeffer and Maude Post, were outraged and agitated. They went to the trustees, saying that “dances of this nature tended to neutralize the strenuous efforts made by the teaching force to obliterate certain undesirable racial tendencies in the students.” The trustees agreed that a strict watch should be maintained to see that nothing further of this kind was permitted on campus or at affairs with which the schools were in any way connected.
The young ‘Iolani Luahine, enrolled at Kamehameha during these years, was withdrawn when her aunty and kumu hula Keahi Luahine became aware of the missionary attitudes against hula on campus. We have no date on this but ‘Iolani did graduate from St. Andrew’s Priory with the class of 1935.
Several years ago Papa Henry ‘Auwae met with our students and bitterly reminisced over the fact that he, too, had to leave Kamehameha about this time. Thrown out for repeatedly speaking Hawaiian.
In 1930, Dr. Donald Mitchell from Great Bend, Kansas, joined the staff as an instructor of English.
Dr. Mitchell started a club for Kamehameha boys in 1931 that allowed them to study and practice Hawaiian cultural traditions. Hui ‘Ōiwi, regularly met to learn and demonstrate Hawaiian cultural practices, especially games. From 1930 until the 1960s, the yearbooks of the Schools often published pictures of the club’s activities, most often showing handsome, brown boys in malo, demonstrating traditional Hawaiian games. Membership in the club was by invitation only. Years later, 1941 graduate Roy Benham noted the popularity of the club:
“Oh yeah, everybody wanted to join…it was a good club. I teased Don about that when I went back to teach. He was still there. I said, Don, the only reason you didn’t select me for Hui ‘Ōiwi was that my ‘okole was too white. You know it just seemed to me that you were selecting the real Hawaiian looking ones.”
In the spring of 1931, as part of a new plan for education, Dr. Homer F. Barnes, recently appointed principal of the School for Boys, dropped the Hawaiian language class from the curriculum. In an undated newspaper article from that period, Dr. Barnes offers forth the reason for the change as being a great opportunity for higher scholarship and adjustment of teaching loads.
Immediately after this announcement, the staff at the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum arranged for Kamehameha Schools’ students to take Hawaiian culture classes at the museum in place of the dropped language classes. Lectures were initially conducted for seniors on a weekly basis, later to be published by the KS Press in 1933 in a 300-page book entitled “Ancient Hawaiian Civilization.”
Sometime in 1935, several seventh grade girls approached classmate Winona Beamer—already a young cultural torch to her friends—and asked her to help them learn the renowned chants and songs of the Beamer family. Hui Kumulipo, the girls’ club for Hawaiian culture, was born.
Hui Kumulipo came together with Hui ‘Ōiwi a few times a year for joint Hawaiian cultural activities, the most anticipated of these being the annual May lū‘au, prepared by the boys and girls in the traditional manner.
During the coming years when Hawaiian language classes started, stopped, and started again, the Hawaiian clubs of Kamehameha Schools were the only venue for the recognition, encouragement and practice of Hawaiian knowledge.
At one such club-sponsored occasion, Mary Kawena Pūku‘i brought her hānai daughter Pat Bacon up to campus for a KSG assembly and the beautiful girl did a standing hula. Winona Beamer, chafing as she must that Kamehameha girls could not stand and dance but only watch, was furious at what she saw rightly as administrative duplicity. Much to the astonishment of her classmates, Winona stood up and stomped out of the assembly.
Nona was not your everyday, docile student. In 1937, as a 9th grader she was kicked out of Kamehameha, charged with doing a standing hula. The occasion was the “Trustees’ Tea” held on a Friday afternoon in the area known as “The Pink Garden.” The chant was the "Oli Aloha." It was this chant that welcomed you here this evening. Winona had known it from her earliest years.
As she walked in, chanting for the trustees that afternoon, Winona’s hand gestures and body movements slipped ever so slightly away from her. Musical as she was, she became one with her chant. When she finished, principal Maude Schaeffer stood up, strode over to her, and announced: “Winona! You may pack your bags!” Winona, had crossed the line and violated the ban on standing hula at Kamehameha.
In a interview in 2003, Aunty Nona described how incensed she was: “I carried my bag all the way down to the gate and I was fuming! Just fuming!” Over that weekend Maude Schaeffer apparently had second thoughts. Winona was reinstated the following week.