It was in 1996 that my family and I wandered through lava-strewn back roads near the Kona harbor on the big island of Hawai’i, trying to find Mahealani Pai. One of the many homeless families we encountered directed us to the Pai family land. Past the porta-potties and the heiau (traditional Hawaiian temple) were some tents, a couple of pole houses on a jetty between fish traps, and a group of 20 or so people being addressed by a man with a flip chart. An environmental justice workshop from the University of Hawai’i was underway. A tall, husky man, a former national surfing champion wearing a long ponytail, t-shirt, and sweat pants, walked toward us, extending a hand: Mahealani Pai.
Every day, Mahealani Pai wades out into the waves and makes his offerings, then turns toward the heiau. He is the caretaker of the heiau at Honokohau near Kona. The Pai family has cared for the heiau and the Wai ’Opio, traditional fish traps, which adjoin the temple, for 14 generations.
The livelihood of traditional Hawaiians is based on a complicated and intricate set of relations in a powerful environment of land and sea. The Pai family’s traditional fish trap, an ancient method of trapping fish behind a submerged rock wall, leaves the fish secure at low tide. The wave motion always shifts the rocks back to the ocean floor, so such traps must be maintained every day. That responsibility and that wall have existed since 900 BC, according to the Pai family.1
“We know this is where tutu, them came from, where they lived, and where they are buried,” says Mahealani Pai of his family’s five acres of land. “We don’t own it, but we know that we belong to it.”2 “We don’t own the land,” echoes his mother, Mabel Pai, “but we take care of it. It’s like when the kings of Hawai’i give you land to take care of. We believe God owns the land, not people.”3 The Pai family never owned the fee simple (white man’s private property title) to their land. But the title-owner, the Greenwell family, maintained a cooperative understanding with the Pais, along with a dozen other families. “All they asked us was to keep up the place. They understood how special this was to our family, and they knew who the old folks were,” says Mahealani.
If only things could stay simple. In the mid-1990s, a development company called Nansay Hawai’i bought the white man’s paper title to 450 acres next to the Pai land. They proposed to construct a “destination resort development” with 330 multiple-family residential units, 380 single-family homes, a golf course, and a health club.4
This proposed development posed an immediate threat to the Pai family’s fish traps, ceremonial worship, and iwi (bones), one that would totally inundate a fragile ecosystem and lifestyle with boats, docks, and tourists. The right of Native Hawaiians to practice traditional activities on privately owned land had often been accommodated in the law, so in 1995, the Pais contested the development in court. The court ruled that the state, and by extension, private property owners, are required to preserve and protect Native Hawaiians’ rights to practice traditional activities. Or in this case, if Hawaiians are gathering shrimp and fish from ponds sitting on a resort’s property, the resort may have to provide them with access and preserve the ponds.
“Nansay’s argument,” declared the court, “places undue reliance upon Western understandings of property law that are not universally applicable in Hawai’i. Hawaiian custom and usage have always been a part of the laws of this state.”5 The court effectively threw a wrench into the development question at Kona. The Nansay project fizzled out.
There is always, it seems, a problem of aboriginal and traditional land title and the white man’s private property. In the tumult of land laws passed in Hawai’i, the end result is always, it seems, the same—the Native people become landless. So it was to be with Mahealani Pai.
In 1988, the Pai family’s agreement with the Greenwell family was put in jeopardy by the National Park Service (NPS) when it “bought” all of the Greenwell parcels for a sweet sum of $17 million.
What the NPS proposed to do was quite strange. The NPS intended to create a park, Kaloko-Honokohau National Historical Park, as “a center for the presentation, interpretation, and perpetuation of Hawaiian activities and culture.”6 But to make this cultural presentation, they would need to throw out all of the Native Hawaiians actually living on the land. A conflict between a living culture and an historic culture, as determined by a federal agency, ensued.
A living culture is manifested through a way of life. An historic culture, in this case, was a tool for the NPS. The NPS magnanimously granted a special use permit to the Pai family, but Mahealani rejected the permit, believing it to indicate an acquiescence to federal rights. Then Pai sued the NPS for aboriginal rights to the land. The case, Pai Ohana v. The United States, was lost in 1994. Then came a string of eviction threats, seven in all.
The final eviction threat was fulfilled on February 14, 1997, when the NPS, hell-bent on its park of historic Hawaiian culture, evicted the Hawaiians. As reporter Michael Lloyd writes, “Shortly before 10:00 a.m., and after a number of supporters left voluntarily,...officials arrested Pai and eight other supporters. ‘I ku mau mau!’ [‘We stand together!’] came the chant from the teary-eyed supporters of the Pai Ohana [family], watching from the southern side of the channel at Honokohau Harbor. ‘I ku mau mau!’ answered Mahealani Pai, standing on the north side, thrusting his shackled hands into the air.”7
There are few places in the world where you can witness the birth of land. Pele, the Volcano Goddess, makes Earth, and the Hawaiians are witness to the creation each day. According to Hawaiian oral history, their islands were born when Papahanaumoku, Mother Earth, mated with Wakea, Father Sky. From this union came the first taro plant, then the first ali ’i nui, and finally the Hawaiian people, or the Kanaka Maoli. From the Earth herself.
Long ago, the first inhabitants of the Hawaiian islands arrived from Tahiti. Over a millennium, the Polynesian people, like their relations spread throughout the Pacific, learned to adapt to island life, the richness of the new land, the wealth of the water, and the limitations necessary for continued generations of survival on fragile and isolated islands.
Hawaiian cultural practice is entirely intertwined with the natural world. Spirits and deities govern each of the elements. The lokahi is a symbol of the “greatest of the traditions, values, and practices of our people,” explains Hawaiian nationalist Mililani Trask. “There are three points in the triangle—the Creator, Akua; the peoples of the earth, Kanaka Maoli; and the land, the ’aina. These three things all have a reciprocal relationship.”8
The Hawaiians transformed the land dramatically. New species of animals and plants were introduced to the island, and a vibrant economy was founded. The Kanaka Maoli combined upland agriculture, mauka, and ocean fishing, makai, and developed fishponds and intensive garden systems, all cared for by the extended family, or Ohana. In the late 16th and early 17th centuries, for instance, they embarked on a tremendous, 50-year development project—they planted a breadfruit forest that spanned the entire big island of Hawai’i. “Because the long-range benefits were obvious to them,” writes historian Marion Kelly, “they persisted and achieved their goal.”9 By the end of the 1700s, the islands supported upwards of a million Kanaka Maoli.10
Change creates chaos.
Meandering and pillaging through the Pacific, Captain James Cook and his crew arrived by chance in Kona in 1778. The waves of foreigners that followed Cook brought foreign epidemics, which devastated the native population.
Typhoid fever came in 1804, followed by influenza epidemics, whooping cough, mumps, leprosy, measles, smallpox, diphtheria, cholera, and, finally, the bubonic plague. By the 1820s, only about 200,000 Hawaiians had survived the onslaught. Seventy years later, only 40,000 Hawaiians remained.11
Unable to make sense of their ongoing plagues, the Hawaiian traditional belief system was shaken. Community leaders interpreted the constant death as a sign of a loss of favor, as a sign that Hawaiians had committed some wrongdoing that had brought down the wrath of their Creator. European missionaries worked to soothe the pain and anguish of the chaos with Christianity. Following the missionaries were the industrialists, including loggers, sandalwood interests, whalers, cattle ranchers, and later sugar and pineapple growers.
Once colonial interests put their handprint on title laws, there is a tendency for intergenerational land tenure and land-ownership patterns to change in bizarre ways. As the colonial interests began to influence the lawmaking of the Hawaiian monarchy, the patterns of land-ownership changed. Foreign advisors to the monarch argued that adopting European concepts and institutions of private land tenure would preserve the land from foreign control. The impact of European diseases on Hawaiians was used as an argument to buttress the change. “Missionaries...argued that Hawaiians were dying as they were lazy and licentious, and therefore the only means that would stem the death of the people was private ownership of land... [it] was the pono [righteous] thing to do.”12
Amidst the chaos and pressure, the monarchy reluctantly agreed to privatize the land. The land commission, headed by an American missionary, allotted the land. Tasked with dividing the land between the government, the ali’i nui (chiefs), and maka ’ainana (common people), the commission proved astonishingly efficient at alienating people from their land. Although there were 88,000 Hawaiians in 1848, only 8,200 received land awards, mostly three-acre lots (a far cry from subsistence holdings), or one percent of the land. Thirty-four ali’i nui received larger portions, but were required to relinquish some 50 percent of their lands. Of so-called government lands, the vast majority became footholds for foreign control, not unlike the American homesteads of the 1880s. Missionaries were given hefty allotments of 560 acres apiece for their work in Christianizing and providing the foundations for multinational industrialists such as Castle, Cooke, Alexander, and Baldwin, the founding fathers of great agricultural fortunes. Since sugarcane producers had to pay duty taxes in order to import Hawaiian sugar to America, they increased their pressure to annex Hawai’i.13
In 1893, with just a fraction of the original population surviving, the haole (whites) overthrew the Hawaiian government. Samuel Dole invaded Hawai’i and plotted a coup that toppled the Native constitutional government of Queen Lili’uokalani. “If we had had a million Hawaiians in 1893,” writes Lilikalá Kame’eleihiwa, “we would still have our country. Haole diseases were, and remain, allies of haole imperialism.”14
In 1898, the United States annexed Hawai’i by congressional resolution, without the consent of or compensation to the Kanaka Maoli. The U.S. government claimed over two million acres of Native lands, and the Kanaka Maoli lost control over most of their territory. As the Hawaiian saying goes, “As we gazed at their heaven, they stole our land from beneath our feet.”
In 1921, the government passed the Hawaiian Homestead Act, which earmarked 200,000 acres of land for Native Hawaiians. (The prime land, now of interest to sugar barons and other newcomers, was excluded from the Act.) No financing for homestead development was provided. In 1946, the United States listed Hawai’i as a non-self-governing territory under its administration, along with American Samoa, Alaska, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Virgin Islands. This status remained in effect until September 1959, when the United States notified the United Nations Secretary General that Hawai’i had become a state of the Union.15
As it turns out, the U.S. did not follow international law in its doling of statehood to Hawai’i. As Mililani Trask notes, “Our peoples were not given independence or Free Association status, nor were we allowed to choose our form of government.”16 In November 1953, the U.N. General Assembly had passed Resolution 742, outlining the terms of removal from the status of non-self-governing territories. These included freedom of choice; ethnic and cultural considerations; and economic, social, and cultural jurisdiction. The U.S. violated these provisions.
In 1959, Hawai’i was admitted as a state of the United States in direct contradiction of international law, which until that year had listed Hawai’i as having a special colonial status of non-self-governing territories. The State Admissions Act made Native Hawaiians “wards” of the newly formed state of Hawai’i. This meant that like children and mentally disabled individuals, the Kanaka Maoli would have no standing in U.S. federal courts. According to sovereignty activist Dr. Kekuni Blaisdell,
Under Article 73 of the UN Charter, the United States was ordered to prepare the Territory of Hawai’i for self-government. Instead, we got two choices: become a state or remain a territory. The people didn’t know they had a right to demand a third choice: for decolonization and independence.17
Whether under federal or state jurisdiction, the two million acres originally earmarked for Native Hawaiians were illegally transferred to private interests.18 Of the 194,000 acres that the Department of Hawaiian Homelands (DHHL) today estimates that it oversees on behalf of the Native Hawaiians, over 45 percent is leased out to farmers, for a mere $4 per acre per year. Fourteen percent is designated as public land, i.e., state parks or forest reserves. The military claims over 200,000 acres.19
As a result, fewer than 6,000 Native Hawaiians ever received land, 22,000 remain on waiting lists for homestead awards, and hundreds of homeless Hawaiians live on beaches throughout the state, under the constant threat of arrest. It is estimated that 30,000 Native Hawaiians have died while still waiting for their land.20
Today, 95 percent of Hawai’i’s land is owned or controlled by just 82 landholders. The federal and state governments claim over 50 percent of the land.21 Rent in Hawai’i’s largest city, Honolulu, is comparable to Manhattan’s. A single family owns the entire island of Ni’ihau. The pineapple interests, such as Del Monte and Dole, until recently controlled much of the island of Lana’i, as well as much of other islands. The U.S. Department of Defense owned the entire island of Kaho’o’lawe until 1990, when then-President George Bush returned it to a public trust.22
As a Hawaiian from the Wai’anae coast said, “We can barely pay house rent, and they like build apartments.... With inflation now, hard to buy tomatoes, carrots.... You cannot eat ’em, those buildings.”23
Today, the life expectancy and rates of infant mortality, homelessness, and incarceration of Native Hawaiians are on par with the dismal conditions found in much of Native America.24 More Native Hawaiians live below the poverty line than any other ethnic group in Hawai’i. Fifty-five percent of the Kanaka Maoli do not complete high school, and only seven percent hold college degrees. Although Kanaka Maoli make up only 19 percent of the state’s population, they comprise 40 percent of the prison population. Dr. Kekuni Blaisdell refers to this as ethnocide and genocide.25
The Militarization of the Pacific
The initial militarization of Hawai’i took place after formal annexation in 1893. Four days later, 1,300 Army troops landed near Diamond Head and became the first military stronghold in the region. This initial encroachment has expanded substantially as U.S. military interests in the Pacific were augmented. After World War II and the subsequent annexing of more Hawaiian land, Hawai’i became a central outpost in what is euphemistically known in military circles as “the American Lake”—the Pacific Ocean.26 The Department of Defense took over many of these lands under martial law the day after Pearl Harbor was bombed in 1941. Today, there are over 100 military installations in Hawai’i staffed by 150,000 military personnel. Their activities comprise the state’s second largest source of income, or a whopping 35 percent of the state’s direct revenues. For most native Hawaiians, the U.S. military is a clear occupying force.
Since the end of World War II, Hawai’i has been the center of the U.S. military’s Pacific Command (PACOM), from which all U.S. forces in the region are directed. It serves as an outpost for Pacific expansionism, along with Guam, the Marshall Islands, Samoa, and the Philippines. The PACOM is the center of U.S. military activities over more than half of the earth, from the west coast of the United States to Africa’s east coast, and from the Arctic to Antarctica, covering 70 percent of the world’s oceans.27
Not surprisingly, the U.S. military until recently controlled some 254,000 acres of land in Hawai’i, or 6.3 percent of the total land, proportionately more than in any other state.28 This includes holdings on Oahu, which encompass 25 percent of the land and include valuable “submerged lands,” i.e., estuaries and bays like Kaneohe Bay.
The vast militarization of Hawai’i has profoundly damaged the land. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, there are more federal hazardous waste sites in Hawai’i—31—than in any other U.S. state. Many of these sites were contaminated by military activities.
The Navy itself acknowledges releasing some 4,843,000 gallons of radioactive liquid waste into Pearl Harbor from its submarines between 1964 and 1973. Similarly, the Navy dumped over 2,000 55-gallon steel drums of solid radioactive waste 55 miles off the Hawaiian shoreline onto the ocean floor.29
As journalist Kathy Ferguson writes,
Among the wastes the military disposes of are pesticides, waste oil, asbestos, chromic acids, PCBs, solvents such as TCE, and solid nuclear wastes.... Given the small, fragile ecosystem of Oahu, [there is a] possibility of these wastes...contaminating the Pearl Harbor aquifer, which is the main source of drinking water for Honolulu.30
The military’s response to these risks is neither exemplary nor even responsible. When it takes action, it is usually the result of prodding by outside groups or mandates by outside agencies. Even then, the military’s protectiveness seems directed toward itself rather than the environment. For example, the military defended the release of freon gas (which is destructive to the ozone layer) from rocket launches off Kauai on the basis that the releases took place in the atmosphere, which is outside the state’s jurisdiction. The Pentagon’s FY ’91 budget for environmental cleanup amounted to less than a third of a percent of its overall budget.31
As well, there are the direct problems associated with military accidents. In 1944, an accidental detonation of conventional ammunition at Pearl Harbor killed and injured more than 500 people. Subsequent accidental bombings of Maui, Ni’ihau, and fishermen off of Kauai in 1965 and 1969 illustrate some of the carelessness of the military in this environment.32 Wai’anae, on the island of Oahu, was accidentally shelled by the army four times between 1987 and 1990. There are approximately 3,000 nuclear weapons stored in Oahu, and unexploded bombs have historically littered many valleys and beaches on the islands.
On the mountain above the beach at Makua, on the island of Oahu, the military had a bombing range. Nevertheless, in January 1983, the state bulldozed Hawaiian homes there to make way for a state park. The Hawaiians who were forced out waded through live ammunition, which had washed up on the beach during the 1982 Hurricane Iwa. Twelve families remained as squatters on their own land. “The state constantly rips off our land,” explains Mililani Trask, “then it turns around and calls us squatters.”33
Hawai’i’s eighth island, Kaho’o’lawe, doesn’t appear on many tourist maps of Hawai’i. One of the only ways to get there is to be thrown off a nearby boat. One pre-dawn morning in 1984, I jumped off a boat into the depths of the waters surrounding Kaho’o’lawe. Unfamiliar with ocean swimming, and a somewhat uneasy swimmer at best, I began to swim furiously to shore, eyes scanning for some light. My ears picked up the laughter of the Hawaiian women frolicking in the water, playing in the surf, and allowing the ocean to take them to shore, kissed by the waves, as it were.
Kaho’o’lawe was named after Kanaloa, god of ocean and foundation of the Earth. Kaho’o’lawe is known as “the carrying away,” for the ocean currents that merge and flow southward from this island, a major departure point to Tahiti. At one time, the island boasted a monastery, an astronomical university, and widespread traditional cultural practice among its people.
On December 8, 1941, one day after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the military declared martial law and took possession of the entire island. In 1965, some 500 tons of TNT were detonated on the island, near Hanakanaia Bay, to simulate the effects an atomic blast would have on nearby ships. The 100-foot-wide crater the explosion left extends below sea level and cracked the water table on part of the island, creating a salt-water pond devoid of life.34 Every two years, Australia, Canada, Japan, and New Zealand practice their military tactics in unison on the island.
Native Hawaiians not only opposed and rejected the militarization of their ’aina, their land, but they began a process of land recovery that rippled far into other islands and indeed into other military-occupied indigenous communities worldwide.
Beginning in 1976, the Native Hawaiian-led group Protect Kaho’o’lawe Ohana (PKO) initiated a series of occupations of the island, leading to lengthy litigation and arrests. A subsequent federal lawsuit sought to force the military to comply with environmental, religious freedom, and historic preservation laws.
It was in 1977 in the increasing mobilization to protect and recover Kaho’o’lawe that George Helm and Kimo Mitchell, two leaders of PKO, mysteriously disappeared at sea while searching for other Native Hawaiians from the island. They are presumed drowned.
The multitude of strategies, press, litigation, prayers, and sacrifices finally resulted in a 1980 consent decree (an out-of-court settlement) between the PKO and the Navy. The decree, a result of the 1976 civil suit in federal court, mandated that the Navy scale back their operations, begin economic restoration, and clear surface ordnance from 10,000 acres of land on the island. The consent decree also allowed the PKO access to the land for four days a month, ten months of the year.
It was under this “access” for Hawaiian ceremonial purposes that I visited the island. PKO’s sophisticated political work, combined with their educational outreach, under which 4,000 people visited the island, helped to transform the island’s destiny. In 1981, the entire island was placed on the National Register of Historic Places, acknowledging 600 archeological sites and 2,000 historic features. Ironically, the island was the only National Historic site also used as a bombing range.
On October 22, 1990, President Bush directed the Navy to end its use of Kaho’o’lawe. Two weeks later, a congressional bill placed a moratorium on the bombing.35
In 1992, a federal study recommended that the island be returned to the Native Hawaiians, that further military or commercial use be barred, and that the federal government pay for the removal of unexploded bombs. According to the study, it would cost between $110 million and $400 million to clear the island of unexploded bombs and restore it.36 Two quit-claim deeds, one written in English and the other in Hawaiian, were signed in 1994, formally returning the land to the state of Hawai’i to hold in trust for the Hawaiian Sovereign Nation. Journalist Christopher Merrill described the scene:
On the hot, overcast afternoon...about 700 people gathered at Palauea Beach on the west coast of Maui for the Conveyance Ceremony. First they stood in silence at the edge of the sea, gazing at Kaho’o’lawe in the distance. They gripped a rope made of sennit, they listened to 100 soundings of the conch and the solemn beat of ceremonial drums. Warriors dressed in Ti leaf cloaks clutching long spears kept watch over a crowd of native people and settlers, tourists and sailors. Waves lapped at the shore, saltwater washed over the feet of the television crews...and Governor John Waihe’e declared this day a reaffirmation to the Hawaiian Nation of our destiny. If this can happen to Kaho’o’lawe, there will be other great ceremonies like it in the future.37
Native Hawaiian activists have a vision for the future of this land. It includes a sacred location and healing place for all Hawaiians and a natural marine and land reserve, where the ecosystem can be restored. This land base creates a precedent for the rest of Hawai’i, which they hope eventually to have under the jurisdiction of a re-established Hawaiian nation.38
Endangered Ecosystems and Voyeuristic Vacations
Tourists outnumber Hawaiians, six to one. That is to say, there are about 1 million residents of Hawai’i, and in 1990, there were six million tourists. Tourists outnumber Native Hawaiians 30 to one. Tourism income represents almost half of the state’s revenue, driving a good deal of the economy—and the ecological destruction. As Shelly Mark, former director of the Hawaiian State Department of Planning and Economic Development, suggests,
Ownership of the land has shifted to corporations off the islands. Rate of return on investment has become the most important thought. There is a conflict between the life of the land and sea, versus the life of the corporate boardroom. Tourism drives up the living and land costs for locals, but provides only low paying, low quality jobs.39
Tourism fuels “development” and subsequent ecological destruction, whether it is modifying shoreline (i.e. Waihe’e State Park) or the industrialism associated with tourist infrastructure. In 1973, for instance, researchers from Save Our Surf, a nonprofit advocacy organization, found that Hawai’i’s three largest industrial companies had dumped hydrocarbons, toxic wastes, and cement into Ke’eni lagoon, covering 32.5 acres of land.40
After the United States, Japan is the main engine behind tourism development in Hawai’i. More and more hotels on the islands are owned by Japanese companies. The Japanese government, in an effort to reduce international friction over its trade surplus, encourages international travel among its citizens. In 1986, the government set a goal of sending 10 million Japanese abroad, and in 1990 they succeeded.41
The majority of the financial benefits of tourism find their way back to the country that invests in tourism, rather than the place that hosts tourists. According to the World Bank, up to 90 percent of each U.S. dollar spent in a host destination will eventually “leak back” to the United States, since U.S.-based international corporations control much of the infrastructure of the tourism industry.42
According to University of Hawai’i Professor Haunani-Kay Trask (Mililani’s older sister and an outspoken nationalist), tourism is the latest wave of colonialism:
This is not America, this is a colony. The sugar and pineapple plantations were the first wave of colonialism. The military and finally tourism are the next waves of colonialism. The purpose of a colony is to take its land, to take its resources, and exploit its people. The transformation of the Hawaiian people and their land into servants of tourism is called commodification. It means turning a cultural attribute or a person into a commodity to make a profit.43
The Hawaiians have been so commodified that they can be replaced. Now, for an “authentic” welcome, airlines hire Filipina women to dress in mumuus and greet tourists as they disembark their planes. But according to Haunani-Kay Trask, tourism is not meant to sell haole culture:
It’s here because we are the native people of this ’aina. It is our culture that tourists come to see. It is our land that tourists come to pollute. That is the secret.... Without Hawaiians, without beautiful Hawaiian women dancing...there would be no tourism.... It deforms our culture, so that Hawaiians think that to dance the Hula is to dance for tourists.... Hawaiians grow up thinking that our culture is a haole interpretation of culture...and if you smile real nice, some haole is going to take you out.44
As ecotourism researcher Deborah McLaren elaborates, tourism
contributes to misperceptions of both hosts and guests. Tourism offers to the consumer both the culture and some of the last intact, pristine environments of Indigenous people as commodities to be purchased. It provides a chance to purchase a non-threatening experience for a limited period, with little chance that consumers will ever have to actually acknowledge the impact of their presence on the host culture, society, and environment.... [It] presents a skewed and magnified version of consumer culture. The fact that a tourist may have a job is never perceived by local youth. Instead, each day, they observe only what tourism presents, leisured consumers with no ties to the community, few responsibilities, discretionary income, and enormous economic power, and vacation lifestyles they would not normally have at home.45
The tremendous tourism development in Hawai’i has profoundly damaged the land. More than a third of the 526 plants and 88 birds on the United States’ threatened and endangered species’ acts are originally from Hawai’i, even though the state’s land mass is just 0.2 percent of the total U.S. land mass. Conservationists call Hawai’i the “endangered species capital” of the nation.46 This ecological havoc likewise threatens Native Hawaiian culture:
When a fishpond is dredged and filled for resort development and construction jobs, we destroy a generations-old resource as a sacrifice for short-term jobs and luxury developments. When our agricultural areas are left without water so that golf courses can be kept green and scenic, we lose the opportunity to subsist on our land.47
Mililani Trask laments the condition of the land, a land endangered by those who wish to enjoy its beauty:
It is hard to return to your traditional lifestyle when the species upon which we lived, those that fed us, have gone from the earth, forever, you cannot return. You have to go to the museum to look at the stuffed birds, but you cannot eat them. It is hard to return to our traditional practice when pesticides and herbicides toxify the food base, the land base, the food chain.48
A difficult birth does not make a baby any less beautiful.
—Mililani Trask
As diverse as the Hawaiian landscape—from the snowpacked Mauna Kea to the rainforest of Kauai—is the political terrain of the nationalist struggle. Whether it is the constant occupations of beaches, the rebuilding of small villages, or the thousands-strong demonstrations, there is a very prominent Hawaiian Nation emerging from behind the tourist billboards and developers’ cranes.
In January 1993, the 100-year anniversary of the overthrow of Queen Lili’uokalani’s government, 17,000 Hawaiians marched to Iliolani Palace in Honolulu to demand access to and control over Hawaiian trust lands and to demand recognition of their sovereignty. A 24-hour religious vigil and years of organizing work had preceded the march.49 Nine months later, on November 23, 1993, the U.S. government did something it rarely does: apologize. Signed into law by President Bill Clinton as PL 103-150, the Apology Bill “offer[ed] an apology to Native Hawaiians on behalf of the United States for the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawai’i.” The bill acknowledged:
Hawaiian people lived in a highly organized, self-sufficient, subsistence social system based on communal land tenure with a sophisticated language, culture, and religion.... Whereas, on January 14, 1893, the United States minister assigned to the sovereign and independent kingdom of Hawai’i, conspired with a small group of non-Hawaiian residents...to overthrow the Indigenous and lawful Government of Hawai’i.
Now, therefore, be it resolved by the Senate and House of Representatives...the Congress apologizes to Native Hawaiians...for the overthrow... and the depreciation of the[ir] rights to self-determination.50
The Apology Bill received substantive support, except from Washington State’s Republican Senator Slade Gorton, a virulent opponent of Native sovereignty, who grumbled that “the logical consequences of this resolution would be independence.”51
Mililani Trask is a centerpiece in the movement for Hawaiian sovereignty, as the past head of state for a Native Hawaiian government called Ka Lahui, which has registered 22,000 citizens. Her elegant stature is readily apparent. She commands the floor, and takes it when necessary. In that job she was both head of state and a statesperson. Naturally. She is also the only person I have ever met who has a photo of herself, the Pope, and Mother Theresa on her office wall, and is both a devout Buddhist and practitioner of Native Hawaiian religion. As an attorney, she spent years litigating trespass, harvesting, and Hawaiian rights cases (and was frequently paid in chickens and poi).
An incredibly eloquent orator, attorney, and organizer, she has been a beacon in the work to rebuild the Hawaiian nation. She explained the beginning of the process of building Ka Lahui,
Our Queen, she said that all of our people were to pray for the enlightened justice of American wisdom.... In 1987, we decided that after 93 years of praying we should do more.
We called the Hawaiian leadership of all the islands to come and put back together the fundamental documents and a constitution for Hawaiians. We had no place to hold this meeting. We had a church that invited us to go there, and all the Native leaders went there. We had some tents, as you do in Indian Country. We set up the tents, and we worked. There were 250 of us who came and wrote our own constitution.52
Ka Lahui works on several different aspects of the sovereignty struggle—on the internal struggle among native Hawaiians, on their relationship to the United States, and on the Kanaka Maoli’s relationship with other nations. Their work on the internal struggle concerns language and cultural restoration, among other things. In relation to the United States, they work on transferring trust assets, revenues, and lands to the Native nation, and getting access to the federal court system. For example, they call for the nationalization of the largest privately held tract in the state, a charitable trust created in the will of the last direct descendant of King Kamehameha I, Bernice Pauahi Bishop. The income from this land is meant to benefit the Kamehameha Schools (private trust fund schools) for Native Hawaiian children. But the trustees consider the $2 billion in assets inadequate to school more than 3,000 of the 55,000 eligible children.53
As part of Ka Lahuf’s international work, Mililani Trask represented Indigenous women at the United Nations Conference on the Status of Women. There, I saw Mililani move deftly from government delegation to non-governmental organization, from adversary to ally, without a flicker. The Hawaiians, Pacific Islanders, and their allies formed the Unrepresented Peoples Organization, of which Mililani Trask serves as Vice Chair. These and other activists are struggling to compose a draft declaration on the rights of Indigenous peoples.
According to Mililani,
The world is not so large, it is quite small. There are 27 species of birds on the endangered species list which live in Hawai’i and nest in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and if they develop the oil in the refuge, we will not have those birds. The world is quite small.... Because [each act] is a pebble in a pond. Small pebble, large ripple.54
Ka Lahui has signed two dozen treaties with other nations, treaties that oppose unfair international trade agreements, support biodiversity, and oppose nuclear testing in the Pacific basin, among other issues of concern. Ka Lahui’s work is exemplary and a part of a mosaic of changing dynamics in the entire Pacific Basin—a region of islands inhabited by Polynesian and Melanesian people with a shared history of occupation by distant militaries.
While Ka Lahui is the largest of the sovereignty groups, there are others, reflecting the diversity of the island. The Nation of Hawai’i, or Pu ’uhonua, has 13,000 citizens and a constitution. Ka Pakakuu, with 2,500 members, acts as a liaison among a number of different groups, from the anti-nuclear movement to Native Hawaiian gays and lesbians. A fourth organization, the Institute for the Advancement of Hawaiian Affairs, is a think-tank run by Hayden Burgess, a Hawaiian attorney, whose Hawaiian name is Poka Laenui.55 The work of these activists all express the same sentiment, as echoed in David Malo’s poem:
E iho ana a luna,
E pi i ana o lalo.
E hui ana na moku,
E ku ana ka paia.
That which is above shall be brought down,
That which is below shall be lifted up.
The islands shall be united,
The walls shall stand upright.
—David Malo, Ka Lahui, Ho okupu56
After a bitter battle, the NPS succeeded in evicting the Pai family from their land in 1997. Now the NPS has a created park (and nude beach) for the purpose of preserving Hawaiian culture, with no Hawaiians in it. How clever.
In 1998, Mahealani Pai graciously agreed to meet my family at his fishponds, now the centerpiece of Kaloko-Honokohau National Historic Park and nudist beach. We walk past scantily clad sunbathers who bask in the rays, oblivious to the ponds and to Pai. Mahealani winces at their immodesty, but his eyes shimmer as he looks at the fishponds. As my eyes scan Mahealani Pai’s fish traps, heiau, shrimpponds, and beach, I see the work of generations building and maintaining a relationship to the ’aina. It is clear that the only ones who can care for an area so well are those who have prayed there for a century.
That opinion is not, however, held in Washington. But in the long term, what Washington decides may not matter. What happens 5,000 miles away is really of only limited consequence to the ’aina and the Kanaka Maoli. As Mililani says,
The beginning of nationhood, the beginning of sovereignty, and working for self determination, has to do with making right your path with the Creator and practicing your ceremony and your culture. This is the predicate to political work in sovereignty Nation building, and as we say in Hawai’i, don’t worry about sovereignty and community work unless your spirit is right, that is the first thing.57
There is something growing in the taro patches, more powerful than can be imagined in Washington. And that is kept, as it has been for generations, in the hearts and memories of the Hawaiians.