Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-s2hrs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-11T02:48:50.180Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“We Are Our History”: Reviewing the History of Education in Hawaiʻi and Oceania

Part of: 60th Anniversary Forum

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 November 2020

Derek Taira
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

There is a “world of difference,” anthropologist Epeli Hauʻofa argued, “between viewing the Pacific as ‘islands in a far sea’ and as ‘a sea of islands.’” The distinction between both perspectives, he explained, is exemplified in the two names used for the region: Pacific Islands and Oceania. The former represents a colonial vision produced by white “continental men” emphasizing the smallness and remoteness of “dry surfaces in a vast ocean far from centers of power.” This understanding has produced and sustained an “economistic and geographic deterministic view” emphasizing Pacific Island nations as “too small, too poor, and too isolated” to take care of themselves. The latter, in contrast, denotes a grand space inhabited by brave and resourceful people whose myths, legends, oral traditions, and cosmologies reveal how they did not conceive of themselves in such “microscopic proportions.” Rather, Oceanic peoples have for over two millennia viewed the sea as a “large world” where peoples, goods, and cultures moved and mingled unhindered by fixed national boundaries.

Keywords

History of education in Oceaniahistory of education in Hawai’isettler colonialismhistory of Indigenous educationPacific World
Type
60th Anniversary HEQ Forum
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 60 , Issue 4 , November 2020 , pp. 632 - 643
Copyright
Copyright © 2020 History of Education Society

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Hau'ofa, Epeli, “Our Sea of Islands,” Contemporary Pacific 6, no. 1 (Spring 1994), 152Google Scholar.

2 Hauʻofa, Epeli, We Are the Ocean: Selected Works (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2008), 65, 74–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Hauʻofa, We Are the Ocean, 62–63.

4 Trask, Haunani-Kay, From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawaiʻi (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1993)Google Scholar; Kame'eleihiwa, Lilikalā, Native Land and Foreign Desires: Pehea La¯ E Pono Ai? How Shall We Live in Harmony? (Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press, 1992)Google Scholar; Desmond, Jane C., “Picturing Hawaiʻi: The ‘Ideal’ Native and the Origins of Tourism, 1880–1915,” Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 7, no. 2 (Fall 1999), 459CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Skwiot, Christine, The Purposes of Paradise: U.S. Tourism and Empire in Cuba and Hawaiʻi (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Stephanie Nohelani Teves, “Aloha State Apparatuses,” American Quarterly 67, no. 3 (Sept. 2015), 705–26; and Adria L. Imada, Aloha America: Hula Circuits through the U.S. Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).

5 Lomawaima, K. Tsianina, They Called It Prairie Light: The Story of Chilocco Indian School (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Adams, David Wallace, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1995)Google Scholar; and Child, Brenda J., Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900–1940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

6 Dibble, Sheldon, History of the Sandwich Islands (Lahainaluna, HI: Press of the Mission Seminary, 1843), 180Google Scholar.

7 Edwin O. Hall, “Common Schools at the Sandwich Islands,” Hawaiian Spectator 1, no. 4, (Oct. 1838), 352.

8 Rufus Anderson, “Missionary Schools,” The American Biblical Repository 12 (July 1838): 107, 108.

9 The white conspirators who led the overthrow of Queen Liliʻuokalani in 1893, established the provisional white minority government (the Republic of Hawaii, 1893–1898), and sought territorial annexation in 1898 used this historical reconstruction of missionary involvement to portray the Hawaiian monarchy as despotic and incompetent and a threat to America's fifty-year “civilizing influence.” For more on Hawaiʻi's white settler interventionist rhetoric see, Thurston, Lorrin A., A Hand-Book on the Annexation of Hawaii (St. Joseph, MI: A. B. Morse, Printers and Binders, 1897)Google Scholar.

10 William De Witt Alexander and Alatau Tamchiboulac Atkinson, An Historical Sketch of Education in the Hawaiian Islands (Honolulu: Board of Education of the Hawaiian Kingdom, 1888).

11 Hyde, C. M., “Educational Work of the American Mission for the Hawaiian People,” in Hawaiian Almanac and Annual for 1892, ed. and comp. Thrum, Thomas G. (Honolulu: Black & Auld, Printers, 1891), 117–26Google Scholar.

12 Kanakaole, “Education in the Hawaiian Kingdom,” Pacific Coast Teacher 1, no. 4 (Jan. 1892), 130.

13 Kanakaole, “Education in the Hawaiian Kingdom,” 132.

14 Thurston, A Hand-Book on the Annexation of Hawaii, 31.

15 Kuykendall, Ralph S., The Hawaiian Kingdom: 1854–1874: Twenty Critical Years, vol. 2 (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1953), 109Google Scholar; and Kuykendall, Ralph S. and Day, A. Grove, Hawaii: A History: From Polynesian Kingdom to American Statehood (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1948), 249Google Scholar.

16 Kuykendall, The Hawaiian Kingdom, 356, 361.

17 Kuykendall, The Hawaiian Kingdom, 107, 351.

18 Wist, Benjamin O., A Century of Public Education in Hawaii: October 15, 1840-October 15, 1940 (Honolulu: Hawaii Educational Review, 1940), 219Google Scholar.

19 Wist, A Century of Public Education in Hawaii, 4.

20 Lawrence H. Fuchs, Hawaii Pono: A Social History (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), 284.

21 William E. H. Tagupa, “Education, Change, and Assimilation in Nineteenth Century Hawaiʻi,” Pacific Studies 5, no. 1 (Fall 1981), 57–70.

22 Schulz, Joy, Hawaiian by Birth: Missionary Children, Bicultural Identity, and U.S. Colonialism in the Pacific (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 C. Kalani Beyer, “The Connection of Samuel Chapman Armstrong as Both Borrower and Architect of Education in Hawai‘i,” History of Education Quarterly 47, no. 1 (Feb. 2007), 23–48; Beyer, Carl Kalani, “Female Seminaries in America and Hawai‘i During the 19th Century,” Hawaiian Journal of History 37 (2003), 91–118Google Scholar; and Kalani Beyer, “A Century of Using Secondary Education to Extend an American Hegemony Over Hawaiʻi,” American Educational History Journal 39, no. 1–2 (2012), 515–35.

24 Michelle M. K. Morgan, “More Than Mere ‘Book Learning’: Democracy and Vocational Education in the Territory of Hawaiʻi, 1900–1959,” in Educating a Working Society: Vocationalism in 20th-Century American Schooling, ed. Glenn P. Lauzon (Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing 2019), 95–116.

25 Hughes, Judith R., “The Demise of the English Standard School System in Hawaiʻi,” Hawaiian Journal of History 27 (1993), 65–89Google Scholar; Young, Morris, “Standard English and Student Bodies: Institutionalizing Race and Literacy in Hawaiʻi,” College English 64, no. 4 (March 2002), 405–31CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Katherine J. E. Fox, “Pidgin in Classroom: Hawaiʻi's English Standard Schools, Americanization, and Hawaiian Identity, 1920–1960” (PhD diss., University of Memphis, 2012).

26 Stratton, Clif, Education for Empire: American Schools, Race, and the Paths of Good Citizenship (Oakland: University of California Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Michelle Morgan, “Americanizing the Teachers: Identity, Citizenship, and the Teaching Corps in Hawaiʻi, 1900–1941,” Western Historical Quarterly 45, no. 2 (Summer 2014), 147–67; Sarah D. Manekin, “Spreading the Empire of Free Education, 1865–1905” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2009); and Khalil Anthony Johnson Jr., “The Education of Black and Indigenous People in the United States and Abroad, 1730–1980” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2016).

27 Tamura, Eileen H., Americanization, Acculturation, and Ethnic Identity: The Nisei Generation in Hawaii (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993)Google Scholar.

28 Reed Ueda, “Second-Generation Civic America: Education, Citizenship, and the Children of Immigrants,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 29, no. 4 (Spring1999), 661–81.

29 Asato, Noriko, Teaching Mikadoism: The Attack on Japanese Language Schools in Hawaii, California, and Washington, 1919–1927 (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2006)Google Scholar.

30 Ah Nee-Benham, Maenette K. P. and Heck, Ronald H., Culture and Educational Policy in Hawaiʻi: The Silencing of Native Voices (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1998)Google Scholar; Lucas, Paul F. Nahoa, “E Ola Mau Kakou I Ka ‘Olelo Makuahine: Hawaiian Language Policy and the Courts,” Hawaiian Journal of History 34 (2000), 1–28Google Scholar; Trask, Haunani-Kay, From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawaiʻi (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1993), 113–17Google Scholar; Davianna Pomaika'i McGregor, “Engaging Hawaiians in the Expansion of the U.S. Empire,” Journal of Asian American Studies 7, no. 3 (Oct. 2004), 218–19; and Davianna Pomaika'i McGregor, “Aina Ho'opulapula: Hawaiian Homesteading,” Hawaiian Journal of History 24 (1990), 33.

31 Silva, Noenoe K., Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press Books, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

32 Beamer, Kamanamaikalani, No Mākou Ka Mana: Liberating the Nation (Honolulu: Kamehameha Publishing, 2014)Google Scholar.

33 Chang, David A., The World and All the Things Upon It: Native Hawaiian Geographies of Exploration (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and David A. Chang, “The Good Written Word of Life: The Native Hawaiian Appropriation of Textuality,” William and Mary Quarterly 75, no. 2 (April 2018), 237–58.

34 Arista, Noelani, The Kingdom and the Republic: Sovereign Hawaiʻi and the Early United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), 10CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 Arista, The Kingdom and the Republic, 24.

36 Noelani Arista, The Kingdom and the Republic; Noelani Arista, “ʻMoʻolelo and Mana: The Transmission of Hawaiian History from Hawaiʻi to the United States, 1836–1843,” Journal of the Early Republic 38, no. 3 (Fall 2018), 415–43; and Noelani Arista, “Davida Malo, a Hawaiian Life,” in The Moʻolelo Hawaiʻi of Davida Malo, Volume 2: Text and Translation, ed. and trans. Charles Langlas and Jeffery Lyon, (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2020).

37 Chang, David A., “‘We Will Be Comparable to the Indian Peoples’: Recognizing Likeness between Native Hawaiians and American Indians, 1834–1923,” American Quarterly 67, no. 3 (Sept. 2015), 859–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chang, The World and All the Things Upon It; and Silva, Aloha Betrayed.

38 Hau'ofa, “Our Sea of Islands,” 152.