Regenerating Life & Land at Waialeʻe
Clipping of the front page of Kā Nūpepa Kūʻokoʻa, Novemaba (November) 26, 1915. The headline of the first story is “Ulu He Haunaele Nui Ma Ke Kula Hoʻopololei Ma Waialeʻe” (A large riot springs up at the reformatory school at Waialeʻe). Clipped from Papakilo.
In November 1915, Hawaiian newspapers reported on a haunaele nui (large riot) at the Waialeʻe Industrial School for Boys, located in a rural area on the North Shore of Oʻahu. After assaulting a teacher, fifty-four children escaped into the nearby mountains. Pursued by teachers on horseback, the majority were returned to the institution at gunpoint. The boys involved explained that the cause of this incident was hunger: they were not being fed enough.
Opened in 1903, the Waialeʻe Industrial School was part of a larger government-run system of institutions that incarcerated children and adults in the Territory of Hawaiʻi. The same white settlers who overthrew the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893 became the leaders of the new Territorial government in 1900. Yet white people remained a small minority in Hawaiʻi, and thus the government enacted a number of measures to repress Native Hawaiian language, culture, religion and political loyalty to the former Kingdom government. The Industrial School at Waialeʻe remained open at the site until 1950.
In Hawaiian, the word for land is ʻāina, which literally means “that which feeds.” When we think about hungry children running away from the Waialeʻe Industrial School in 1915, we are also reminded of the beauty of what is happening on that same land now. Today, our partner non-profit organization, the North Shore Community Land Trust, works at the site to restore loʻi kalo (areas for growing taro, a traditionally important staple food) and a freshwater fishpond.
This summer, our research team will be on Oʻahu conducting further research and looking to connect with community around the history of the Boys’ School at Waialeʻe. We are very grateful to have garnered two grants to support this work. The first, which is being directly granted to the North Shore Community Land Trust, is a National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH) Chair’s grant that was recently made available to communities and sites named in the Department of Interior’s Federal Indian Boarding School Investigative Report. This grant will allow us to conduct community meetings at Waialeʻe to share more about the history of the Boys’ school, discuss how this history should be memorialized, and create digital story maps that can explain some of the history of the Boys’ school while connecting to the site as it stands today.
The second is an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Digital Justice Seed Grant, which will allow us to continue this momentum and create the foundations of a digital resource about the history of industrial schools in Hawaiʻi — including the Boys’ School but also the other sites our researchers are interested in (at Keoneʻula, Mōʻiliʻili, Waimano, and Kawailoa). We plan to use Mukurtu, a content management site platform that was designed with Indigenous communities in mind. The site allows for different levels of access to follow and enact Indigenous cultural protocols around sharing cultural heritage and history. We hope to provide interpretation of this history that situates these institutions within a longer history and future of the lands they occupied.
These lands, where the industrial schools starved children, were always meant to feed us. The vision we have for our work, put simply, is to make these places sites that feed Native Hawaiians – literally, culturally, and spiritually. Overall, what we propose is meant to offer space and time for the communities impacted most by the history of these schools to process, grieve, and heal. That healing will be a long-term, collective process. But we know that bringing more people to these sites and allowing them to walk, talk, and learn on the land will feed us all in many ways, and help us ensure that the children kept at the industrial schools are not forgotten.
Please stay tuned for several opportunities to connect with our team on Oʻahu in June and July. We are planning an informational meeting in mid-June - to share more about us and our work; and a talk story event after the community work day at Waialeʻe on Saturday, June 29th; along with a couple of other possibilities still in the works! We will update our brand new social media accounts when we have more details — see the links to our Instagram and Facebook pages below.