In 1906, the Hawaiian newspaper Ka Naʻi Aupuni published a striking editorial. Young Hawaiians, it warned, were becoming strangers to their own language.

It described a scene that was becoming more and more common at the time. A newcomer, intent on learning ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi, asks a young Hawaiian about the meaning of a certain old word from a book or newspaper. The reply? “‘A‘ole au i ʻike.” “I don’t know.”

The editorial summed it up this way: “(Today’s youth) don’t know because their knowledge and readiness in their own language is truly inadequate.”

Historians would grumble if I claimed that the decline of Hawaiian can be traced to a single cause. The post-overthrow years were doubtlessly full of zealous Americanization campaigns. But Act 57, a law of the Republic of Hawai‘i passed 130 years ago Monday, is a strong contender.

Ideas showcases stories, opinion and analysis about Hawaiʻi, from the state’s sharpest thinkers, to stretch our collective thinking about a problem or an issue. Email news@civilbeat.org to submit an idea or an essay.

Read More

In essence, it was the first legislation to mandate formally and broadly that English be the language of instruction in all schools in the islands, both public and private.

Its designers — among them the same men who had overthrown the monarchy just three years earlier — were ingenious in their cunning.

How to assimilate a generation of young Hawaiians? Stamp out their language. Not long before the law came into effect, the American Rev. Robert Stuart MacArthur explained the motives in a newspaper article for “The Friend.” The goal, he wrote, was to instill in them ideas of Christianity and the American Republic, while expunging “kahunaism, fetishism and heathenism.”

The effect of Act 57 on ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi was swift and devastating. By 1902, zero schools were teaching in Hawaiian.

In a report from the same year, the president of the Board of Education noted, “The gradual extinction of a Polynesian dialect may be regretted for sentimental reasons, but it is certainly for the interest of the Hawaiians themselves.”

It was, the report went on to say, “tantamount to a complete linguistic revolution.”

In schools, teachers and administrators implemented the law with zeal. They punished children for speaking Hawaiian, and the punishments were severe. Teachers slapped and hit keiki, deprived them of food, forced them to pull a weed for each uttered Hawaiian word.

As intended, the ban seeped out far beyond the schoolhouse.

Parents, worried that their children would not excel in the classroom, began to encourage English at home. Even some families opposed to the rules accepted them. They wanted their children to prosper in this radically changing world over which they had little control.

This was the case in the home of Gladys Kamakakūokalani ‘Ainoa Brandt, an educator and civic leader. In 2004, she gave an interview as part of an oral history project at Kamehameha Schools. Her parents, she recalled, thought that her success depended on her giving up Hawaiian language and culture. “If they were alive today,” Brandt said, “they would feel differently.”

That Hawaiian began to die out in the home posed an existential threat. Larry Kimura, a professor at the University of Hawaiʻi Hilo and a central figure in the revival of ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi, told me, “Language is so important in grounding a person to his home, to where he belongs.”

Civil Beat stories ma ka ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi

‘Ka Ulana Pilina’ is an ongoing collection of news articles and opinion pieces written in the Hawaiian language to better connect with our Indigenous readers, identify underreported stories and improve our engagement with an underserved community.

Read More

Kimura remembers his own grandmother, a native speaker born the same year Act 57 became law, lamenting the loss of ʻōlelo with her peers. For them, in some sense, it marked the loss of Hawaiʻi itself.

After all, what is Hawaiʻi without Hawaiian? What happens to a place and a people when their language withers?

Language is the very life blood of a culture. It contains its stories, its art, its genealogies. It names its sacred places, its ceremonies and celebrations.

This is particularly so for Hawaiian, which is filled with allusion and metaphor and a most wonderfully layered and rich array of vocabulary.

There are countless words for different winds and rains or the distinct ways the ocean meets the shore. 

The rain of Hilo, for example, is ka ua kani lehua, a name that describes droplets pattering on what were once the townʻs many ʻōhiʻa lehua trees.

Ke kai hāwanawana evokes the soft whispering of waves rustling against the rocks at Kawaihae.

The wind of Ka‘ū — the makani kuehu lepo, the scatterer of dust — tells us about the bush-bending gales and alludes to the strength of those who reside there. They are known for their independence and toughness of spirit, to the point that they once killed their own chiefs when they grew self-serving.

The ubiquitous word ʻāina is also layered with meaning. It is not just land or earth, but a word whose very etymology suggests that which feeds, nourishes. In it, after all, is the root word ʻai, to eat.

This hints at the treasure Hawaiʻi nearly lost, what Act 57 nearly destroyed. Against the odds, though, the language did survive — in Hawaiian churches, in song and hula, in kitchens with tūtū, in troves of nūpepa.

Those places preserved the language to the present day, where things are increasingly optimistic.

In 2019, the International Year of Indigenous Languages, UNESCO recognized Hawaiian as a success story. It noted how, in 1985, only 32 children under the age of 18 — including on Ni‘ihau — spoke the language.

The State of Hawaiʻi estimates that more than 27,000 people five years and older speak Hawaiian at home.

One essential cause of the rise is Hawaiian immersion schools, which currently enroll some 2,500 students.

In the early 1980s, at their founding, Kimura told me they could hardly persuade four families to enroll their children. 

Remarkably, it was still technically illegal to use Hawaiian as the medium of instruction at the time — Act 57 remained on the books. It took a three-year lobbying campaign by ʻAha Pūnana Leo to persuade the Legislature to pass a bill lifting the ban.

Today, there are not enough Hawaiian teachers to meet the demand — yet another sign of the language’s renaissance. 

The 1906 editorial in Ka Naʻi Aupuni compared Act 57 to cutting off the headwaters that fed streams of knowledge to Hawaiian youth. Those waters have begun to open again. They may flow at a trickle but a steady and resolute one all the same.