Confronting Settler Colonial Histories: Education, Race and Politics in the Hawaiian Kingdom
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- What was the role of Hawaiian aliʻi in establishing educational institutions and encouraging literacy prior to the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893? Existing literature on the history of education in Hawaii portrays a linear narrative of foreign domination in which missionaries arrived in Hawaii and imposed western modes of learning and governance on Native Hawaiians. More recently, Hawaiian scholars have countered these dominant narratives by documenting the Hawaiian monarchy’s agency in actively adapting western political strategies, in part to protect their sovereignty from foreign imperialism. This thesis builds upon this recent Hawaiian scholarship and shows how Hawaiian leaders supported early missionaries as teachers of literacy and Christianity as part of an ongoing project of cultural and political adaptation. Using the framework of settler colonialism, I address how existing literature ignores Hawaiian agency and explicitly supports the American project of occupation. I then challenge this dominant narrative, relying on primary materials that show the major role of Hawaiian ali'i and teachers in the adoption and spread of literacy in Hawaii. I argue that the aliʻi supported Western education in the Hawaiian Kingdom as part of a foreign policy strategy to resist Western imperialism. An analysis of archival, primary source material indicates that the aliʻi supported palapala as a political tool, resulting in Western education as a crucial component of leadership and government positions.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | June 2020 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Makalua-Yee, Maʻili |
|---|---|
| Advisor | Biestman, Karen |
Subjects
| Subject | settler colonialism |
|---|---|
| Subject | education |
| Subject | Hawaii |
| Subject | Hawaiian Kingdom |
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
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- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Preferred citation
- Preferred Citation
- Makalua-Yee, Maʻili and Biestman, Karen. (2020). Confronting Settler Colonial Histories: Education, Race and Politics in the Hawaiian Kingdom. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: https://purl.stanford.edu/hg177vh6567
Collection
Stanford University, Program in International Relations, Honors Theses
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- ayee14@stanford.edu
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