UC Irvine

The first trustees of Kamehameha Schools (KS), a group of five White, pro-annexationist entrepreneurs, attempted to engineer social solutions for the territory’s problem with Native Hawaiian youth. They proposed to cure rural and urban youth perceived to have unfit minds and unhealthy bodies. The trustees, administrators, and teachers enacted a curriculum designed to transform the ways Native youth thought about themselves and the world around them; worked in the modern, capitalist economic system; and lived with their families in their own homes. This project of deracination was built on a curriculum of military discipline, the inculcation of a Protestant work ethic, and the proper performance of masculinity and femininity. Bernice Pauahi established KS during a period of tremendous change as the booming sugar plantation economy led to dispossession of Natives from their land, competition with immigrant labor, and public policy which stripped Native Hawaiian monarchs of political power. These settler colonial forces complicated constructions of ability and disability, which were ascribed unevenly on subjugated peoples. Moreover, colonialism introduced foreign diseases which decimated the Native Hawaiian population, leading to the popular perception that Natives were an unhealthy, unfit, dying people. This dissertation is an institutional history of KS, exploring its evolution from an industrial boarding school to a modern college-preparatory institution for Native Hawaiians. It uncovers the varied methods KS used to solve the “Native problem,” and create “fit” Natives who knew how to “properly” think, work, and live.