Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 8, Number 2, 1 February 1991 — Hawaiian language making a comeback [ARTICLE]

Hawaiian language making a comeback

by William Wilson This year Hawai'i's public school system is celebrating its 150th anniversary. Hawai'i is proud to have one of the oldest public school systems in the United States. Lahainaluna High School is the oldest high school west of the Rocky Mountains. Not often considered today is the fact that Hawai'i's public school classes, including such courses as trigonometry and anatomy at Lahainaluna, were originally taught and administered entirely in Hawaiian.

Hawai'i is the only state whose public school system was originally taught entirely in a Native American language. Today, based on the precedent of those early Hawaiian language schools, the state of Hawai'i has re-established education through the Hawaiian language in public elementary schools on the four largest islands of the state.

Through these Papa Kaiapuni Hawai'i (Hawaiian medium elementary programs) and the Punana Leo Hawaiian language preschools, Hawai'i is providing a unique educational model for the United States. Indeed, data from Hawaiian medium programs were used by U.S. Sen. Daniel K. Inouye in convincing Congress to pass his landmark Native American Languages Act recognizing the right of Native Americans to be educated through their own languages. Passage of the Act took three years of vigorous grassroots support from a coalition of Hawaiian, American Indian and Alaskan Native families that represented the largest amount of support for a Native American issue in Congress in recent years.

Kamehameha III created school system Hawaii's public school system began in the 1840-41 school year. The government school system created by Kamehameha III in that year was based primarily on community schools develop>ed to teach reading and writing in Hawaiian. These schools taught a alphabet whieh had been developed in 1822 by New England missionaries based on similar alphabets used in Tahiti and New Zealand. Within a short time literacy had spread to tens of thousands of Hawaiians through hundreds of informal schools.

The "pre-public" schools were run primarily by Hawaiians, rather than by the missionaries as is popularly believed today. In fact, four years after the first official printing of the Hawaiian alphabet there were over 500 Hawaiian teachers conducting schools throughout the islands. The missionaries were severely hampered in teaching, not only due to the sheer number of people studying reading and writing, but also by the difficulty they had in speaking in Hawaiian. Indeed, reading and writing had already begun to spread among the people before the first sermon given by a missionary in Hawai'i was ever preached! The person who gave that first sermon in Hawaiian was not one of the loeal New England missionaries, but the Reverend William Ellis who was visiting from Tahiti. Rev. Ellis had already learned Tahitian and was thus able to acquire Hawaiian in a few weeks when the resident missionaries who had been studying Hawaiian for years were still teaching and giving sermons in English.

Missionary teaching was concentrated in boarding schools and in English language schools such as the Chief's Children's school and Punahou School. The division between the Hawaiian-taught and missionary-taught schools is still evident in the public-private school division found in Hawai'i today. Hawai'i's public schools conducted in the loeal language by loeal born teachers were extremely successful in educating the citizens of the kingdom. Indeed, it is often claimed that Hawai'i had the distinction of having the most literate citizenry of any nation in the world in the 1800s. Over 100 different newspapers were printed in Hawaiian during the 1900s with writers, editors, and readers products of Hawai'i's Hawaiian medium public schools.

While the English often boast of the fact that they are among few European peoples whose ancestors recorded a full pre-Christian epie peom — Beowulf— Hawaiian writers such as Malo, Kepelino, Kamakau and others educated in Hawaiian schools preserved an ancient literature mueh larger than that of the English including such works as La'ieikawai, Mo'ikeha, the romance of Pele and Lohi'au, Kawelo, and many other. The respect that 19th century Hawaiians had for their own culture and writers is evident in the fact that Malo was appointed the head of Hawai'i's Department of Education.

Move to create a English system In the mid-1800s, however, a former missionary, Richard Armstrong, replaced David Malo in that position. Armstrong advocated replacing public schools taught in Hawaiian with public schools taught in English, and replacing loeal born school teachers with teachers imported from the United States and England. Armstrong instituted a policy restricting the budgets of the Hawaiian schools in favor of the English Schools.

There was resistance to the move to transform the public school system to an exclusively English system. Governor Kekuanao'a, head of the Board of Education, issued a report pointing out that Hawaiian was a fully capable vehicle for teaching any subject, that teaching Hawaiian children in English rather than Hawaiian would make such

children look down on their own people and that replacing Hawaiian with English would destroy the individuality of Hawai'i. Similar arguments were being heard elsewhere in the Pacific from New Zealand and Japan where Englishmen and Americans were trying to convince loeal governments that to use any language other than English in any Pacific nation's schools was primitive and backward.

Armstrong and other advocates of changing Hawai'i's school language were successful in establishing a number of public English schools in cities and towns using imported teachers. īhe Hawaiian public schools struggled with books shortages, salary inequities and Europeancentered prejudices during a eolonial period when Hawai'i was one of a handful of places in the world that had escaped outright foreign control. In spite of the language battles in the Department of

Education, Hawaiian still remained the language of all Hawaiians and of interethnic communications in the streets. Even children who attended English schools learned to read and write their native language, because many Hawaiian children their age still attended Hawaiian schools and adults conducted government, religious and cultural business in Hawaiian. Government policy — eliminate Hawaiian language continued page 18

Language education

/rom page 15 Public schools taught through the loeal language by loeal teachers were struck a mortal blow, however, in 1893 when the Hawaiian monarchy was overthrown. It now became government policy to eliminate the Hawaiian language and the Hawaiian public schools were abolished under the school language law of 1896. Many Hawaiians today blame this law for the extermination of the Hawaiian language. In the six main inhabited Hawaiian islands, children who spoke Hawaiian even on the playground where physically punished. Teachers feared that speaking Hawaiian even to explain something to a child on his or her first day of school could result in being fired. Parents were visited by teachers and told that to continue speaking Hawaiian at home would have negative repercussions on their children in school.

The school-directed campaign against Hawaiian resulted in Hawaiian being replaced with Pidgin English as the preferred language of most nonCaucasian children born in Hawai'i between 1900 and 1920. Pidgin has since eome to be viewed by some as the primary langiiage of,identification for Hawaiians. Before 1900, most children born'in Hawai'i grew up speaking Hawaiian regardless of the ethnic language spoken in the home and many Iearned English as a foreign language.

Iromcally, the forced use of English in the schools did not result in Hawaiian children learning English better than their parents, if that was the goal of the English-only policy, and there is reason to think that it was not. Linguistic studies have shown that the English of children born before 1900 is closer to standard English than the Pidgin spoken by later generations of loeal children who never spoke Hawaiian. The loss of the Hawaiian language also resulted in a decrease in literacy among Hawaiians. Onee more literate than the white populahon of the United States and the loeal Asian immigrant

groups, the Hawaiians became the most educationally at-risk ethnic group in Hawai'i in Hawai'i's public school system. Efforts by Hawaiian legislators in the 1920's to include Hawaiian as a "foreign" language in Hawai'i schools had no real effect in providing for a future for Hawaiian as a living first language, and even these laws were often left unenforced by the - territorial government that was controlled through Washington.

Language renaissance In the 1970's, new ideas regarding the equality of peoples and cultures reached Hawai'i, and a new interest developed in righting the wrongs of the previous century. Efforts to provide opportunities for children to leam Hawaiian as a foreign language again emerged. The University of Hawai'i established Hawaiian language and Hawaiian studies degrees taught primarily through English. Hawaiian was even made an official language of Hawai'i again. Learning about Hawaiians was now encouraged, but in the euphona of strengthening the study about Hawaiians, few realized that it was still illegal to use the Hawaiian language in the schools — to actually be Hawaiian in a linguistic sense.

In 1984, preschools taught entirely in Hawaiian called Punana Leo ("language nests") opened, and immediately ran into problems because antiquated laws and policies blocking the use of Hawaiian were still on the books. Families involved in the Punana Leo lobbied extensively to change state laws denying private Hawaiian schools the same rights accorded the Japanese and Chinese foreign language schools as well as

the law forbidding the use of Hawaiian as the medium of education in the public schools. The effect of the old school language law on Ni'ihau School and the last 30 native Hawaiian-speaking children in the world also became an issue in the legislature. In 1987, the 1896-instituted restriction on use of the Hawaiian language in Hawaii public schools

was removed by the state legislature and that same year, the DOE implemented Papa Kaiapuni Hawai'i, Hawai'i's first Hawaiian medium elementary programs in nearly a century. The nucleus of the children in the program as well as the teaching materials eame from the Punana Leo. In 1989, the legislature instituted special funding for a center at the University of Hawai'i at Hilo to train Hawaiian-speaking teachers and develop materials in Hawaiian. Additional sums were provided by the legislature for evaluation and supplementary reading materials.

The evaluations of the children in Papa Kaiapuni Hawai'i showed that these children are performing at, or above grade level academically, that they have the same level of fluency in English as their peers in public schools taught through English, and that their ability in Hawaiian exceeds that of students studying Hawaiian at the university level. As in the public Hawaiian medium schools of the 1800s, today's Hawaiian medium schools include children from non-Hawaiian as well as Hawaiian ancestry. These children are carrying on a public educational heritage unique in the United States and revitalizing the Hawaiian language — the one feature believed by many people as indispensable for the future survival of Hawai'i's world-famous indigenous culture.

Although the scars of nearly a century of repressing the Hawaiian language have frightened some Hawaiians away from education in Hawaiian as if it were the inferior institution that the languages supressors claimed, more and more Hawaiians are enrolling their children in modern Hawaiian medium schools that promise a future for Hawaiian culture as proud as its glorious past.

William Wilson is chair of the Hawaiian Studies Department at the University of Hawaii at Hilo. He is a co-founder and on the board ofdirectors of Punana Leo. He also works for the UHHilo Hale Kuamo'o Hawaiian Language Center producing materials for Hawaiian immersion programs.