Maybe Lahainaluna is, or was, a Federal Indian Boarding School, but how can it be that both Kamehameha and Lahainaluna are in this category of schools? One is for Hawaiians, the other is not. One is a private school that took Federal funding, the other is a normal, state-funded (not federally funded) public school.

The report from the Department of Interior discusses Kamehameha in some detail, mainly a recounting of the history of its founding, which, as I noted in my previous post:
In 1888, the Kamehameha School for Boys incorporated a military training program, which the War Department recognized as a military school in 1910. Between 1916 and 2002, under the National Defense Act, Kamehameha Schools participated in the Reserve Officers Training Corp and Junior Reserve Officers Training Corp programs.
As I commented in that post, skimming over the years between 1888 and 1916 without mentioning the overthrow or annexation elides these pivotal events which must affect Kamehameha’s ostensible status as an Indian Boarding School. This also continues the narrative that Hawaiians are somehow Indians. There is no comparable description of Lahainaluna, and we are therefore left to speculate what precisely made Lahainaluna qualify as a genocidal institution.
When I was at Lahainaluna, there is no doubt that the work was tough – but this was supposed to be the merit of the place. Still, when (as I have it from a good source) the department of labor came in and checked for child labor violations, it was not so far off the mark. Harassment was a worse problem than overwork in my view, though I was personally fortunate enough to have escaped the worst of it.
We had kids of all races. Many were in fact Hawaiian, but my Senior year roommate was from Canada!
Something about the agricultural nature of Kamehameha and Lahainaluna (as well as the other schools implicated in the list – mostly agricultural reform schools) lent itself to the characterization as Federal Indian Boarding Schools. Actually, Lahainaluna had become over the years something of a de facto reform school. There seemed to be a time when young people took pride in a hard day’s work, but those days were mostly behind us by my time. So parents who couldnʻt handle their kids sent them there as a last resort – sometimes it worked, sometimes not. This was a change from the days when it was somewhat selective to attend the boarding department.
Like Kamehameha, Lahainluna has boarding and day students – so were these schools indoctrinating the day students as well? There may be a case at Kamehameha, but at Lahainaluna the experience of boarding and day students was so completely different that it was as if they attended different schools. It is highly improbable that Lahainaluna was indoctrinating the day students. I tell you flatly: they werenʻt. So how does this compare to Federal Indian Schools that were boarding-only? The boarding was part of the process – to separate the children from their parents was part of the genocidal process. At Lahainaluna, about half of the boarders live on Maui and visited their families on weekends and all breaks – not an effective way to separate them from their problematic, culture-laden parents!
As for deculturization, Lahainaluna was not especially guilty, in my experience. In fact, we had what Iʻve called the “industrial Hawaiian experience,” which was actually a fairly normal experience for a 20th century Hawaiian in terms of farming and learning an abbreviated form of Hawaiian culture. And it was very abbreviated – we learned Hawaiian songs for performing on David Malo Day, but we did not have a course in Hawaiian language at the oldest school in Hawaiʻi, for example. (We had a Hawaiian culture course, but it was an elective, which I did not take).
But perhaps the defending of these institutions by their “victims” is itself the sign that these were truly schools for indoctrination, assimilation and even ethnocide? These issues, raised by the Interior report, if nothing else, show that it is difficult to see whether an institution is genocidal or not – even long after the fact – when you are inside it.