Title

Embracing Education and Contesting Americanization: A Reexamination of Native Hawaiian Student Engagement in Territorial Hawaiʻi's Public Schools, 1920-1940

Type

Journal Article

Authors

Taira, D. S.

Abstract

This article explores the efforts of Native Hawaiian students to appropriate and take control of their schooling as part of a broad indigenous story of empowerment during Hawaiʻi’s territorial years (1900-1959). Histories of this era lack a visible indigenous presence and contribute to the myth that Natives passively accepted the Americanization of the islands. This article challenges this myth by examining Native student writings to tell a story of Native involvement in education as a pragmatic strategy designed to advance distinctly indigenous interests through the American education system. These stories reveal schools as complex sites of negotiation where Native students regularly navigated socio-cultural pressure from their friends, parents, teachers, and America’s growing presence in the islands while testing and exploring their own identities.

Citation

Taira, D. S. (2018). Embracing Education and Contesting Americanization: A Reexamination of Native Hawaiian Student Engagement in Territorial Hawaiʻi's Public Schools, 1920-1940. History of Education Quarterly, 58, 361–391.