Nā Hulu Kupuna: To Honor Our Intellectual Ancestors

Because of American colonialism and the attendant displacement of the Hawaiian language, most Hawaiian children grow up not knowing that they come from a long line of intellectuals. They are taught that Hawaiian culture, except for a few of the arts, is a thing of the past. The project that this article describes seeks to begin to remedy that situation by documenting the writers and editors of nineteenth and twentieth century Hawaiian-language newspapers and books. This essay focuses on the creation of bio-bibliographies of the writer Joseph H. Kānepu'u (1824–ca. 1883), and the writer, editor, attorney, and politician Joseph Mokuohai Poepoe (1852–1913).