Educated to Resist: Educational Policy and the Origins of the Native Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement, 1921-1976

• In Event: Discourses of Education and Citizenship in Historical Policy Contexts

Abstract

This research project examines how the ideology of Americanization and citizenship training introduced into the public and private school systems during the Territorial Period (1900-1959) helped Native Hawaiians gain access to full participation in American society and represent the Native community in the public realm. As strangers in their own homeland, the American educational system in Hawai‘i provided Hawaiians the “structures of civic acculturation” that eventually proved useful as instruments for increasing Native inclusion and involvement in politics and other spheres of public life in an increasingly Americanizing Hawai‘i (Ueda, 1999). These experiences demonstrate how Hawaiians negotiated with the American educational system during the Territorial Period. Long viewed as an era of cultural and linguistic loss for Native Hawaiians, reexamining the Territorial Period as an era of rebuilding the Hawaiian nation through the rise of an educated Native middle class who would later lead the Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement of the 1970s suggests that the foundation for this Native resistance was laid over many decades.
This new middle class embraced the progressive “paradise of new-middle-class rationality” that maintained an educated populace desires a functional efficient society (Wiebe, 1967). This optimism translated over to faith in government involvement in public initiatives to improve society by creating stability and order through standardization and bureaucracy. Public programs in education, social work, and health exemplified how the government could facilitate and promote efficiency in the public sphere. By joining social organizations, members of the middle class demonstrated their personal commitment to instilling efficiency and working for the public good. Through this process the Native middle class redefined their environment not by replacing or abandoning their cultural system and commitment to sovereignty but molding their community to adapt to the changing times by adopting the structures necessary for survival in a new world.
By exploring how notions of colonial education, social reform, Hawaiian family structure, and gender intersect with each other within the construction of this middle class, this project also aims at making visible Native women’s overlooked contributions to the activism of the 1970s. Far from passively accepting their education in domesticity, female students, as pragmatic-minded participants, engaged the colonial educational system to access foreign knowledge to help their community navigate the changing times. Through their civic education, middle-class Hawaiians gained political self-consciousness and a new language of political democracy that they later applied to help them form an imagined indigenous community interested in sovereignty and collective responsibility.
My project relies on material from the Kamehameha Schools Archives, Hawai‘i State Archives, and the Hawaiian Collection at the University of Hawai‘i. These rich collections provides a wealth of detail for studying student, alumni, and public impressions and reactions to education material detailing specific socio-political issues informing and fueling Native civic participation, civic organizations, and other examples of Native activism and engagement in the public sphere.

Author

• Derek Taira