⚡ Special Issue: Native Hawaiians keep a language alive

Throughout the 19th century, Native Hawaiians—as with other Indigenous groups—experienced increasing suppression of their language.

But as disputes arose over translation discrepancies and lobbyists championed the use of English, the Hawaiian legislature ruled in 1859 that English versions of the law would override versions in Hawaiian.

“People don't recognize that until it's almost gone, because they're hanging onto their typical culture identification tags such as their songs, their dancing, their foods, their religion maybe, or what they wear or how they look. But language is the one that is slipping away without them noticing it. And by the time it happens, it’s in very dire straits.”

In 1978, ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i was recognized as one of Hawai‘i’s official languages. Since then, state lawmakers have made efforts to support the legitimacy of the language in a reversal of previous mandates by the U.S. and state governments.

In 2022, the Hawai‘i state legislature established that, effective July 1, 2023, “Any rule, order, policy, or other act, official or otherwise, that prohibits or discourages the use of kahakō and ‘okina or the consistent use and spelling of Hawaiian names and words, as provided by this section, shall be void.”

While the County of Kaua‘i uses special characters in its printed materials, for example, it doesn’t use them on its website, citing the inaccuracy of apostrophe and umlaut substitutes and discoverability issues.

“Searching in Google for ‘Kauai’ is not the same as searching for ‘Kauaʻi,’” reads a disclaimer published on the county website. “Very few people outside the Hawaiian islands would be aware of the existence of these ‘special’ characters and would therefore have difficulty locating pages which use them.”

“We really see this as a multi-year movement towards Hawaiian language and English parity,” Makanani Salā, executive director of the Honolulu Mayor’s Office of Culture and Arts, told Spectrum News. “So much of our history is held in our place names, our wahi pana, so it is important for us to assure those names are respected and utilized correctly.”  

But in addition to identifying as “100% Chinese,” the actor and content creator also identifies as “100% African American,” highlighting his Blasian identity and experiences in short videos that have gotten him over 100,000 followers on both Instagram and TikTok.

Black and Japanese creator Yasna Vismale, who has nearly150,000 followers on TikTok and with whom Holmes has collaborated with, produces similar content celebrating her Blasian identity. In one video, she shares how her mother pushed her to engage with jazz music in addition to Japanese media. “Through jazz I learned that Blackness is not just about suffering. Black music is the foundation of American music,” she says in the video.

Black and Taiwanese voice actor Brandon O’Neal gained over 450,000 followers on by producing comedic Chinese-language content on TikTok, sometimes with subversive themes shaped by their own experiences growing up Black in Taiwan, they said on the podcast Taiwanren.

Black and Filipinx organizer Rohan Zhou-Lee founded the “Blasian March” in 2020, mobilizing rallies in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago and elsewhere to draw attention to Black and Asian American communities’ “parallel struggles with white colonial settler violence.”

In an article published by Mixed Asian Media, Zhou-Lee wrote about facing rejection from the Black community because of his Asian identity, with one social justice job interviewer berating them to “explain anti-Blackness in Korean and Chinese culture and media” and expressing disappointment that they hadn’t done “enough for the Black community,” while on the other side “Asian folks look down on me for the beautiful Blackness of my body.” Both anti-Black and anti-Asian hatred are “rooted in white miseducation,” Zhou-Lee emphasized.

Some of Holmes’ videos simply share anecdotes about his family, like one captioned “Eating DimSum with my diverse family” showing his Chinese and Black family members gathered around a dining table or one captioned “POV: ur Blackinese and both your grandmas are QUEENS” showing his Chinese and Black grandmothers.

Others address specific challenges of growing up Black and Asian, like friends speaking Japanese to him after learning of his Chinese heritage, having to code-switch between listening to pop and rap music to avoid bullying, or being followed around in Chinese stores because of his appearance.

Holmes has also written about his frustrations with Asian anti-Blackness, especially among AAPI advocates who speak out against the model minority myth but “fail to realize the bigger picture” of their complicity through silence in anti-Black violence.

But policies like the 1965 legislation and U.S. foreign influence in the Pacific Islands and Southeast Asia eventually shaped the face of Asian America today. A 2021 Pew Research Center report found that roughly 70% of Asian American adults were born in another country. And roughly 16% of Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders are also foreign born according to parameters set by the Asian Pacific Institute.

East and South Asian populations from China, India, and Japan were primarily the ones immigrating to the United States immediately after the passage of the Hart-Celler Act. Ten years later, the U.S. Chinese American population nearly doubled, according to the Library of Congress.

Refugees fled “political persecution and violence” that continued in the aftermath of the wars and bombings in Southeast Asia, according to the Southeast Asian Resource Action Center. 

When the Vietnam War ended in 1975, hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese refugees fled the country and came to the United States. The same year, in Cambodia, the Communist-led regime of the Khmer Rouge began their brutal genocide of the Cambodian people, leading to the resettlement of Cambodian refugees in the United States.

The conditions of their arrival to the United States compounded with the government’s underinvestment in Southeast Asian populations has contributed to the socioeconomic disparities between East Asian and Southeast Asian Americans.

Vietnamese, Filipino, and Thai populations all made hourly wages below the average hourly wages earned by AAPIs in 2019 -- $30.73 -- with Cambodians making an average of $23.12 per hour, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

Early Samoan communities formed on the West Coast in the 1950s when the U.S. Navy reassigned Samoan personnel from Hawai’i to various cities between Seattle and San Diego. After World War II, many Samoans also moved to San Francisco to work on the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard. 

Many Samoans who were educated on the islands migrated to the U.S. mainland seeking greater educational and economic opportunity, leading to a consistent outsourcing of Samoan skilled labor to the mainland from the 1950s to 70s. Samoans were able to earn almost three times the amount of income for employment and factory wages on the mainland compared to what they could earn on the islands, according to researchers Gordon Lewthwaite, Christiane Mainzer and Patrick J. Holland in The Journal of Pacific History.