On April 5th 1900, Hawai‘i officially became American. The United States Congress had passed Hawai‘i’s Organic Act transforming the islands from a white minority-led republic into an incorporated U.S. territory with a path to statehood thereby completing a process of colonization that had begun with the arrival of American Missionaries eighty years earlier.

Despite this political transformation, America failed to recognize Hawai‘i and its people culturally as American. What followed next was a near six-decade (1900-1959) long public schooling campaign to Americanize Hawai‘i’s majority nonwhite populace and prove Hawai‘i was American. But things did not go as planned. In the case of Native Hawaiians, Americanization was far from successful as many students, their families, and their communities saw in public education a means to survive, and even thrive, as Hawaiians. This is their story.