![]() ![]() And they started their first Hawaiian school called Pūnana Leo, which means "nest of voices." The state, however, did not offer any support or curriculum, Kimura said. They pushed, and eventually succeeded in getting Hawaii's Department of Education to allow them to create Hawaiian language "immersion schools" in the mid-1980s. Their goal was ambitious: to create an entirely new generation of Hawaiian language speakers. To revive the language, they wanted to start with young children - preschoolers - and build schools where instruction was provided entirely in Hawaiian. Kimura, Kawai'ae'a and other activists decided that the solution was not just to push for Hawaiian to be included in traditional schools. "You know, we were part of the generation where women were burning their bras, and civil rights, and people were asking, 'How come I can't speak the language of my grandparents? How come they had this and I don't have that?' " "The '70s is really part of that whole Hawaiian renaissance," she said. She was one of Kimura's students, and says the push to reclaim the language was part of a broader awakening of that era, which took on new meaning for Native Hawaiians. Keiki Kawai'ae'a, director for Ka Haka 'Ula O Ke'elikolani College of Hawaiian Language at the University of Hawaii, was also part of the movement to revitalize Hawaiian. He conducted the interviews on KCCN Radio (a station that no longer goes by that name) because, he said, "It would be very important for them to be heard." ![]() ![]() "This was a population of people who were in their 60s and older, who were senior citizen age - a group that I knew from my own upbringing with my own grandparents that they would not be with us for a long time," Kimura said. Today, he puts that population at a couple of dozen. He estimates there were about 2,000 of them left of this generation who grew up speaking Hawaiian in the home. Out of a tiny studio on the ninth floor of a Waikiki office building, he began interviewing all the native language speakers he could find. In the 1970s, Kimura was a young professor, trying to teach himself Hawaiian, when he started a 90-minute radio program called Ka Leo Hawai'i. Today, Kimura is called the grandfather of the Hawaiian language's revitalization. But the practice of primarily speaking the Hawaiian language from birth, as my great-grandmother and many other Hawaiians of her time did, nearly died with her generation.Ī man named Larry Kimura - the voice interviewing my great-grandmother on that radio program - and some student activists set out to change that. In Hawaii today, nearly everyone knows how to speak at least a few words and phrases of Hawaiian. The show, it turns out, sparked a much larger movement to save a language. It was beautiful - musical, even, just like the strums of the ukulele that she played later on the show. The author's great-grandmother, Martha Kekauililani Kahanu Iwanaga. It was a way to meet her, and, for the first time, I heard people speaking the Hawaiian language to each other. I never met my great-grandmother, but hearing her speak in the rounded sounds and lyrical vowels that make up the Hawaiian language was like magic. The first time I heard the CD recording, it sent chills down my spine. That voice of an elderly Hawaiian woman was that of my great-grandmother, Martha Kekauililani Kahanu Iwanaga, speaking her native language on a Honolulu radio program more than 40 years ago. " Ae hanau ia wau i Honoma'ele." ("Yes, I was born in Honoma'ele," she said.) " Ae," she said, meaning "yes" in Hawaiian, when asked a question by a male voice. The voice was soft and scratchy, as if a bit timid in front of the microphone. So they did it on their own - starting with preschool - where kids could absorb the language from the start. The state, however, did not offer any support or curriculum, Kimura said. ![]() Hawaiian language activist Larry Kimura led the charge in the 1970s in getting Hawaii's Department of Education to sanction Hawaiian-language immersion schools. ![]()
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