By Maile Kane
I am a longtime reader of Ka Wai Ola and a Native Hawaiian. I am also Deaf, born in the 1950s and raised on Niʻihau. I graduated from the Hawaiʻi School for the Deaf and the Blind. I want to correct the record on an article that misrepresented the history of Deaf people in Hawaiʻi.
The article, “Hawaiian Sign Language” that appeared in the April 2022 issue of Ka Wai Ola, treated Hawaiian Sign Language (HSL), a project developed by Linda Lambrecht, James Woodward, and Barbara Earth, as a continuation of a historic, Indigenous deaf language.
But the premise is inaccurate, and I want to explain why.
There was no common HSL in use before American Sign Language (ASL) arrived in Hawaiʻi. Through the 1950s, Deaf children were forced into oral-only education. Sign language was forbidden, and children were disciplined for signing – not unlike the suppression Native Hawaiians faced around spoken language. I say that deliberately, because it’s part of why it matters so much to get this story right.
Through early 1960s, Hawaiʻi’s Deaf people communicated through homemade signs; not a shared language, but what each household invented on its own. ASL was introduced amidst real confusion; hearing educators cycled through ASL, Signing Exact English, Pidgin Sign, and other systems before ASL took hold.
At no point did we use anything called “Hawaiian Sign Language.” It did not exist because we did not sign ʻōlelo Hawai’i. We signed in English-based systems, or in the makeshift gestures our families invented. It was personal, inventive, and specific to us. It was not a shared language, and it was not passed down as one.
HSL advocates point to Hiram Bingham’s 1821 account of a Deaf Hawaiian man signing as evidence of continuity. But a sign language developed at UH Mānoa in the 2000s based on interviews with local Deaf people of mixed descent is not a continuation of what Bingham described two centuries earlier. HSL is not a revival of a dying Indigenous language.
Dorothy Sueoka Casterline, a member of the Deaf community who co-authored A Dictionary of American Sign Language on Linguistic Principles with William Stokoe, never endorsed HSL as a historic language. Wanda Goeas-Andrew, another community member, told The Guardian in 2016 that what existed before ASL was “just sort of a mixture of everything,” closer to an accent than a language.
When a well-meaning story treats a linguistically fabricated project as an Indigenous Deaf language, it doesn’t just get the history wrong; it also, crowds out the real and ongoing story of Deaf Hawaiians building something authentic today.
I also want to be honest about a broader frustration: some Deaf people often feel disconnected from the wider lāhui. I hope that, in the future, our lāhui will recognize that there are Deaf Kānaka who desire greater connection and recognition with their brothers and sisters.
Finally, I want to share that Kekai Kaʻaumoana Cummings, the first Deaf Hawaiian man to attend UH Mānoa and major in ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi, is developing a true ʻōlelo-based sign language. He learned from us, and we trust him to tell our stories.
