Similarly, while Native Hawaiians, like other wronged and displaced peoples, have strong moral claims on the political branches of government for recompense, the courts have no role to play in determining whether Congress should have made different or additional provision for Native Hawaiians to compensate them for their grave losses. If “[g]enerous provision has been willingly made to allow [indigenous peoples] to recover for wrongs” perpetrated by the United States, it has been “as a matter of grace, not because of legal liability.”

—Brief for Petitioners, State of Hawai‘i, et al. v. Office of Hawaiian Affairs, et al., p. 45, citing Tee-Hit-Ton Indians, 348 U.S. at 281-282.

On selling ceded lands

The brief filed by Attorney General Mark Bennett in the state’s appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court from transferring or selling ceded lands has caused much anger among Hawaiians. The appeal seeks to overturn a Hawai‘i Supreme Court ruling temporarily barring the state from transferring or selling ceded lands. A reading of the brief illustrates the state’s acknowledgement that while wrongs have been committed against Native Hawaiians in the past, history is no protection against the superior power of the government to steal, coerce and oppress.

It should strike people as ironic that a Governor who helped to make “Shaloha” a byword of Jewish identification with Hawai‘i—as a place of diversity and acceptance and a place where Jewish people belonging to the synagogue community, Temple Emanu-El, might “pursue social justice”—could take responsibility for an administrative statement that quite plainly and banally states that Hawaiians, while having a moral right to their lands, do not have a legal right to the ownership of those lands. Read More

In the last month of the U.S. presidential campaign, the candidates of the two ruling parties and their supporters have gone into high gear in pushing the policy differences between their respective sides.

For those who closely watch or have been directly impacted by U.S. foreign policy, however, the party tickets are fundamentally the same. While the two sides may squabble over which country to target next—how precisely to intervene in that country and how to lay the justifying groundwork—they both share an open disregard for the sovereignty and will of foreign governments and peoples alike.

The unapologetic and dangerous sense of entitlement to interfere in the affairs of other nations is perhaps most evident in the case of Democratic vice-presidential candidate Joe Biden, who has been called a “liberal” interventionist. According to the Miami Herald, former U.S. Ambassador Peter Galbraith, a former top staff aide on the Foreign Relations Committee, said that Biden “is an interventionist, but that does not necessarily mean military intervention.” Read More

The Hawai’i Independent reported Monday that Gov. Linda Lingle released a five-point plan to bolster Hawai’i’s economy in the face of the global economic crisis.

Lingle intends to 1. increase tourism marketing; 2. improve infrastructure; 3. lower business fees; 4. attract outside investment, particularly in energy; and 5. maximize federal revenue.

While three of her points put Hawai’i lawmakers in the right direction, two of them do not effectively steer us from a flawed economic dependency.

Infrastructure improvement is critical for ongoing economic development, and also creates jobs. Lower business fees and taxes will ease the burden on small businesses, which are the lion’s share of employers in Hawai’i. And external investment in energy helps to capitalize on a dramatically growing market.

But the two items which bookend her plan—increasing tourism spending and attracting federal dollars—are flawed. Hawai’i is too dependent on tourism and federal (read: military) dollars, and increasing our reliance on these industries is a mistake. To combat the long-term economic crisis, we must take this opportunity to invest in economic independence, and decrease our dependence on tourism and federal dollars.
Read More

Although the Honolulu dailies have been touting the recent settlement agreement between Governor Linda Lingle and the Office of Hawaiian Affairs as a “land and cash deal worth over $200 million dollars,” let’s be clear: this is no victory for the Hawaiian people. Because the Office of Hawaiian Affairs (OHA) and state had been in dispute over what the payments should be, and over which lands and what revenues are covered, OHA filed a lawsuit against the state that reached the Hawai’i Supreme Court. The state court instructed the state government to negotiate with the state agency of OHA. If the state legislation passes, the state government would continue to pay OHA about $15.1 million annually and transfer some lands from one arm of state to the other.

The whole thing is a charade! This recent maneuvering within the state is simply an attempt by OHA to collect as much from the state legislature in anticipation of the Akaka bill passing, so that the Office of Hawaiian Affairs portfolio will be worth more when transferred to the proposed Native Hawaiian Governing Entity. This is the sell-out deal that would follow in the immediate wake of the passage of the Akaka bill, if it makes it out of the US Senate. OHA is working in unison with the federal representatives; they have sold us out time and time again, and now reps are trying to work their way into becoming US recognized leaders of a Native Hawaiian Governing Entity under US domestic law. Or worse, it also works as a “plan B” scheme for OHA to work their way towards a global settlement with the state in case the federal bill fails again. OHA says it wants the “return” of the lands or compensation for the loss of the lands as a result of the overthrow and annexation. Unlawful sell-out!

Given that former Governor Ben Cayetano refused to allot the revenues according to the court ordered formula in the past, we have to ask why Governor Lingle is so willing now. Don’t forget that Lingle’s State Attorney General relentlessly continues to get the Hawai`i courts to affirm that the state has the right to sell our national lands. The Hawai`i Supreme Court’s order for an injunction to bar the sale of the land until claims are resolved has people focused on the stalled Akaka bill in Congress, which could create “a third party” to resolve claims on the ceded lands—but we already know who would constitute this so-called third party: the trustees of OHA.

Whenever any state government supports federal recognition of the indigenous peoples residing without the boundaries asserted by the state, we must ask why. What will the state government of Hawaii gain from passage of the Akaka bill? And why does the state support federal recognition in this case, when states almost always oppose the federal acknowledgement of Native Nations? It’s simple: because the state has a lot to gain—the 1.8 million acres of land to which the Hawaiian people and other descendants of citizens of the Hawaiian Kingdom still hold collective title. Even the US Apology Resolution passed by Congress in 1993 affirms that these are our national lands: “the indigenous Hawaiian people never directly relinquished their claims to their inherent sovereignty as a people or over their national lands to the United States, either through their monarchy or through a plebiscite or referendum.”

As everyone knows, and yet so many still want to deny, the Hawaiian Kingdom never ceded these lands to the provisional government, nor the so-called Republic of Hawai`i, nor to the US government. The new Republic seized these lands then ceded them to the US in 1898. The Hawaii Admission Act transferred them from federal to state control, then the Hawaii State Constitution asserted that the lands shall be: “held by the State as a public trust for native Hawaiians and the general public” (Article 7, Section 4). Different branches of the state can swap, scheme, and swindle, but those of us who hold true to our history of resistance to the US “annexation,” and our unabiding claim to nationhood under international law will hold fast and hold firm; we will not settle.

Still fresh in our memory is the killings of 29-year-old mother in Kailua and 2-year-old toddler in Honolulu that happened on the same day. Both murders were done by males of mature age in a chillingly cruel manner. Regardless of the judiciary’s final judgment, the public has tried to find consolation in some sort of aberration in the perpetrators, attributing their unusual cruelty to ice addiction and mental condition.

Even if we are to accept such explanation, it maybe hard for us to deny unsettling feelings, haunting us as an after-effect of the murders. Personally, those incidents invoke in my mind the historical instances of Nanjing massacre and other Japanese wartime atrocities in Asia. The Japanese military forces reduced women, children, and elderly to mere life that was clubbed, raped, and slashed to death, and tossed into a pit for a live burial. Such cruelty has been repeated time and again, for instance, during the Vietnam War (e.g., My Lai massacre), the “ethnic cleansing” in Yugoslavia, the civil war in Sierra Leone and perhaps in the ongoing “war on terror” in Iraq and Afganistan which we will know sometime in the future.

Those murders in Kailua and Honolulu force us to rethink the conventional understanding of the relationship between war and everyday violence, which focuses on a psychological impact of war upon the individuals. What we are witnessing today, I argue, is an intrusion of war into the very fabric of our society. In other words, war is no longer confined to its designated territory: War has become extra-territorial or deterritorialized.

Now Hawai‘i’s relationship with war is two-fold. On one hand, war impacts Hawai‘i through its dependency on the US bubble economy inflated by war. After a brief impasse immediately following 9/11, Hawai‘i has enjoyed the trickle down effect of the US war economy boom in the areas of tourism and real estate market. The bubble has burst as indicated, for instance, by the decrease of visitors to Hawaii in the year 2007, the first time decrease since 2003.

On the other hand, Hawai’i has come to be directly besieged by war. Since 2001, there have been significant military expansions in Hawai‘i: the deployment of Stryker Brigade, the inauguration of a classified military research center at University of Hawai‘i (UARC), the B-2 stealth bomber’s monthly bombings of Pohakuloa, and the launching of Superferry that is designed to transport Stryker Brigade and other military equipments. Besides those I would add the buy-out of Hawai‘i’s telecommunication system by the Carlyle Group as an “invisible” war machine. As the Carlyle Group – which is closely tied to the Bush family – is the 11th largest arms dealer in the US, our telecommunication system has come to be part of their arms-based economy.

Squeezed between the demise of dependent economy and the direct implantation of war, Hawai‘i may see more instances of everyday violence of cruel nature. A fundamental response to the everyday violence in Hawai‘i, therefore, requires the process of rehabilitation of a war-torn society. For such society-wide rehabilitation, the indigenous cultural value of aloha ‘aina can be the most viable guiding concept to help heal the wounds of society as well as individuals, and to envision the future without violence and war. The concept of aloha ‘aina, to take on a Kanaka Maoli activist Andre Perez’s interpretation, is not confined to the land in its territorial aspect. It can be applied to the care and love for one’s body, for one’s family, and every being constituting ‘aina that feeds us both in material and spiritual sense.

The opening day of the Hawaii state legislature also marked the return of an issue that took center stage just two short years ago on the campus of the University of Hawaii: the patenting and experimental genetic modification of kalo, the Hawaiian taro plant.The genetic modification of kalo marks the intersection of the most traditional of Hawaiian practices with the untested practices of global agri-business. The first kalo, according to Hawaiian oral history, grew from Haloanaka, stillborn child of Papa and Wakea and ancestor of all Hawaiians. The second child was Haloa, who is an ancestor to humans. Within the Hawaiian cosmogony, kalo is the elder sibling of the Hawaiian people.

In the 21st century, the production of kalo is already under threat, without the new risks of genetic modification. Production of kalo in Hawai’i has dropped from 14 million pounds in 1948 to 4 million in 2005. Increasing production of kalo can reduce dependence on imported food, which constitutes 90% of Hawaii’s food supply. Kalo would increase Hawaii’s “food sovereignty,” a term of art for the economic and cultural self-determination of a people.

The cultivation of kalo seems to have a therapeutic effect on people, particularly Hawaiians, as evidenced by Ka’ala Farms’ culture and cultivation-based treatment program for the chemically-dependent. In the emerging system of Hawaiian-oriented schools, working in the lo’i (taro patch) is used as both punishment and reward, a fact which seems to underscore its therapeutic nature.

Some futurists warn of a potential condition involving deprivation of contact with the natural world as development, urbanization and the sedentary lives of children coalesce. All of these are reasons to return the production of kalo – organic kalo – to the center of Hawaii’s economy.

Kalo is an issue that can actually unite rather than divide ethnic and other factions in Hawaii. On a plane from San Francisco I once met the Japanese daughter of the founder of Haleiwa Poi. Much of the kalo cultivated today is grown on farms owned by non-Hawaiians; similarly, much of the kalo consumed today is eaten by all of Hawaii’s ethnic groups. I expect that our peoples want their poi made from real kalo, not a lab-developed variety, and they would support the continued cultivation of organic kalo.

Opposition to GMOs, or genetically modified organisms, is far from a lunatic-fringe position – the entire European Union is under fire from the central institution of globalization, the World Trade Organization, for its member countries’ bans on various genetically modified foods. As far back as 2001, 14 Pacific Island nations as well as many Asian and African countries had bans or moratoriums on GMOs. Only in the US is such opposition seen as marginal.

There’s hope. Lo’i kalo have been restored in many areas. Organic food is a fast-growing sector of the international marketplace as both producers and consumers find the costs manageable. But even the term “organic” is misleading. It makes one think this is food for hippies, or some exotic fare that would offend the meat-and-potatoes sensibilities of middle America. There was another name for organic food before the introduction of genetic modification: it was called food, the stuff humans have eaten for a couple million years. To create distrust of non-genetically modified food is a perversion of logic that can only happen in a media-hypnotized society.

The distortion knows no bounds; at one point, it was illegal to label organic foods not genetically modified as GM corn became virtually the only type available in the American market.

The genetic modification of kalo also presents intellectual property issues that, unfortunately, the laws are not satisfactorily designed to resolve. The question is often asked: “who owns kalo?” Hawaiians cultivated many varieties of kalo through traditional breeding practices, by some counts 300 varieties. Does this not mean that Hawaiians, in fact, “own” the practice of kalo cultivation? Intellectual property law does not recognize group but only individual rights of ownership, a bias that discriminates against collectivist societies and Indigenous peoples.

Surely we can agree on this: we all want our and our childrens’ food to be uncontaminated with unproven “technologies” – we just want to eat our traditional foods in peace.