A Hawaii law that required school instruction be taught in English remained on the books for 90 years and was repealed only in 1986 to make way for children to learn in Hawaiian.
Act 57 was repealed when supporters of Hawaiian language in public schools realized there was an antiquated law that prevented what became Punana Leo, or the Hawaiian-language immersion program.
“I was shocked,” said former state lawmaker Clayton Hee, who pushed the House version to successfully overturn the law. “I was shocked but not shocked, because the best way to erase a culture is to take away the language.”
Hee, who is 50% Hawaiian, did not know such a law existed until after he was elected to the House and then to the Senate beginning in 1983.
“The language was dying,” he said. “It did not make sense that the Native Hawaiian language could not be spoken in the schools when English and Hawaiian are the official languages of the state of Hawaii.”
A newly passed House resolution this legislative session apologizes for the English-only teaching law that effectively banned instruction in Hawaiian and all other non-English languages.
RELATED: Former Gov. Ben Cayetano apologizes for Facebook post Opens in a new tab
Generations of families have heard stories of their kupuna being beaten in school for speaking Hawaiian.
The resolution estimates that the number of Hawaiian speakers plummeted from 40,000 in 1896 to 2,000 in 1978, the year when a state constitutional convention shepherded sweeping support for Hawaiian culture and programs.
Asked why it still took years after the constitutional convention to overturn the English-only requirement in schools, Hee could only theorize.
“My own thinking is that some things take time to evolve,” he said.
Peter Young, former head of the state Department of Land and Natural Resources, is the great-great-great-grandson of Hiram Bingham, who led the first group of Protestant missionaries to Hawaii to try to convert Hawaiians to Christianity.
Young wrote an extensive Facebook post in 2015 to clarify that speaking Hawaiian was never specifically “banned” — and certainly not by his missionary ancestors.
“Missionaries are often blamed for discouraging use of the Hawaiian language (some even suggest they were the ones that banned its use),” Young wrote in 2015. “That, too, is simply not correct. (Actually, the missionary efforts to establish a consistent alphabet helped save the Hawaiian language, not eliminate it.)
“On July 14, 1826,” Young wrote, “the American Protestant missionaries finalized a 12-letter alphabet for the written Hawaiian language, using five vowels (a, e, i, o and u) and seven consonants (h, k, l, m, n, p and w). That alphabet continues today.”
The goal was to help raise the literacy level across the islands with a particular purpose, Young told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.
“They wanted Hawaiians to read the Bible,” Young said. “They were going to teach the Hawaiians to read and write in their own language.”
Young researched attendance figures and found that the number of students attending English-language schools while Hawaii was still an independent country soon outpaced the number attending schools taught in Hawaiian.
He believes that many Hawaiian students were bilingual in English and Hawaiian, but English was gaining in popularity “because people advancing in society were English speakers. Speaking English was like this new technology for a society that was changing.”
Bingham left the islands in 1840, and Young acknowledges that brutality ensued when the provisional government in 1896 required that school instruction be conducted only in English.
“I believe people were beaten,” he said. “I don’t want to downplay that people were persecuted for speaking Hawaiian.”
Specifically erasing the Hawaiian language from public and private schools was part of a larger effort to stave off attempts to restore the Hawaiian kingdom after it was overthrown in 1893, said Trisha Kehaulani Watson, a legal expert and consultant on Hawaiian culture.
“In 1894 there was an attempt to restore the Kingdom and these laws were specifically put in place to dis-empower Hawaiians and make sure the Kingdom was not restored when the Provisional government was in power,” Watson said. “It was a very intentional effort.”
