Short answers, pulled from the story.
British explorer James Cook used the spelling Owhyhee when he first made contact with the islands in 1778. This spelling appeared on the first map of the Sandwich Islands engraved in 1781 as a phonetic approximation by 18th-century English speakers. The initial O reflected the Hawaiian copula 0, which predicates unique identity before a proper noun.
The first written Hawaiian alphabet known as ka pīāpā Hawaii appeared in print on the 7th of January 1822. Initially this alphabet included letters like B, D, R, T, and V along with F, G, S, Y, and Z for spelling foreign words. By 1826 developers voted to eliminate redundant letters to achieve a one-symbol-one-phoneme system.
Act 57 passed by the Republic of Hawaii in 1896 accelerated the decline of the Hawaiian language. This law established English as the medium of instruction for all government-recognized schools and led to severe physical punishment for children caught speaking their native tongue. The law effectively banned Hawaiian from public schools for 91 years until 1987.
The first 0Aha Pūnana Leo language nest center opened in 1984 as a privately funded preschool program. This program invited native Hawaiian elders to speak to children in Hawaiian every day to create a model for intergenerational transmission. By 2011 the number of native speakers had risen to 2,000 out of 24,000 total fluent speakers.
Hawaiian is still spoken as the language of daily life on the isolated island of Ni0ihau located off the southwest coast of Kauai. This island uses a local dialect known as the Ni0ihau dialect which is considered the most aberrant and the one most in need of study. The isolation of the island has preserved a unique linguistic heritage that stands in stark contrast to the standardized University Hawaiian taught in schools elsewhere.
Hawaiian immersion schools use a unique metaphorical system called pepeke meaning squid to teach sentence formation. This metaphor features the body of a squid with three essential parts: the po0o or head representing the predicate, the 0awe or tentacles representing the object, and the piko where the head and tentacles meet representing the subject. The Hawaiian medium education system is a combination of charter, public, and private schools with over 80% of graduates from these laboratory schools attending college.