Princess Abigail Kinoiki Kekaulike Kawananakoa was known fondly as “Kekau” by her closest friends and family. She married her wife, Veronica Gail, on October 1, 2017.
Veronica Gail Kawananakoa
Veronica is originally from the South, growing up in North Carolina. While she still has a home and family there, her life led her West, and it was in Hawaiʻi that she first met Abigail Kawananakoa. Introduced by a friend, the two of them hit it off immediately.
One of their shared passions was horses. Quarter Horse racing is essentially racing by ranchers and has little of the trappings that go with the racing of thoroughbreds like the Triple Crown races and race courses. You either succeed or you fail; there are no excuses in that group. Abigail and Veronica’s successive homes in the Lakeview area of Southern California became a part of that racing community. Abigail had both racing horses and breeding horses while Veronica focused on breeding.
In Honolulu, Veronica was an invaluable part of every aspect of Princess Abigail’s life, a life focused around their home in Nuʻuanu. It is an understated home that is dominated by the beauty of its surrounding landscape and the ʻauwai that runs through it. It was like stepping back into another time in Hawaiʻi to sit and talk with the two of them with the cool winds of Nuʻuanu, the sound of a running stream and the quiet of the green as a backdrop. They made their home a special place to be and the conversations were often formidable.
Seeing them together in their many public appearances over the years, at charity functions, at government events, and at the many functions related to Princess Abigail’s role keeping alive the royal history of Hawaiʻi, one was always struck by what a striking couple they were. Strong, proud, and independent.
Abigail would tell people that “she is the love of my life” and that was obvious to anyone who saw them together. And in the final months and days of her life, that love was what got them both through that most difficult of times.
He Wahine Holo Lio
Princess Abigail was an accomplished equestrienne and well-respected businesswoman known throughout the quarter horse racing community as “Ms. Abigail.” An owner, trainer and world-class champion breeder, she candidly shared her personal relationship with her elite breeding stock of champion mares and stallions:
“I love these horses more than life itself. I delight in them. They deserve our love. They deserve the best we can give them. We domesticated them. They are the part of our lives that make us better people.”
Sole proprietor of the Lakeview Quarter Horse Farm in Nuevo, California, Princess Abigail became involved in American quarter horse racing in the 1970s and bred her first quarter horse in 1980. In 1989, her first homebred stakes winner, “Royal Trips,” became the first of more than 350 winners bred in Ms. Abigail’s own name.
Amongst Princess Abigail’s great achievements was winning the 1993 All American Futurity with her two-year-old chestnut colt, “A Classic Dash,” who ran the 440-yard race in 21.51 seconds at Ruidoso Downs, New Mexico. Notably, Princess Abigail’s trainer, Connie Hall, became the first woman to win the All American Futurity.
In succeeding years, Princess Abigail was name AQHA Champion Owner in 1994 and 1995 and continued to reign as one of the sport’s top owners and breeders. In 1996, Princess Abigail’s three-year-old gray gelding, “Evening Snow,” broke a 23-year-old world record by running the 440-yard race in 20.94 seconds to win the AQHA West / Southwest Challenge Championship at Turf Paradise in Phoenix, Arizona.
To date, foals bred by Princess Abigail have won $9.89 million on the track, producing four world champions that have won five world championships. In 2012, Princess Abigail was duly honored by the Pacific Coast Quarter Horse Racing Association for her major contributions to the sport and in 2018 she was inducted into the American Quarter Horse Hall of Fame.
As a respected, long-standing member of the American Quarter Horse Association, Princess Abigail in 2021 was honored to have a 400-yard stake race at the Los Alamitos Racecourse named the “$100,000 Abigail Kawananakoa Stakes.”
A steadfast proponent of equine preventative treatment and rehabilitation, Princess Abigail in 2007 granted an endowment of $3 million to Colorado State University (CSU) to create the Abigail K. Kawananakoa University Chair in Equine Musculoskeletal Integrative Therapies.
In May of 2016, Princess Abigail received an honorary doctorate from CSU in recognition of her dedication to global equine health. The following year, Princess Abigail committed $20 million in support of CSU’s C. Wayne McIlwraith Translational Medicine Institute and its pioneering discoveries in equine medicine and orthopedic research.
C. Wayne McIlwraith Translational Medicine Institute at Colorado State University
Early Life & Childhood
Princess Abigail grew up in a storied time, a beloved child in a tight-knit family of Hawaiian royalty, the aliʻi. She was born in 1926 to Princess Lydia Kamakaeha Liliʻuokalani Kawananakoa and William Ellerbrock. At a young age she became the hanai (adopted) child of her maternal grandmother, Princess Abigail W. Campbell Kawananakoa, and from that time on grew up mostly in her grandmother's home at 1438 Pensacola Street. She also spent a great deal of time at her great aunt Muriel Campbell Shingle Amalu's home in Punaluu.
In a Honolulu Magazine interview conducted in 1970, the writer Laurie Hover remembered seeing Princess Abigail as a small child at the Punaluu house. Known then to family and friends as "Kiki", she was described thusly: "A little towhead in faded sailamokus and shirt tied a-midriff, she somersaulted on the lawn with the other small fry."
Amid the royal atmosphere—in which her grandmother was visited and revered by Native Hawaiians bearing tributes of fruits, fish, and lei; and was fanned by attendants holding lauhala fans—Princess Abigail was described as crawling in and out of her grandmother's lap and tucking flowers into the doting matron's hair.
"...There was 'Kiki' hunting ecrevisse, the tasty little fresh water shrimp that inhabit Hawaii's mountain streams…" Hover wrote evocatively. "'Kiki' sliding recklessly down cane flumes… 'Kiki' throwing ripe guavas that generally found their mark."
It was here in the Punaluu house that Princess Abigail created her fondest memories.
"We would get up early and ride horseback to the mountains to pick rice bags full of ginger buds," she later recounted, then "come back, swim the horses, and spend the rest of the day stringing leis on the lanai."
Throughout her young life, Princess Abigail was surrounded by other female relatives such as her grandmother's sisters. She described them as "gracious, charming people" who had "beautiful homes and heirlooms and time for us children."
Under her grandmother's care, Princess Abigail was raised in a singularly unique royal atmosphere in which the old ways were not simply cultural practices but a way of life. Princess Abigail W. Campbell Kawananakoa also frequently received visitors, Hawaiians paying tribute, and foreign dignitaries.
"Every Jan. 1," Princess Abigail said in a 1990 interview in the Honolulu Advertiser, "my grandmother's birthday, groups of Hawaiians would come and serenade her well into the night, and we would invite them in and feed them. It was their way of showing respect to her, and their singing was beautiful.
"I also remember the elaborate preparations for the entertaining my grandmother did. I remember her ordering hundreds of carnation leis, which cost only 25 cents apiece then. Every guest would get a carnation lei, and the honored guests would receive ilima or pikake leis. The dinner table was set just perfectly, with fine linens and many plates and many pieces of silverware, which would be replaced by servants as the meals progressed."
As a teenager, Princess Abigail excelled in athletics and captivated much of local society, whether she was attending the Punahou School in Honolulu, or later living in Shanghai and California:
"Kekau—pretty as any film star—in a cotton summer formal, off to the Punahou Prom… Kekau on her first day in Notre Dame College in Belmont, Calif. (an academy many of her family had attended before her) waiting with curiosity to see who every was excitedly expecting, only to find it was 'the Hawaiian Princess,' the fair-haired newcomer already in their midst… still later a more sophisticated but still sportive Kekau, in the Swiss resort, Villars, plowing up the deep powder snow as she flashed by on skis… Wherever Kekauu was, there was the action!"
At seventeen years old, Princess Abigail returned to Hawaiʻi from Notre Dame College on the last convoy to Hawaiʻi for the rest of the duration of World War II. On April 12, 1945, her grandmother Princess Abigail W. Campbell Kawananakoa passed away. In a nod to the close relationship she had with her grandmother, it was 19-year-old Princess Abigail (referred to at that time as "Kekaulike") who revealed the portrait of Princess Abigail W. Campbell Kawananakoa to hang in Iolani Palace.
Princess Abigail attended Dominican College in San Rafael, California, for two years and then the University of Hawaiʻi. From 1945 to 1947, she worked in the Hawaiʻi State Legislature. Her true passion began to emerge around this time in the realm of ranching and breeding superior grades of livestock. Most of her efforts were focused at one of her homes in Kahuku, breeding and training horses, and she acquired a herd of cattle.
"Horses were one thing that was all mine," close friend Robbie Alm remembers her saying to him on several occasions. "It's one thing that I don't owe any of the success to anyone but me."
Throughout her childhood and early adulthood, Princess Abigail enjoyed the companionship of many, diverse friends, including the aliʻi of other Polynesian islands and one of the royal cousins she grew up tumbling around the Punaluu house with, Alicia Shingle King. She described her closest friend as being Helen "Sunbeam" Beamer, whose family she'd known since early days, and also counted Gladys Brandt, whose mother served as a kind of lady in waiting for Princess Abigail's grandmother, among her closest confidantes.
Other close and trusted friends emerged later in life, especially out of Princess Abigail's work as a board director of the Friends of ʻIolani Palace, which she dutifully took on after her mother, who had been appointed as board President by Hawaiʻi Governor John Burns, passed away in 1969. (Princess Abigail would later become President in 1971.) Those friends included Betty Lou Stroup and Ivanelle Choy, also directors of The Friends of ʻIolani Palace, and a close aide, Maggie Parker.
In 1979, after her aunt Muriel's passing and several changes in ownership, Princess Abigail purchased and renovated the house at Punaluu.
"It hurt me to see the Punaluu place deteriorate after Muriel's death," she said. "I felt that if I could bring it back to its original grandeur, a little of those magical days of my youth would return."
"I'm glad I have Punaluu," she would remember fondly. "When I go there and close its gates, for a small moment in time I drift back to the beautiful summer days (of my youth) and to a most beautiful and kind lady, Auntie Muriel."