Saving the Hawaiian Race: Pedagogies and Settler Colonial Possession at the Kamehameha School for Boys, 1888-1913

Abstract

The Kamehameha Schools (KS), established in 1887 through the last will and testament of Bernice Pauahi, was founded as a school for those with Hawaiian ancestry, but was ultimately configured to align with settler colonial interests of Hawaiʻi’s haole elite. Drawing from Noelani Goodyear-Kaʻōpua’s analyses of domestication and “tender violence” at the Kamehameha Schools, this project aims to further theorize the function of the Kamehameha School for Boys as a settler colonial project during its formative years. This project examines the relationship between racial discourse and gendered pedagogies at the Kamehameha School for Boys between 1888 and 1913, employing Maile Arvin’s theory of the settler colonial logic of possession to conceptualize what I describe as a possessive race-saving project. I propose that a similar logic of possession through whiteness underscores the settler colonial project at KS that was purported to save the Hawaiian race from degeneracy and extinction. Kanaka Maoli boys are produced to be closer-to-whiteness through re-masculinizing pedagogies, and therefore somewhat assimilable as industrial laborers, in the name of racial rehabilitation. Students are able to possess whiteness, but are also possessed in the process. Possession simultaneously frames the white faculty and administrators as race-saviors, indigenizing the methods employed at KS and naturalizing the political authority of white settlers over Kanaka Maoli. The logics of possession, however, are able sometimes unsettled through regenerative refusals by Kanaka Maoli students, in which Indigenous futurities beyond possession were still imagined.