Hawaiian Issues
By: Jonathan Kay Kamakawiwo'ole Osorio
Credit to UHMC Hawaiian Studies Department
for providing material from which
this blog post is copied from
In her 1989 book From a Native Daughter,
Haunani-Kay Trask said that the modern Hawaiian movement began when some fifty families living in Kalama Valley protested the eviction notices served by the Bishop Estate in 1967. Their resistance to a new suburban development, and the lossf one more productive working community, has grown over forty years later into a large part of the way that Hawai'i defines itself to the world.
It is difficult to identify any aspect of life in Hawai'i that does not reflect some part of the Hawaiian movement today: the resurgence of Hawaiian language has produced an outpouring of cultural productivity, from political demonstrations to State-supported Hawaiian language immersion schools. Consider contemporary fashions - even if they are mostly t-shirts - that articulate Hawaiian words that would have been unintelligible to the greater public a few decades ago. The word aloha will no longer suffice to represent an island identity. The history of the American takeover in Hawai'i, once a story repressed in Hawaiian families and ignored in public institutions, has spawned dozens of books, plays, video documentaries, lawsuits, music, and lately, slam poetry that have all brought this history into sharp relief in the public mind.
The physical landscape in Hawai'i has quite definitely been affected. Windward valleys on O'ahu are still agricultural communities because of the leadership of young Hawaiian activists in the early 70's and there are areas in urban Honolulu where taro grows again, and students of the 'aina learn again how to protect water and land resources using technologies and values that we learn from a curriculum that is many centuries old. In fact, certain words and phrases like ahupua'a and malama 'aina have crept into the popular lexicon, and may already be indispensable to anyone or any business that is practicing some sustainable activity.
And cultural heroes - outside of a few exceptions in the sports world - are Kanaka Maoli activists, cultural practitioners and musicians who were also activists, or people who have identified themselves with Hawaiian causes.
I doubt that more than a few hundred people could name the boards of directors of any of the largest corporations in Hawai'i, while tens of thousands of people know Nainoa Thompson, George Helm & Kimo Mitchell, and Israel Kamakawiwo'ole.
But by and large, the Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement has been forwarded by thousands of people, faceless and unnamed, who have protested freeway and hotel construction over sacred heiau, grieved over the desecrated graves of ancestors, ended in military abuse of Kaho'olawe, demonstrated for prison reform and lobbied for health and education reform, proved that a Hawaiian diet prolongs life, translated nineteenth century Hawaiian language newspapers, and joined the rolls of Ka Lahui Hawai'i.
None of this was predictable forty years ago, when it seemed that the story of modern Hawai'i was principally the story of the rise of Asian wage laborers and their descendants, and how they wrested fairer conditions, better lives, and opportunities from a society dominated by the plantation. Oddly enough, the values and principles that moved the labor unions and the democratic party to destroy the old haole race preferences in Hawai'i seem to have evaporated, as the democrats and the tourism-driven economy have brought fantastical new riches to the Islands, and given unions and big landowners something new to protect. When one turns to listen for the sounds of protests, or looks for idealists who dream of a fairer and compassionate society, less destructive of nature, one sees Hawaiians.
This is something not lost on the old guard haole and malihini predisposed to think of rights and money as being indistinguishable from one another. For more than fifteen years a fairly small group of neoconservative activists have attempted to scuttle the Hawaiian movement, challenging government agencies that lay claim to revenues and land for Native Hawaiians, challenging the Hawaiian preference policy of a private school established by the will of a Hawaiian chiefess under Kingdom Law, and insulting Hawaiian attempts to research and write their histories, reassert older spiritual values, and claim the right to live on as a people. That these objectors are unable to cultivate the same aloha for themselves as an almost homeless Hawaiian musician can with one recorded song is mostly a testimony to the stinginess of their agenda and the poverty of their beliefs. But it is also a testimony that some sense of pono, of justice, still resonates in the multi-ethnic and widely diverse society that Hawai'i has been for more than 160 years.
No one is really fooled that the conservative agenda is about civil rights, equal opportunity, or respect for property. Partly because of the Hawaiian movement, the public is much more aware of the extent to which the United States has ignored its own laws, and certainly the laws of a sovereign nation, to territorialize Hawai'i and take possession of nearly half of its property. People with long roots in the islands, and especially those who still remember life under the plantations, know very well that every political and economic reform was conceded grudgingly, and after more than fifty years of democratic reform, lo and behold, the plantation companies have held fast to the land and to economic power.
Though Hawaiian protest has resulted in protecting access to more public space, especially the shorelines, and has limited the ability of landowners to maximize their own profit at the expense of other landowners and the general public, these are precarious achievements. So too is the amazing revival of the Hawaiian language, which has important lessons to offer all residents of Hawai'i, so many of whom have lived through a time when their own cultures and languages were repressed, and when they were cast as inferiors, aliens, and even enemies. The Hawaiian culture revival dignifies everyone except those who believe that there should really only be one cultural, and demonstrates that identity us at least as important as economic opportunity. It is that lingering sense of justice denied, however, that makes Hawai'i's political and civil society a better place than it would be if the Hawaiian movement is silenced. Should that day come, the ideals of the neocon malihini and old guard landowners will dominate, and the signs of an island paradise for sale will be planted everywhere.
Maybe the most important achievement has been the way that Hawaiian rights - really multiple rights - in education, political standing, restoration of land, environmental protection, and religious freedom have all been asserted peacefully, consistently, and successfully for forty years. This should provide hope and confidence for all peoples that pursuit of dignity and cultural survival is not only possible, but perhaps the only really meaningful human endeavor left in a world that pursues consumer goods and security so mindlessly. Some people may say that Hawai'i will be a better place when Hawaiians no longer stand in the way of progress. But even these people must know that at one point, this will no longer be Hawai'i.
The Sovereignty Movement's political vulnerability has always been the issue of ancestry. Even the 1960s struggle over evictions in Kalama Valley was racially politicized when Bishop Trustee Richard Lyman attempted to portray the movement as led by haole, leading to a splintering of the Kokua Kalama Movement between Kanaka Maoli and the non-Hawaiian supporters of the valley's tenant pig farmers. When Ka Lahui was formed in 1987, its constitution required voting citizens to have Hawaiian ancestry, and even required that half its legislature be elected by citizens with 50% blood quantum. Challenges that the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, the Department of Hawaiian Homelands, and Kamehameha Schools violate American civil rights laws may not be convincing to courts or to the general population, but residents of Hawai'i who are not Kanaka Maoli by descent do express uneasiness about where this movement is going, and whether they might, in time, face some kind of dispossession.
Recently, though, the movement has transformed from a purely native advocacy to a larger nationalist struggle to restore the nation-state that was invaded and occupied by American military forces in 1893. That nation, the Hawaiian Kingdom, was a multi-ethnic constitutional monarchy that treated with dozens of nations and whose laws, at least until 1887, acknowledged that citizenship and civil rights were not related in any way to race. Restoration of the Hawaiian Kingdom has garnered more and more support over the past decade because it acknowledges the rights of nations under international law, and because it does not lead to the destruction of relationships among friends and families because of race.
Restoration, of course, would re-create a nation quite independent from the United States. Perhaps not ironically then, the American government's responses to the sovereignty movement have been to insist that race is at the core of the political solution between Hawaiians and the United States. The 1920 Hawaiian Homes Act clarified that the United States owed some support to Native Hawaiians, and defined such natives by a blood quantum rule that articulates racist assumptions about human beings. In 1978, the new State Constitution set up the Office of Hawaiian Affairs to seek the betterment of native Hawaiians, and in 1993 the U.S. government apologized to the nation it had victimized a century before, but confined its apology to people of Hawaiian ancestry. Finally, since 1994, the congressional delegation from Hawai'i has tried to pass the Native Hawaiian Reorganization Act, which would allow natives to form their own government without addressing the non-Hawaiian Kingdom's subjects whose national identity was usurped as well. It is ironic that that the only successful challenger to Hawaiian "entitlements" was a rancher named Freddy Rice. During his U.S. Supreme Court challenge to the voting procedures for the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, he made a public announcement that his ancestor was Hawaiian Kingdom subject, and that he had the same right as any native to vote for an OHA trustee.
National identity and ancestry have been easily confused by a public generally ignorant about the standing of the nineteenth century Hawaiian Kingdom. Not many people in Hawai'i know that dating back to 1841, the nation had biennial elections conducted by a literate and well informed electorate made up of native and non-native citizens, and that the voting franchise was offered with a liberality almost unknown in any other country of the world.
Rancher Freddy Rice probably knows that his ancestors' rights were protected, as were the rights of every other subject - native, Chinese, and African - under the laws of the Kingdom. In addition to the violence and humiliations that were done to the Hawaiian people since 1893, there have been the violations of the law.
To ignore how law has been distorted to accommodate the American takeover may be easier for people who believe that everyone is much better off under American rule than we would be as citizens of a small island state thousands of miles from the major industrial centers that feed the global economy. And that brings one back to the central argument of this essay - that the Sovereignty Movement forces us to consider what it is we want this society to be.
At some point, it may be necessary for people to accept that independence from the U.S. is a logical and necessary step toward protecting the amazing society that matured in these islands, and which is now threatened by runway land prices and an almost total dependence on the global market system for its survival. This assertion would have been considered an absurdity less than two decades ago, and its growing traction in the movement is not simply a result of a better understanding of the history of the takeover. In fact, it may have more to do with a blossoming disaffection with global modernity and the international consumerism that drives it.
The problems, not just for native people but for communities in the Pacific, are not simply related to climate change or environmental degradation. The overarching problem is that Pacific Islanders are less and less in control of our own destiny as we become more integrated into the global economy. That this is true for everyone, including the ordinary citizens of large industrial nations, does not make it any more palatable for islanders. Careful conservation, sharing resources, cooperation and consensus, honoring ancestors, protocols that demonstrate respect for one another, and a definition of wealth that is indicated by family relations, healthy lifestyles, and community connections along with monetary security - these are all Pacific Islanders cultural hallmarks that have been assaulted by a Euro-American ethos of individual achievement and profit, and a reliance on the marketplace not just for trade, but as the foundation of its values.
The near collapse of the largest bank in America, and the economic crises that emerged from the mortgage-backed securities failure in 2008, have not led Americans or some Hawai'i residents to question the reliability of an unchecked capitalist society. In fact, Hawai'i's sudden vulnerability has not spurred a call for a diversified economy and more careful management of our resources, but a kind of panic in the governor's office and the legislature that created furlough Fridays in the public schools, a level of unemployment that was unimaginable three years ago, and a public that seems convinced that returning to the high point of seven million tourists a year is the only thing that can save the economy. In February 2010, the House finance committee actually considered a bill that would set a minimum price of three quarters of a billion dollars for the sale of several properties controlled by the State. These specific properties are part of the Ceded Lands - Hawaiian Kingdom and Crown Lands - whose ownership has been contested politically and in court by the Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement, and the sale of which this very same legislature had agreed to impede in legislation a mere two months before.
Some of these lands are contested, most notably Mauna Kea, which houses thirteen large, multi-million dollar telescopes built on lands that the state leases out for one dollar per year. Hawaiian cultural practitioners have protested the presence of these telescopes for years as a desecration of sacred and environmentally sensitive areas of the mountain. The state seems to believe that it is easier to sell these lands off to meet this year's budget deficit through one big yard sale, than to do the hard work of really managing these lands - which would mean working with native cultural practitioners, astronomy practitioners and the academic community to create a working relationship that could provide reasonable revenues, protection of the land, and a protocol that respect native religious and cultural beliefs.
No one would argue that this is not a difficult and demanding task. But consider this: in the ancient days, that is precisely what konohiki - the chiefly land managers in the Hawaiian ahupua'a - did. They managed human and natural resources by knowing everything about the land division over which they were responsible. Some of today's lawmakers may be able to read a spreadsheet, but they have practically no understanding of how to make the land really productive again.
Kanaka Maoli still know how to make the land a treasure and how to give people a chance to work productively. In taro gardens and fish ponds, young people from charter schools and expensive private schools are taught how to maintain an 'auwai, plant and harvest taro, inventory and utilize the resources of a shoreline, build and navigate a canoe using traditional methods, and harvest fibers that casn be used for cords to thatch a house or create an intricate work of art. Perhaps we could call it basket weaving with a vengeance - young people returning to a kind of personal and purposeful creativity which may just save us all. But for that to happen, a form of subsistence and land management will need to be protected by the most powerful government agencies from real estate speculation, zoning that requires urbanization, large-scale agribusinesses that create their own protective infrastructures, the transfer of water from an agricultural watershed, and ultimately, from a market system that would require a profit. What we need is a pu'uhonua from the market system, and it needs to be large enough and capitalized enough to give people the opportunity to live a life directly nourished by the land.
This is what the pig farmers in Kalama Valley were trying to do in 1974, and in the end, it is what the Sovereignty Movement is really about. We have seen what determined guerrilla mahi'ai can do to resurrect taro in urban places like Kanewai and Anuenue, and to rebuild fish ponds along the Moloka'i shores, where the only government assistance required was that it not prosecute mahi'ai for growing taro on public lands. Imagine homelessness addressed by a vigorous back-to-the-land-movement, with training and housing and employment all located in ahupua'a that were naturally designed for growing taro and harvesting fish.
The Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement has also been about challenging our assumptions regarding the ways we live with one another by continually asserting a culture of sharing and inter-dependency with all of the life around us. This is why we must end military occupation of Hawai'i, not just because military use poisons our lands and waters, but also because the mission of the armed forces so fundamentally opposes our values of inclusion and aloha 'aina. It defends a very particular definition of a people, and we Kanaka Maoli are focused on a much larger society than the American nation. Indeed, we have nurtured and will continue to uphold a community that is larger than humanity itself.
It would be fitting that a movement begun by tenant farmers, idealistic twenty-year-olds, and Kanaka Maoli elders, all drawn to remember and recount the knowledge of their ancestors, might actually be the key to saving us all.
Although I did not ask for any permission to share this essay, I had received it at one event at UHMC and was compelled to share with you, the common+unity that we all have in our journeys. Let's be reminded that if it wasn't for those before us who have done something right, we wouldn't have the pleasure of being here today.
What happened to our ancestors, forced them to survive by any means necessary. Now that our lineages have survived this far, what are we going to do with their hard work? Are we going to ignore their signature in the Ku'e Petition, ignore their loyalty to what truly belongs? Are we going to go against the common voice of our ancestors?
