By Kaeo Yuen
As one of the few Native Hawaiians at Harvard College – and a proud graduate of Kamehameha Schools – I’ve watched the Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision ripple across campus. The Supreme Court’s ruling dismantled affirmative action, prohibiting universities from considering race in holistic admissions.
Now that same organization has turned its attention to Kamehameha Schools, arguing that its preference for Native Hawaiian children is unconstitutional. But that claim confuses everything about the time, place, and founding of the schools. Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop endowed an educational trust in her 1883 Will to establish Kamehameha Schools as a reparative act, not a racist one.
When Pauahi wrote her will, Native Hawaiians were dying from disease and, increasingly, the loss of sovereignty. Western reforms – beginning with the 1848 Māhele – dismantled communal land ownership, allowing foreigners to buy property and dispossess Hawaiians, while missionary schools banned the Hawaiian language from classrooms.
As the great-granddaughter of King Kamehameha I, Pauahi devoted nearly her entire estate to her people’s future. She instructed her trustees “to support and educate orphans and others in indigent circumstances, giving the preference to Hawaiians of pure or part aboriginal blood.”
For a people facing cultural and physical extinction, this was an act of survival, not exclusion.
A decade later, the Hawaiian Kingdom was overthrown by American businessmen backed by the U.S. military. Kamehameha Schools, founded in 1887 under Hawaiian Kingdom laws, endures as one of the last institutions created by, and for, Native Hawaiians.
Today, it operates three K–12 campuses and 30 preschools serving over 7,000 students each year. Its programs integrate Hawaiian language, values, and belonging that many Native children cannot find elsewhere. For a people already facing the highest rates of incarceration, suicide, and homelessness in our own land, limiting access to culturally grounded education would only deepen those wounds.
Students for Fair Admissions claims ancestry-based education is “neither fair nor legal” ignoring the fact that the colonization of Hawaiian lands, language, and lives was neither fair nor legal. For a people still healing from centuries of dispossession, Native Hawaiians need this kind of education most of all. We serve our people because history has not. Using the U.S. Constitution as a weapon against Kamehameha Schools is the continuance of colonization.
If these lawsuits succeed, they could open the door to attacks on The Queen’s Health System, Hawaiian Homelands, and the Office of Hawaiian Affairs. What is at stake is not just education, but the survival of every institution built to restore what colonization tried to erase.
And though Students for Fair Admissions may claim to fight for fairness, as an honest student for fair admission, I believe in admission not only into schools, but into opportunity itself.
True fairness ensures that every child, including those from indigent and Indigenous backgrounds, has a place to grow, to dream, and to serve. That is what Pauahi fought for in 1883. It is what we fight for now.
Kaeo Yuen is a 2024 graduate of Kamehameha Schools Kapālama. He is currently a sophomore at Harvard and a teacher assistant at Ke Kula Kaiapuni o Pūʻōhala in Kāneʻohe.
