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 Hawai‘i’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 sociocultural pressure from their friends, parents, teachers, and America's growing presence in the islands while testing and exploring their own identities.

Background/Context: Current historical understanding of Hawaiʻi’s territorial period celebrates American education as a crucial influence on the islands’ political development. In particular, the territory’s public school system represents an essential institution for spreading democratic freedom, fostering social mobility, and, more importantly, establishing America’s presence as a positive influence on Hawaiʻi’s political destiny. There has yet, however, to be a critical look at how White territorial school leaders used the public school system as a settler colonial institution with the intent of producing a compliant non-White population accepting of the nation’s racially stratified social, political, and economic systems of inequality. Focus of Study: Making Hawaiʻi American was about controlling the islands’ past and determining its future. Cultivating consent, as this article contends, was a critical strategy to reach this end. White school officials used their uncontestable authority to uproot local history and social systems and replace them with narratives affirming American exceptionalism and racial segregation. Throughout the territorial period (1900–1959), they designed and supported formal and informal schooling practices and policies to inculcate Hawaiʻi’s majority nonwhite students with American values, norms of behavior, and political beliefs to socially engineer acceptance of White American authority and racial hierarchy. Through repetition and enforcement of these practices and policies, they sought to replace the unfavorable local memory of American involvement in the forced 1893 overthrow of Queen Liliʻuokalani and Native protests over U.S. annexation in 1898 with an affirmative, progressive narrative justifying America’s presence and jurisdiction as a beneficent enterprise. Research Design: This article brings historical inquiry to this topic and uses archival materials from the University Archives and Pacific-Hawaiian Collections at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Those include the entire collection of the Hawaii Educational Review, correspondence and memos produced by schoolmen (White male school officials and administrators), and newspaper clippings. It also draws on secondary literature to help further contextualize this topic. Conclusions/Recommendations: The history of White educators in territorial Hawaiʻi reveals how public education under their leadership constituted a colonizing project designed to limit student opportunities and determine their futures. The challenge for scholars and educators is not to consign such histories to mere reflections on past mistakes but to identify how forms of oppressive education continue to manifest in schools today and impact student lives.

This article investigates how white educators used American education in an effort to socially engineer Hawaiian acceptance of U.S. control over the islands. Examining school reports, journal articles, and official correspondence from the Kamehameha School for Girls, I explore the various strategies principal Ida M. Pope used to promote white middle-class ways of homemaking and mothering, in an effort to undermine her Native Hawaiian students’ Indigenous identities and convert them into docile Hawaiian Americans. Despite Pope’s language of female empowerment, she harbored racist attitudes toward Native Hawaiians and produced an institutional climate hostile to Indigenous identity. This article builds on previous work on white women’s maternalism in Native American boarding schools to highlight how themes of white feminity, U.S. empire, and settler colonialism manifested at the Kamehameha School for Girls. More broadly, it reveals the role of white women in Hawai‘i as agents of colonial control who actively labored toward normalizing U.S. occupation and empire.

There is a “world of difference,” anthropologist Epeli Hauʻofa argued, “between viewing the Pacific as ‘islands in a far sea’ and as ‘a sea of islands.’” The distinction between both perspectives, he explained, is exemplified in the two names used for the region: Pacific Islands and Oceania. The former represents a colonial vision produced by white “continental men” emphasizing the smallness and remoteness of “dry surfaces in a vast ocean far from centers of power.” This understanding has produced and sustained an “economistic and geographic deterministic view” emphasizing Pacific Island nations as “too small, too poor, and too isolated” to take care of themselves. The latter, in contrast, denotes a grand space inhabited by brave and resourceful people whose myths, legends, oral traditions, and cosmologies reveal how they did not conceive of themselves in such “microscopic proportions.” Rather, Oceanic peoples have for over two millennia viewed the sea as a “large world” where peoples, goods, and cultures moved and mingled unhindered by fixed national boundaries.

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