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The state of the Hawaiian language renaissance, said Na‘alehu Anthony, can be gauged by a visit to the drug store, or some similar community stomping grounds. He’s done that, and the conclusion he’s drawn: Hawaiian is gaining in strength. Read more

The state of the Hawaiian language renaissance, said Na‘alehu Anthony, can be gauged by a visit to the drug store, or some similar community stomping grounds. He’s done that, and the conclusion he’s drawn: Hawaiian is gaining in strength.

“What you have now is a metric of the numbers game starting to play in your favor,” said Anthony, filmmaker and chief executive director of ‘Oiwi TV. “You started with one or two able to speak Hawaiian fluently, and now there are many more.

“Before, if you heard someone else speaking Hawaiian in Longs, guarantee you knew them, because there weren’t that many of us,” he added. “Now you hear someone speaking Hawaiian, you look up — and you have no idea who they are.”

The native tongue was just celebrated, as it is each year, in February as “‘Olelo Hawai‘i Month,” but it wasn’t always so. Hawaiian officially joined English as an official language of the state during the 1978 Constitutional Convention, which also laid the groundwork for the Office of Hawaiian Affairs and arose from the broader Hawaiian cultural renaissance that was in its infancy.

The language provision at the time was largely symbolic, but the symbolism was important. After the overthrow of the monarchy and the annexation of Hawaii by the U.S., speaking Hawaiian was strongly discouraged, even punished in school classrooms. Not surprisingly, over time the speaking of Hawaiian withered, until the language immersion programs, first in preschools, began its revival.

And it became linked to the sovereignty political movement as well. Just this January, Samuel Kaeo, a University of Hawaii Maui College associate professor of Hawaiian studies, made news when he refused to speak English at a court hearing arising out of a protest at the Haleakala observatory.

The court ultimately acceded to his demand to speak in Hawaiian, through an interpreter, But that followed a more hostile, initial response: The judge issued a bench warrant for his arrest.

That caused real emotional upheaval in the Native Hawaiian community. John Waihee, the former governor, had been a delegate at the ConCon. He remembered stories within his own family of the punishments meted out, the result being that the kids were warned against speaking Hawaiian.

“I’m the generation that was told never to speak,” Waihee said.

The Kaeo case, he said, was too reminiscent of the bad old days.

“I never expected it to be tested as it has been,” Waihee said, “but when it was, the first thing that popped into my mind was, ‘This is what shouldn’t happen any more.’”

The establishment of Hawaiian as an official language was considered “cute” by those who didn’t understand that history. Most of the ConCon delegates did, however, and that decree was made in the context of a broader mandate that Hawaiian language, culture and history be studied in the public schools.

Nobody disputes that the potential enabled by the Constitution language amendment has not been realized fully. Hawaii, advocates acknowledge, is not Canada where, at least in parts, French is actively spoken as well as English.

Here’s the official phrasing of the provision:

“English and Hawaiian shall be the official languages of Hawaii, except that Hawaiian shall be required for public acts and transactions only as provided by law.”

That final clause is a limiting factor. Efforts have been made in the past to require documents to be translated into Hawaiian, but have failed. The most recent attempt was Senate Bill 643, introduced in the last legislative session, which would require that “all newly created, replaced, or reprinted state and county documents, letterheads, symbols, and emblems to contain accurate, appropriate, and authentic Hawaiian names and language.”

The bill had hearings, passed the Senate but stalled in the House. It was carried over this session but never budged.

But advancement in the educational realm has been very successful. In 1987, the state Department of Education launched the Hawaiian Studies Program and the Hawaiian Language Immersion Program, Ka Papahana Kaiapuni Hawai‘i.

It took decades, but now immersion schools such as Ke Kula Kaiapuni ‘o Anuenue are teaching their second and third generations of students, all subjects taught in Hawaiian.

Baba Yim, a graduate of the school, took over Feb. 13 as its principal (po‘okumu), after nearly 20 years on faculty, starting as a student teacher while he finished his degree at the University of Hawaii. His eldest son, who attended from preschool days, now teaches in the high school grades.

Yim said that when he attended Kamehameha Schools, there were fewer sections of Hawaiian taught than Japanese.

“I took four years of Japanese,” he said. “My mom said it will help me get a job.” And it did. Yim said he used Japanese in his job with a dinner cruise company, speaking to the tourists. That covered his tuition to finish his degree.

Anuenue is a K-12 public school, all classes taught in Hawaiian. Some relaxation of the rules is allowed at recess and lunch, but Yim said even then, when a student addresses him in English, he tends to answer in Hawaiian.

It was more of a struggle to keep the kids on the immersion path at the beginning, he said, because they would go home to entirely English-speaking families.

“Back 20 years, or 15 years ago when the program was much younger, I think it was more just faith, just blind faith, that if you do it, it’s going to grow, it’s going to work,” Yim added.

“But now we actually see. The number of kids who are coming from families and households that speak Hawaiian is growing. So the number of kids who go home … and their parents say, ‘I don’t speak Hawaiian, I can’t help you with your homework,’ that number is dropping.”

A few hours before the interview, Yim had conducted meetings with two prospective students. One is a kindergartener — that’s typical — but the other was a boy in sixth grade.

”To start immersion as a fifth- and sixth-grader, it’s a very difficult choice to make,” he said. “But again, we’re a public school. Hawaiian is an official language of the state. If the parents feel that’s something they want to try, we’re going to support that child with all the resources that we do have.”

One reason this family might choose to enroll the boy is because his younger sister in kindergarten attends, Yim said. And the school encourages such family ties as part of conveying cultural values along with language.

“It’s building character in our kids, and growing that responsibility of older siblings to younger siblings,” he said. “You know, even kids who are only children in their own house: When they come here, they’re not.”

Most of the student body identifies as Native Hawaiian in some measure, he said — but not all of them.

“Parents of children who are not Hawaiian, I think another reason that they choose this for their children is because they see the value of a child who is educated with more than one language, how that stimulates their brain, and makes them more understanding, more empathetic to the world around them,” Yim said.

Anthony celebrates the “great strides” the language has made within the educational system.

“We have a stable structure that allows us to take a breath,” he added.

He sees its exposure in the larger society expanding, and he believes that will continue.

“Hawaiian is embedded in everything we do today,” he added. “We just forget.”

There are still backward steps, but it warms his heart to hear more of the language when out and about, and more of it being pronounced correctly.

“If we could get people here to all say ‘Honolulu,’ not ‘Hah-nalulu,” I could retire,” Anthony said. “My work is done.”