Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop Left Her Wealth to Native Hawaiians. Now, the Schools Her People Established Face Legal Challenges

Supporters of a educational network created to educate Native Hawaiians describe a new lawsuit targeting the admissions process as a clear attempt to disregard the desires of a royal figure who left her fortune to secure a brighter future for her people nearly 140 years ago.

The Legacy of the Hawaiian Princess

The Kamehameha schools were established through the testament of the royal descendant, the heir of Kamehameha I and the final heir in the dynasty. At the time of her death in 1884, the her property included approximately 9% of the archipelago's overall land.

Her bequest founded the educational system utilizing those lands and property to fund them. Today, the system comprises three campuses for primary and secondary schooling and 30 kindergarten programs that prioritize learning centered on native culture. The schools instruct around 5,400 pupils throughout all educational levels and maintain an financial reserve of approximately $15 bn, a amount greater than all but about 10 of the country’s premier colleges. The institutions accept zero funding from the federal government.

Selective Enrollment and Economic Assistance

Entrance is extremely selective at each stage, with merely around a fifth of applicants securing a place at the upper school. These centers additionally subsidize roughly 92% of the cost of schooling their pupils, with virtually 80% of the enrolled students furthermore getting various forms of monetary support based on need.

Background History and Cultural Importance

Jon Osorio, the dean of the Hawaiian studies program at the the state university, explained the learning centers were established at a time when the indigenous community was still on the decline. In the late 1880s, about 50,000 Native Hawaiians were believed to dwell on the Hawaiian chain, down from a peak of from 300,000 to half a million individuals at the time of contact with foreign explorers.

The Hawaiian monarchy was genuinely in a unstable kind of place, particularly because the United States was becoming ever more determined in securing a enduring installation at the naval base.

The dean said throughout the 20th century, “almost everything Hawaiian was being sidelined or even eradicated, or very actively suppressed”.

“In that period of time, the learning centers was genuinely the only thing that we had,” Osorio, a graduate of the institutions, commented. “The institution that we had, that was exclusively for our people, and had the potential at least of keeping us abreast of the general public.”

The Court Case

Now, almost all of those admitted at the institutions have indigenous heritage. But the new suit, submitted in the courts in the capital, claims that is unfair.

The legal action was initiated by a group known as SFFA, a neoconservative non-profit located in the state that has for decades conducted a legal battle against affirmative action and ethnicity-focused enrollment. The organization took legal action against the Ivy League university in 2014 and eventually secured a historic high court decision in 2023 that saw the right-leaning majority terminate race-conscious admissions in post-secondary institutions throughout the country.

A digital portal established in the previous month as a preliminary step to the Kamehameha schools suit notes that while it is a “excellent educational network”, the institutions' “enrollment criteria clearly favors students with Hawaiian descent instead of those without Hawaiian roots”.

“Actually, that favoritism is so strong that it is essentially not possible for a applicant of other ethnicity to be admitted to the schools,” the group says. “Our position is that priority on lineage, as opposed to merit or need, is unjust and illegal, and we are committed to stopping the schools' illegal enrollment practices in court.”

Legal Campaigns

The initiative is spearheaded by a legal strategist, who has directed groups that have submitted more than a dozen lawsuits contesting the consideration of ethnicity in schooling, commerce and across cultural bodies.

Blum offered no response to media requests. He told a different publication that while the organization endorsed the Kamehameha schools’ mission, their programs should be open to all Hawaiians, “not exclusively those with a specific genetic background”.

Educational Implications

Eujin Park, a scholar at the education department at Stanford, explained the legal action targeting the Kamehameha schools was a remarkable example of how the struggle to reverse civil rights-era legislation and guidelines to foster equitable chances in schools had shifted from the arena of post-secondary learning to elementary and high schools.

Park stated right-leaning organizations had challenged the Ivy League school “very specifically” a in the past.

I think the challenge aims at the learning centers because they are a very uniquely situated school… much like the manner they chose the university quite deliberately.

The academic stated although race-conscious policies had its detractors as a relatively narrow tool to broaden learning access and entry, “it was an important instrument in the repertoire”.

“It functioned as a component of this broader spectrum of regulations accessible to educational institutions to expand access and to create a more just learning environment,” the expert said. “Eliminating that instrument, it’s {incredibly harmful