Report Cites Mistreatment Of Students At Native Hawaiian Boarding Schools 0 Hawaiians fared somewhat better than students at Indian boarding schools on the mainland, a new federal investigation shows.
When Jonathan Osorio attended Kamehameha Schools in the 1960s his native tongue, Olelo Hawaii, wasn’t an official part of the curriculum.
Hawaii had just become a state a few years prior, in 1959, and Kamehameha Schools, despite its reputation today as a bastion of Hawaiian language and culture, was part of a century-long campaign to assimilate the islands’ Indigenous people into an American society dominated in large part by white privilege.
Few of Osorio’s cohorts had little more than a rudimentary understanding of Hawaiian, he said.
