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BROKEN TRUST: Greed, Mismanagement & Political Manipulation at America's Largest Charitable Trust. By Samuel P. King and Randall W. Roth. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press. 2006. xi, 324pp. (Pictures, figures.) US$16.00, paper. ISBN0-8248-3044-X.
King and Roth's lucid and appealing Broken Trust chronicles twentieth-century Hawai'i through the lens of an extraordinary institution, a perpetual trust dedicated to the education of Hawaiian children. Established by the Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop after her death in 1884, the trust initially created two schools later merged as the Kamehameha Schools and administered as the Bishop Estate. Pointing to the richness of traditional Hawaiian understandings of land tenure and person, King and Roth begin by considering the transformation of these understandings after the end of the Kingdom and in the twentieth century, and how they became integral to Hawaiian education. Broken Trust is worth reading alone for its examination of changing understandings of Hawaiian persons and their place in an emerging American state...