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.Footnote ¹

For Hauʻofa, this discrepancy was more than a semantic turn—it represented a reclamation of Indigenous identity and representation of the region from two hundred years of European and American imperialist influence. He feared if such narrow and deterministic colonial perspectives continue to define Oceania, its people, and its culture, “our histories will remain imperial histories and narratives of passive submission to transformations, victimisations, and fatal impacts.” Internalization of these narratives could confine Oceanic peoples to “mental reservations” in which they remain forever dependent on foreign nations and international agencies for survival. Therefore, to counteract these negative effects, he argued, “We must . . . actively reconstruct our histories, rewrite our geography, create our own realities, and disseminate these through our educational institutions and our societies at large.”Footnote ² Doing so would not only restore agency to “people of the sea” but also empower them to take charge of their destiny.

This essay draws inspiration from Hauʻofa's writings to reconceptualize and situate the educational historiography of Hawaiʻi within the broader context of the educational historiography of Oceania. I seek to attract attention to the ways in which the region's educational history has been theorized, constructed, and employed by framing the history of education in Hawaiʻi (immigrant, Indigenous, and colonial) as emblematic of Oceania's limited presence in the larger historical literature on education and schooling. In doing so, I hope to highlight how the historical educational experiences of immigrant and Indigenous peoples in both Hawaiʻi and Oceania remain woefully understudied and that the vast majority of extant research centers on Western events, institutions, and individuals following European contact. As Hauʻofa succinctly puts it, “this kind of history is a hindrance,” as it establishes Oceania as having no history prior to imperialism, only a “prehistory.” Such misunderstanding relegates Oceanic peoples to the “roles of spectators and objects for transformation,” marginalizes their narratives and experiences to the “footnotes of the histories of empires,” and reinforces paternalistic colonial ideas of Oceania as tiny, remote, and helpless.Footnote ³ Coupled with enduring and deeply rooted commercialized themes in the imaginations of continental Americans of idyllic scenery and friendly natives living in eternal paradise, it is easy to comprehend why Hawaiʻi and Oceania escape greater critical examination.Footnote ⁴

This sociocultural reality, however, does not suggest a lack of interest in Indigenous experiences in education. The history of Native American boarding schools reflects a wealth of scholarship involving a range of issues that include settler colonial pedagogy and institutions; settler educators and administrators; and Indigenous teachers’, communities’, and students’ experiences and responses. Seminal works in the 1990s by K. Tsianina Lomawaima, David W. Adams, and Brenda J. Child reveal the lengths to which settler colonials attempted to assimilate Native American children as well as the complex forms of resistance and survival strategies Native students and their communities employed to endure their schooling and colonization more broadly.Footnote ⁵ As a result, these works have inspired a new generation of scholars in the twenty-first century eager to explore and expand the field through fresh perspectives and innovative approaches.

Hawaiʻi, however, has yet to experience such an undertaking. The first written histories about Hawaiian education—composed in the mid-nineteenth century by haole (white) American missionaries—emphasize the common schools as the primary sites for transforming Hawaiʻi from a “state of heathenism” to that of a Christian nation. These early narratives reveal how missionaries envisioned Hawaiian salvation as an orderly educational process that guided Natives away from paganism and toward Christianity and that portrayed schools as the most efficient and effective institutions for achieving this transition. In History of the Sandwich Islands, missionary Sheldon Dibble described the kingdom's common schools as the greatest means of access to the souls of Native Hawaiians in order to ensure their salvation. At school, they learned the “art of reading” which “unlock[ed] . . . the rich volume of God's word” and granted Native Hawaiians direct access to the “blessings of Christianity and . . . civilization” in the Bible.Footnote ⁶ Fellow missionaries Rufus Anderson and Edwin O. Hall shared similar views. In an 1838 article, Hall emphasized the importance of establishing an extensive system of Christian public schools for removing the “rubbish of ignorance and superstition” and making the blessings of Christianity and civilization “permanent.”Footnote ⁷ Anderson's “Missionary Schools” takes a global look at the history of foreign mission schooling and its impact on countries across the world. His narrative situates “Sandwich Island” mission schools within this larger history and compares them with those of other “heathen nation[s]” as “folds where the lambs of the flock [were] to be fed.”Footnote ⁸

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the history of Hawaiian education underwent a dramatic revision to support the political actions and objectives of a new generation of white settlers. These narratives, mostly written by the adult children of the original missionaries (or “second-generation missionaries”), no longer emphasized the importance of schools to Hawaiian salvation but, rather, stressed the essential roles missionaries played in advising, organizing, and leading the Hawaiian nation's educational institutions during the nineteenth century. This revision defined both first- and second-generation missionaries as benevolent and selfless crusaders committed to developing a school system capable of civilizing a primitive people and, thereby, converting their feudal kingdom into a modern nation-state.Footnote ⁹

These narrative adjustments began appearing in various publications during the final years of the monarchy. In 1888, Alatau Atkinson, inspector general of schools and future territorial superintendent, and second-generation missionary William D. Alexander coauthored the pamphlet An Historical Sketch of Education in the Hawaiian Islands, in which they praise the missionaries in building a number of primitive schools that provided a rudimentary education in reading, writing, and basic arithmetic.Footnote ¹⁰ This arrangement, they argued, brought literacy to the Hawaiian people and established the foundation of the kingdom's school system. In an 1892 article, first-generation missionary Charles M. Hyde described the public school system his colleagues created as a “great factor” in “uplifting the dark races into full fellowship in the brotherhood of man.”Footnote ¹¹ In particular, he credited the inclusion of manual labor into the nation's public school system as critical to civilizing Native Hawaiians. That same year, an anonymous author with the penname “Kanakaole” outlined the benefits of American civilization bestowed by the kingdom's centralized, “Anglo-Saxon”-led school system to Hawaiʻi's “little, dirty, brown-skinned” students.Footnote ¹² In “Education in the Hawaiian Kingdom,” the author explained how a unified district provided a standard “enlightenment” curriculum emphasizing American “home life and its comforts, its literature and intellectual force, [and] its social and moral elevation.”Footnote ¹³

In the immediate years following the 1893 overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy, historical understanding of public education shifted once again. Authors now looked to establish the educational system of the Republic of Hawaii as fundamentally American in origin, organization, curriculum, and faculty. They did so in support of the white-minority government's larger objective of securing the annexation of Hawaiʻi to the United States. Accomplishing this goal, however, required assuaging white Americans’ fear of Hawaiʻi's “non-homogeneous people” as “unfit for incorporation” by demonstrating how the islands’ school system, led and designed by white Americans since 1820, had always been American and was the perfect institution for preparing Hawaiʻi's people for annexation.Footnote ¹⁴

Scholars of the first half of the twentieth century embraced this narrative highlighting the inherent positive American nature of Hawaiʻi's schools. In his publications on the Hawaiian Kingdom, University of Hawaiʻi history professor Ralph S. Kuykendall credited American missionaries as the “most potent driving force” in creating and sustaining the “American pattern” of the island nation's “strong school system.”Footnote ¹⁵ In particular, he showcased the efforts of Richard Armstrong (father of Samuel C. Armstrong, founder of the Hampton Institute) to inculcate “habits of industry” through agricultural training in the public schools and promote the English language as the medium of instruction as strong examples of American leadership.Footnote ¹⁶ Kuykendall's pro-missionary coverage, however, starkly contrasted with his assessment of Indigenous school administrators and bureaucrats as inexperienced and incapable of successfully overseeing a national education system.Footnote ¹⁷

Territorial Normal School president Benjamin O. Wist shared the same assessments of missionary achievements and critique of Native incompetence, but whereas Kuykendall remained focused on the nineteenth century, Wist expanded the argument to contend that missionary educational efforts actually represented a nascent Americanization process instilling “American ideals, institutions, and practices” into Hawaiʻi's student population in preparation for eventual US citizenship. “In every particular,” he argued, “the Hawaiian public school system became American in practice before it became American in fact.”Footnote ¹⁸ Therefore, as an incorporated territory awaiting statehood since 1820, he reasoned, “It is public education in the American pattern that does most to justify Hawaii's claim to equal status with other commonwealths of the American nation.”Footnote ¹⁹

This historical consensus involving the missionary legacy in education began to fracture by the late 1950s. In his book Hawaii Pono: A Social History, American studies professor Lawrence Fuchs broadly agreed with Wist's assessment that American education influenced Hawaiʻi's political transformations during the territorial period, but he argued that this change came from the bottom up. He reinterpreted missionary and white planter involvement in nineteenth- and twentieth-century public education as creating an un-American school system that restricted opportunities for social mobility based on race. Undaunted, Fuchs claimed, the “brown-skinned and slant-eyed” students of territorial Hawaiʻi took advantage of their American civics education in the public schools to learn about their rights and privileges as citizens and reject the agricultural and vocational education agenda white sugar planters and their supporters in the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) promoted.Footnote ²⁰ As a result, this new multicultural generation of Americans who came of age in the postwar era forged a new politically active middle class that backed the Democratic Party sweep of the territorial legislature in 1954, ending fifty years of white planter political control over Hawaiʻi.

While an important departure from the benevolent missionary focus of earlier accounts, Fuchs's book still celebrates America and American education as crucial influences on the historical and political development of Hawaiʻi into a US territory. He defines decades of racial, political, economic, and educational grievances of Hawaiʻi's multiracial population as disorganized anger that required American education to inspire, inform, and guide their political organization against white minority control. American schools, therefore, represented critical institutions for spreading democratic freedom and opportunity and, more importantly, establishing America's presence as a positive influence on Hawaiʻi's political destiny.

By the end of the twentieth century, historical scholarship on education in Hawaiʻi had once again shifted, with a new generation of scholars critically reexamining missionary involvement in education and the celebratory narratives of Hawaiʻi's public school leadership and institutions. This growing body of research focuses on the ways in which race, labor, imperialism, and settler colonialism have intersected to inform and shape nineteenth-century and territorial-era education policy, practice, and curriculum. In a 1981 article, William E. H. Tagupa discussed the evolution and impact of missionary education policies, beginning with Hawaiian-language literacy programs meant to promote Christian salvation to that of preparing Hawaiians for American assimilation and annexation by replacing the Hawaiian language with English as the medium of instruction.Footnote ²¹ In Hawaiian by Birth, Joy Schulz explains how the private education of second-generation missionary children at Punahou in the middle decades of the nineteenth century cultivated a sense of white superiority and privilege that created tense relations between them and the Native Hawaiian community and, ultimately, lead to their involvement in overthrowing the monarchy.Footnote ²² Several of C. Kalani Beyer's articles explore how attitudes of white supremacy, civilization, and patriarchy informed the construction of and instruction at manual training institutions and female seminaries meant to “uplift” and “save” Native Hawaiians during the late nineteenth century.Footnote ²³ Michelle Morgan expands the discussion of manual education into the first half of the twentieth century to highlight the aggressive push by the DPI to make vocational training a core component of territorial schooling.Footnote ²⁴ Judith R. Hughes, Morris Young, and Katherine Fox each examine the history of the territorial-era English Standard School (ESS) movement and the challenges local policymakers faced in promoting ESS as a necessary part of their Americanization campaign and addressing accusations that the policy racially excluded nonwhite students.Footnote ²⁵ Finally, Clif Stratton's Education for Empire, Michelle Morgan's article on Hawaiʻi's teachers and Americanization, and dissertations by Sarah D. Manekin and Khalil Anthony Johnson Jr. reveal the growing interest in the use of empire as an analytical framework for contextualizing Hawaiʻi within larger national debates about race, citizenship, manual labor, and schools.Footnote ²⁶

These histories represent important contributions for advancing our understanding of the myriad ways American influence over Hawaiʻi's education system affected the islands’ political development into a territory of the United States. But white settler involvement in education is only part of the story. Missing are equally robust examinations of the ways in which immigrants—in particular Chinese, Portuguese, and Filipino—and Native Hawaiians understood, experienced, and engaged formal schooling, literacy practices, and Americanization in the decades after the arrival of American missionaries in 1820.

One exception is scholarship on Japanese immigrants. Eileen Tamura's seminal work, Americanization, Acculturation, and Ethnic Identity, the Nisei Generation in Hawaiʻi, examines the efforts of Hawaiʻi's white school officials to force Nisei (second-generation Japanese Americans) to Americanize and the ways in which Nisei and their Issei parents (first-generation Japanese immigrants to North America) responded by appropriating and adapting American education to advance their own interests.Footnote ²⁷ Reed Ueda's 1999 article builds upon Tamura's argument, exploring how the civics education program at McKinley High School in Honolulu, meant to Americanize Nisei students, instead provided them with the political language of equal rights and universal citizenship they would later use to politically transform Hawaiʻi into a pluralistic democratic community in the postwar era.Footnote ²⁸ In examining Nikkei (Japanese-American) legal challenges to territorial government efforts to control Japanese-language schools, Noriko Asato's book Teaching Mikadoism further demonstrates the complicated ways in which race, citizenship, language, and schools affected Hawaiʻi's Japanese-American population.Footnote ²⁹

By comparison, historical research on Native Hawaiian engagement with public education during the territorial period remains narrow and limited. Beginning in the 1990s, several scholars began denouncing missionary influence and DPI policies as suppressing and replacing the Hawaiian language and culture with English and Americanization. Their revisionist critique defined American schooling as a process of stripping Indigenous children of their Native identity and transforming them into a new passive generation of “Hawaiian-Americans” accepting of US occupation.Footnote ³⁰ While powerful as an anticolonial narrative drawing public attention to white settler efforts to eliminate Indigenous identity through education, it also had the adverse effect of creating an entrenched victimization narrative that framed Hawaiʻi's history of public education in the territorial period as a time of deprivation and loss. As a result, little room existed for a more nuanced understanding of Indigenous responses to territorial-era schooling.

Times, however, are changing. In recent years, several Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) scholars have pushed back at the victimization depiction by relying on nineteenth-century Hawaiian-language sources to argue that Natives were not passive victims of colonialism. Political scientist Noenoe Silva examines antiannexation protests from the late nineteenth century to counter settler-colonial histories of Indigenous acceptance of the US invasion and occupation of the islands.Footnote ³¹ Geographer Kamanamaikalani Beamer explains how Hawaiian leadership customized and adopted Western technologies and concepts to support and bolster Indigenous governance in a time of increasing foreign encroachment.Footnote ³² Research by historian David A. Chang reveals how Hawaiians during the nineteenth century adapted to and embraced literacy and written texts as a means to control relations with Westerners and, later, resist colonization and assimilation efforts.Footnote ³³ Noelani Arista's work takes a more nuanced approach toward understanding the historical development and impact of Hawaiian-language literacy practices and printing skills. Rather than view literacy and printing as straightforward examples of Hawaiian agency, she contextualizes Native appropriation of these technologies within a larger “confluence of worlds” that acknowledges the complexity and fluid nature of negotiation and deliberation that occurs when different “meaning-making systems” engage one another.Footnote ³⁴ Doing so moves away from simply understanding Hawaiian-language sources as evidence of historical resistance and, instead, recognizes them as “oral-made-textual sources” reflecting the continuation of Hawaiian customary practices of learning and passing on knowledge.Footnote ³⁵

These histories, while not specifically focused on education, demonstrate the new and exciting opportunities for expanding and reevaluating the history of education in Hawaiʻi by examining non-English sources. Hawaiian-language newspapers and documents reveal a complex and organized Indigenous response to Western education, literacy practices, and print technology that operated in conjunction as well as in opposition to missionary and white settler schooling initiatives. This new understanding underscores Native Hawaiians as keen and savvy actors in school administration, teaching, and learning during the first half of the monarchy.Footnote ³⁶ They also reveal that while second-generation missionaries and their settler allies secured greater control over the school system and government toward the end of the nineteenth century, Natives continued to oppose the takeover of their nation, textbooks, and curriculum.Footnote ³⁷

Despite these developments, more research is needed. For example, in the years before and during the monarchy, we still understand little about school life in rural communities, Native teacher-training practices and curriculum, charity schools, the lives and efforts of Native school administrators, the battle over secularism and Catholicism in the public schools, aliʻi (chief) influence over public and private school construction and instruction, the development of the common- and select-school systems, immigrant schooling experiences, Indigenous instructional practices and educational philosophy, higher education, and international exchange programs. Even lesser known is education during the territorial period. While current research expands our understanding of settler control over the education system and Japanese immigrant schooling experiences, there remains a dearth of historical scholarship on Chinese, Portuguese, Filipino, and Native Hawaiian populations (as mentioned previously); the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa; progressive education in the islands; the educational philanthropy of missionary descendants; and reform schools.

This paucity of research, however, should not be viewed as an impediment to future scholarship. Rather, it represents an exciting opportunity for expanding and developing contextual knowledge of the various institutions and communities in Hawaiʻi to better understand their complicated experiences and varied outcomes with American education. As scholars of nineteenth-century Hawaiʻi have demonstrated, great potential exists in researching non-English language sources to unearth diverse perspectives that challenge, affirm, and enrich current historical understandings of schools and schooling. Taking the same approach with research on education during the territorial period could similarly uncover new stories and experiences revealing a much more vibrant and complex past and inspiring fresh questions for future scholars.