In January of that year, a group of businessmen backed by the American ambassador overthrew Hawaii’s monarchy, laying the groundwork for annexation to the United States. The territorial government established English as the only official language. From then on, people caught speaking Hawaiian faced severe social ostracism.

The English-only law had an immediate chilling effect that prevented subsequent generations of Native Hawaiians from learning their linguistic ancestry. Preannexation, Native Hawaiians were some of the world’s most gifted communicators, with centuries of history and culture bound to an oral tradition. The arrival of missionaries had by the mid-1800s brought the printed word, and led to the creation of a slew of Hawaiian-language newspapers—or nūpepa. According to a write-up by Kamehameha Schools, by 1834, more than nine in 10 Hawaiians were literate, up from close to zero percent just a dozen years prior.

Read: De-stigmatizing Hawaii’s creole language

But as literacy rose, other aspects of Hawaiian culture receded—including the kapu system of governance, which enforced strict social rules; the low-fat, nutrient-rich diet; the kapa-bark clothing; and the hula as a sacred form of cultural and spiritual expression. This was not the first time Hawaiians had experienced loss at this scale. A century before the overthrow, British explorers brought diseases that decimated the Native Hawaiian population. By the time Hawaii became a state, in 1959, the Hawaiian language had lost a critical mass of native speakers. According to one study, fewer than 30 students were studying Hawaiian at the University of Hawai‘i’s flagship campus during the school year that began in 1960. Other indigenous languages were undergoing their own protracted deaths—roughly 230 of them went extinct at some point between 1950 and 2010. In the ’60s, estimates suggest that fewer than 2,000 people could speak Hawaiian fluently, and just a few dozen of them were children.

But then something remarkable happened. An unlikely Hawaiian renaissance blossomed in the ’60s and into the ’70s, initially driven by artists who sought to reclaim traditional music and dance. Ironically, the rise of Hawaii’s tourism industry, spurred by advances in aviation, helped support this renaissance, because visitors wanted to experience Hawaiian culture. Tiki bars and commercialized luaus were a poor substitute for what was lost in the overthrow, but the appropriation of Hawaiianness allowed the authentic aspects of Hawaiian life to creep back in. Then, in 1978, the state of Hawaii held a constitutional convention, prompted in part by questions about land rights and a return of Native Hawaiian sovereignty. Among other measures aimed at improving natives’ well-being, the convention made Hawaiian an official language for the first time since the kingdom had fallen.

This move enabled the beginnings of the modern-day Hawaiian-immersion movement—the one Kelling, the educator, is now striving to advance. Activists “knew that raising children in an environment where Hawaiian was the ordinary language of interaction was central to the survival of the language,” reads a historical overview of ‘Aha Pūnana Leo, a leading Hawaiian-immersion organization that founded its first early-education program on Kaua‘i in the mid-’80s. Later, Pūnana Leo launched a preschool out of downtown Honolulu’s historic schoolhouse and church—whose surrounding graveyard memorializes missionaries and plantation tycoons, and where Kelling began his teaching career in the early ’90s. Today, Pūnana Leo—whose name translates into “nest of voices”—comprises 12 programs across the state.