• Preserving the Hawaiian language Preserving the Hawaiian language The resurgence of the Native Hawaiian culture that began in the 1970s also marked the return to life of the Hawaiian language. Today hundreds of children are attending Hawaiian-language immersion schools,
• Preserving the Hawaiian language
Preserving the Hawaiian language
The resurgence of the Native Hawaiian culture that began in the 1970s also marked the return to life of the Hawaiian language. Today hundreds of children are attending Hawaiian-language immersion schools, new words are being made to provide Hawaiian terms for things like computers, and books written in the Hawaiian language are again being printed.
Learning a language imparts much more than the ability to read or speak it. Each language colors the way one thinks and acts, and what better way to preserve, recall and perpetuate the Native Hawaiian culture than to spread the learning of the Hawaiian language.
Long before this new renaissance, Frances Frazier, who now lives in retirement in Lihu‘e, was hard at work preserving Hawaiian language documents. Working at archives in Honolulu, she helped translate and preserve Hawaiian-language land documents and other papers. Frances has also translated literary works, like the account of the Westside wahine Pi‘ilani, the wife of Ko‘olau, the famous paniolo who fled to Kalalau Valley in the 1890s after being diagnosed with leprosy. Frances’ life has bridged a time when her kupuna could recall when Hawaiian was the first language of Kaua‘i.
In Frances’ childhood days, renowned Hawaiian myth collector and translator William Hyde Rice of Lihu‘e was putting down on paper his versions of classic Kaua‘i legends; many would have been lost had it not been for his literary work that he undertook late in his long life.
With the onslaught of modern life changing the face of Kaua‘i more each day, we are fortunate to have a growing number of students, and now graduates, of Hawaiian-language-based schools.
We also have an under-appreciated connection to the Hawaiian language of old through our residents whose roots can be found on Ni‘ihau. The Ni‘ihau community on that island and on the Westside is a last bastion of the Hawaiian language, for this community can in a bigger way than anywhere else in Hawai‘i trace a clear line of Hawaiian-language speaking that goes back unchanged since Captain Cook’s sailors first stepped foot on Ni‘ihau in 1778.
Like the craft of Ni‘ihau-shell lei-making, which some say is the only Hawaiian native craft practiced continuously since the days of Cook, the Ni‘ihau people are possessors of a treasure not measured in dollars or bars of gold. They are the voices of the ancestors of the Hawaiian people. Their dialect and fluid manner of speaking is a time capsule unlike any other.
As the 21st century rolls on let’s hope the knowledge and use of the Hawaiian language grows, and that 50 or 100 years from now Frances Frazier, our immersion schools and Ni‘ihau people, along with our literary legacy of Hawaiian-language publications, are all recalled as pivotal elements in keeping this Polynesian language alive and well.
