Missionaries in Hawaii: Literacy, Suppression, and Legacy

The first American Protestant missionaries arrived in Hawaii in 1820. Their influence on the islands was far-reaching, complicated, and still contested. They helped create a written form of the Hawaiian language and built schools that produced one of the highest literacy rates in the Pacific. They also discouraged and in some cases actively suppressed cultural practices central to Hawaiian life, including hula and the Hawaiian language itself, and the families they founded went on to accumulate economic and political power connected to the eventual overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy. It is a mixed legacy that still shapes the islands. Understanding it requires looking at all of it honestly.

Arrival in 1820: the moment and its context

The first missionary company of fourteen (not twelve as sometimes reported), organized by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions (ABCFM) based in Boston, arrived in Hawaii on April 4, 1820 (some sources cite March 30 landing date), after a 164-day voyage from Boston Harbor aboard the brig Thaddeus. The group included two ordained Congregationalist ministers (Hiram Bingham and Asa Thurston), a physician (Thomas Holman), a farmer (Daniel Chamberlain), a printer (Elisha Loomis), a teacher (Samuel Whitney), and a business agent (Samuel Ruggles), along with their wives, and four Native Hawaiians returning home after studying at the Foreign Mission School in Cornwall, Connecticut (Thomas Hopu, William Kanui, John Honolii, and Prince George Humehume, son of Kauaʻi's King Kaumualiʻi).

They arrived at Kawaihae Bay on the Big Island's Kona coast and received permission from Liholiho (Kamehameha II) to land and establish a mission, though permission was initially granted for only one year on a trial basis. They arrived at an extraordinary moment of social upheaval. Just six months earlier, in October-November 1819, the kapu system that had governed Hawaiian religious and social life for centuries had been formally abolished by the regent Kaʻahumanu (Kamehameha I's favorite wife and most politically powerful widow) and the young king Liholiho (Kamehameha II). The heiau (stone temple platforms) were being destroyed, wooden god images (kiʻi) were being burned, and the traditional priesthood (kahuna class) was being dismantled from the top down. The missionaries encountered a society actively seeking new frameworks to replace what had just been abandoned, which gave them a cultural and political opening that might not otherwise have existed.

They were not immediately welcomed universally. The first year saw significant resistance from some chiefs and from foreign traders and ship captains who viewed the missionaries as threats to the existing social arrangements that benefited them (particularly the sandalwood trade and access to port facilities). But several high-ranking aliʻi, including Kaʻahumanu herself (who converted in 1825) and Keōpūolani (Liholiho's mother, who converted in 1823 shortly before her death), eventually became Protestant Christians, and this gave missionary influence substantial political legitimacy and protection. Additional companies of missionaries arrived roughly every two years through the 1830s and 1840s, expanding the mission network to all the main islands: seven companies total arrived between 1820 and 1848, bringing approximately 180 missionaries and family members to Hawaii.

Creating a written language

The Hawaiian language had no written form when the missionaries arrived. Working closely with Hawaiian ali'i and scholars, particularly high chief Kalanimoku and others, the missionaries developed a phonetic alphabet for Hawaiian in 1826. The alphabet they produced was remarkably compact: five vowels (a, e, i, o, u) and seven consonants (h, k, l, m, n, p, w), plus the glottal stop (') and the macron (kahako) to mark long vowels. These last two diacritical marks were not consistently applied in early printing and were largely absent from official usage until the Hawaiian language revitalization movement restored them in the late 20th century.

The alphabet they created was phonologically accurate and well-suited to Hawaiian. Within a decade, Hawaiians were printing their own newspapers, composing their own political tracts, and writing down oral traditions that might otherwise have been lost. The newspaper Ka Hae Hawaii, founded in 1856, was the first Hawaiian-language newspaper; by the end of the 19th century, more than 100 Hawaiian-language newspapers had been published. Many of these papers carried the chants, genealogies, histories, and traditional knowledge of Hawaiian cultural practitioners, and they now form a primary archive for scholars and cultural revitalization efforts.

Literacy and schools

The missionaries established schools throughout the islands and, working with Hawaiian aliʻi who saw literacy as a source of political and administrative power, developed a system of common schools that spread with remarkable speed. By the 1831-1832 school year, missionary records report approximately 52,000 students enrolled in mission schools across the islands, out of a total Hawaiian population estimated at 130,000-150,000 at the time. By the 1840s, Hawaii had achieved literacy rates estimated at 75-90% of the adult population, among the highest in the world at that time, with the vast majority able to read and write in Hawaiian. This was a genuinely remarkable achievement by any measure, accomplished within a single generation.

The Lahainaluna Seminary on Maui, founded in 1831, was the first school of higher learning established west of the Rocky Mountains (preceding any college in California or the Pacific Northwest). It trained Hawaiian men as teachers, translators, ministers, and scholars. The seminary's students and graduates included David Malo (c. 1795-1853), one of the most important Hawaiian historians, whose book Moʻolelo Hawaiʻi (Hawaiian Antiquities), written in Hawaiian in the late 1830s and published in 1838, remains a foundational primary source text of traditional Hawaiian culture and history written by a Native Hawaiian observer. The schools the missionaries built, and the literacy they enabled, were instrumental in producing the Hawaiian intellectual and literary tradition of the 19th century that preserved knowledge that might otherwise have been lost orally.

Suppression of cultural practices

The missionaries viewed Hawaiian cultural practices through the lens of 19th-century New England Congregationalism, which found much of what it saw sinful, backward, or incompatible with Christian civilization. Their objections were wide-ranging: traditional clothing, surfing, traditional medicine, hula, the kahuna system of priests and healers, and the complex sexual and social freedoms of traditional Hawaiian society.

Their influence on the ali'i led to legislation restricting or criminalizing several of these practices. The consequences were real: traditional knowledge systems were disrupted, practitioners were marginalized, and the cultural confidence of a society that had previously operated on its own terms was undermined. The most lasting effects were on language and on hula.

Hawaiian language suppression

Hawaiian language suppression operated on multiple levels across more than a century. In the early missionary period, the priority was translation: producing Hawaiian-language materials for conversion and literacy. This phase actually strengthened the written language. The suppressive phase came later.

In 1896, five years after the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy by a group that included sons and grandsons of missionaries, the Provisional Government and then the Republic of Hawaii passed legislation making English the mandatory language of instruction in all schools. Hawaiian was banned from school classrooms. Children were punished for speaking Hawaiian at school. This policy continued after annexation in 1898 and persisted through most of the 20th century.

The effects were generational. By the 1970s, the Hawaiian language was functionally extinct as a community language. The estimated number of native speakers had fallen below 2,000, concentrated mainly among older adults on the island of Ni'ihau. The language had gone from being the medium of an entire civilization to being on the verge of extinction within three generations.

The Hawaiian language revitalization movement, which began with the founding of the first Punana Leo Hawaiian-medium preschool in 1984, reversed this trajectory. Today, approximately 18,000 people speak Hawaiian with varying degrees of fluency, and several thousand children are being educated in Hawaiian-medium schools. The language is now an official language of the State of Hawaii alongside English. See the Hawaiian language guide for the full context.

The suppression of hula

Hula was more than entertainment. It was the primary vehicle for preserving and transmitting the chants, genealogies, histories, and philosophical knowledge of Hawaiian culture. Every hula performance encoded information in movement, chant, and gesture that could carry complex meaning across generations without writing. The missionaries saw hula as lascivious, idolatrous, and incompatible with Christian morality.

Through their influence on the ali'i, missionaries succeeded in suppressing public hula performances in the 1830s. The ban was not total and not universally enforced, but public hula became culturally marginal and legally precarious for decades. Practitioners continued in private, at the cost of significant personal and social pressure.

The reversal came with King Kalakaua, who reigned from 1874 to 1891 and became known as the Merrie Monarch for his deliberate revival of Hawaiian culture. Kalakaua publicly performed and promoted hula, sponsoring performances at state events and recording chants that had been transmitted orally for generations. His reign was the first wave of the Hawaiian cultural renaissance. The suppression had not erased hula; it had driven it underground. The tradition survived and returned.

Missionary families and political power

The children and grandchildren of missionary families became among the most powerful economic and political actors in 19th-century Hawaii. They moved from ministry to land ownership, sugar planting, law, and government. Names like Cooke, Castle, Dole, Baldwin, and Alexander recur across the most important businesses and political positions in the Hawaiian Kingdom and its successors.

The sugar economy that developed after midcentury depended on access to land, capital, and political influence that missionary families had accumulated in the preceding decades. The interlocking directorates of "the Big Five" companies that dominated Hawaiian commerce well into the 20th century included multiple firms founded by missionary descendants.

When the Committee of Safety orchestrated the illegal overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani in January 1893, the group included sons and grandsons of missionaries. The U.S. Marines who came ashore from the USS Boston at the request of U.S. Minister John Stevens provided the coercive backdrop. The overthrow was, among other things, the political culmination of the economic rise that missionary families had engineered over the preceding seven decades. For the full account, see the page on the 1893 overthrow.

A complex and contested legacy

The missionary legacy in Hawaii resists simple evaluation. Literacy, the written record of Hawaiian culture, the schools that trained Hawaiian intellectuals: these are genuine achievements with lasting value. Language suppression, the marginalizing of hula and the kahuna tradition, and the political networks that produced the overthrow: these are genuine harms with lasting consequences.

What makes the legacy particularly complex is that the benefits and the harms came from the same source. The printing presses that published the Bible in Hawaiian also published the newspapers where cultural practitioners preserved traditional knowledge. The schools that taught reading and writing to a generation of Hawaiians also taught them to distrust their own culture. The missionaries who helped create a written language were connected, through their children, to the legislation that banned that language from schools.

Hawaiian historians including David Malo, Samuel Kamakau, and more recently Noenoe Silva and Jonathan Osorio have written extensively about this history from a Native Hawaiian perspective that does not minimize either the achievements or the harms. Engaging with their work gives a fuller picture than any account organized primarily around missionary intentions. For a broader understanding of Hawaiian history, see the history hub.