Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 16, Number 6, 1 June 1999 — Bishop Estate [ARTICLE]

Bishop Estate

Jan. 20 will mark 60 years since the Hawai'i Supreme Court granted the request by a committee of 10 Honolulu Civic Club members to appoint a Hawaiian trustee of Princess Pauahi's estate. For 56 years, only haoles were trustees, the justices and trustees being annexationists, except for Charles Reed Bishop, a New Yorker and consort of Princess Pauahi, who resigned in 1905 from the company of his treasonous trustees after having conveyed all his property to this beloved princess' estate. In renaissance, Hawaiians protested the trustees'selection and rejection of students, arrogance and failure to increase the number of students or to teach Hawaiian music or language. In 1940, the student body totaled only 378. The estate was worth $30 million. In 1941 and 1943, Senators William Heen and David Trask had intense investigations of gross bias or whimsicality of the trustees. Today it is time for another renaissance. The swan song of the discharged trustees is not aloha or mahaSee LETTERS on page 4

LETĪERS

From page 3 lo but ho'okano - boasting of weahh of the estate of $10 hillion to provide earnings for themselves, instead of education to thousands of "boys and girls, orphans and indigents of Hawaiian pure or part aboriginal blood," or our impoverished and criminalized people. ( Collins , 36 Haw. 334, 1943). Arthur Trask Anahola