What Does “Hawaiian” Mean? Dr. Keanu Sai on Education, Identity and the History We Inherit

BrotherLee Time Episode #90 | Guest: Dr. Keanu Sai | Format: Explanatory Feature

What does it mean to be Hawaiian?

Depending on who you ask, the answer might begin with ancestry. Blood quantum.

Culture. Where somebody was born. Where they were raised. The family they come from.

For Dr. Keanu Sai, one of the central arguments in his conversation with BrotherLee Time is that even the language we use to answer that question has changed.

And according to Sai, understanding that change requires looking at what generations were taught in school.

This is where the conversation gets uncomfortable. It is also where it gets interesting.

“I Didn’t Know Nothing”

Sai grew up in Hawaiʻi. He attended Kamehameha. He was surrounded by Hawaiian family, Hawaiian practices and older relatives whose lives connected directly into earlier generations.

Still, he says there were major parts of Hawaiian political history he simply did not know.

By the time that history reached his generation, Sai describes himself as “completely wiped clean” of an older understanding of Hawaiʻi. That realization did not come while sitting in a classroom. It came later, as he began researching his genealogy and trying to understand the lives of his ancestors. The more he read, the more he began questioning what he had been taught.

In the BrotherLee Time conversation, Sai argues that this disconnect did not happen by accident. He describes a process he calls denationalization, where an older Hawaiian national identity was gradually replaced through education and Americanization.

He connects that process especially to the school system.

According to Sai’s explanation in the episode, English and American history became dominant in education while knowledge of the Hawaiian Kingdom and the political world that existed before and around 1893 disappeared from everyday instruction. He argues that families adapted to that environment in order to protect their children, including by not passing on the Hawaiian language when speaking it could bring discipline at school.

That has consequences beyond what language somebody speaks. It can change how an entire generation understands where it comes from.

When a Word Changes Meaning

One of the clearest examples Sai gives is the word Hawaiian itself.

Today, the word is commonly connected to Native Hawaiian ancestry. Sai asks listeners to look at how the term functioned during the Hawaiian Kingdom. His explanation is that “Hawaiian” could operate as a nationality, meaning a Hawaiian subject, rather than functioning only as a racial category.

He compares it to words like British or American. Under the framework he describes, a person could be ethnically Scottish, for example, while also being Hawaiian by nationality. He points to Archibald Cleghorn, father of Princess Kaʻiulani, as an example in the conversation. Sai also explains that someone born within the kingdom could acquire Hawaiian citizenship while Native Hawaiians could be distinguished more specifically as Aboriginal Hawaiians.

Whether a listener has heard that distinction before or not, it immediately changes the question.

Instead of asking only: “How Hawaiian are you?”

Another question appears: “What did the word mean to the people who were actually using it at the time?”

That is a different way of reading history.

Sai describes the problem with a sports analogy. Imagine trying to explain a football game using baseball rules. The game will look confusing because the framework is wrong. His argument is that people often look backward at the Hawaiian Kingdom using modern American ideas about race, citizenship and identity. If the people living at that time were working with a different political and national framework, then interpreting their records through a modern framework can distort what they meant.

The point is not that everybody reading this has to immediately accept Sai’s broader legal conclusions. The point is that language has context. And context matters.

What Happens When School Becomes the Memory?

Every generation inherits a story. Most of us do not sit down as children and audit it. We go to school. We learn the names. We memorize the dates. We take the test. Then we grow up carrying a version of history that feels normal because it has always been there.

Kenji Lee speaks directly to that experience in the episode. Born and raised in Hawaiʻi, raising his own children here, Kenji tells viewers that he is willing to question what he learned in school. Not with animosity. Not because the goal is division.

Because being a parent changed the weight of the question. What are we passing down? What beliefs did we inherit? Which ones have we actually examined?

That becomes one of the most useful ways to enter this conversation. You do not have to begin with certainty. You can begin with a question.

“It’s Okay to Not Know”

Dr. Sai says something near the end of the first half of the episode that may be more important than any single historical argument. “It’s okay to not know.” For him, the next part matters.

Now you can begin to understand why you did not know. And from there, you can start asking better questions. Sai says he came onto BrotherLee Time because he sees storytelling as another way people can learn. You should not have to enroll at the University of Hawaiʻi just to hear the conversation. He wanted to share moʻolelo. He wanted somebody watching at home to hear something unfamiliar and say:

“I never know that.”

Then look. Ask. Read. Think.

Sai describes critical thinking simply as asking good questions. That approach feels especially important with a subject this heavy. Hawaiian history can become political very quickly. Identity can become personal even faster.

And when people feel like their family, education or understanding of home is being challenged, conversations can close down before they really begin.

BrotherLee Time is not interested in making that smaller. The better conversation is the harder one. What were people taught? What was left out? What did words mean when they were originally used? What do the records say? What do different scholars argue those records mean?

And after hearing all of it, what questions do you still have? That is where learning starts. Not with pretending we already know everything. With enough humility to admit that maybe we do not.

Watch the Full Conversation

This article covers only one thread inside a much larger episode.

Watch BrotherLee Time Episode #90 with Dr. Keanu Sai for his full explanation of Hawaiian identity, genealogy, Americanization, denationalization, the Hawaiian Kingdom, his legal and historical arguments, and the three-phase mission he discusses with Kenji and Taisei.

Watch the full episode on the BrotherLee Time YouTube channel and listen on podcast platforms including Spotify and Apple Podcasts. BrotherLee Time is also on Patreon.

Come into it curious. Ask good questions.

Leeward born. Globally felt.

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Accuracy Note

This article summarizes and contextualizes arguments Dr. Keanu Sai made during his BrotherLee Time interview. Statements about denationalization, the legal status of the Hawaiian Kingdom, occupation, citizenship, Americanization and related historical or legal questions are attributed to Dr. Sai where they reflect his analysis. BrotherLee Time is presenting the conversation and its ideas, not representing every disputed historical or legal interpretation as independently established fact.