Governor Abercrombie calls the public rejection of Act 55, which created the Public Lands Development Corporation, a 鈥渃onspiratorial hysteria鈥� (, September 13, 2012, A1) one day after Mililani Trask writes that the uproar is the result of fears that are needlessly 鈥渉ysterical.鈥� (HSA, September 12, 2012) I do not need to speak for the environment-conscious members of the public who have their own reasons for being leery of a state corporation that gets to exempt its projects from county zoning and state land use designations, except to say that they seem more prudent than hysterical. I will speak only as one of the plaintiffs in OHA v HFDC, the so called 鈥淐eded Lands鈥� case.

What Act 55 calls Public lands are almost entirely the Crown and Government lands of my country. The State Supreme Court in 2008 admitted that we K膩naka Maoli have an un-relinquished claim on these lands, and briefly enjoined the state from selling these lands, pending a resolution of the claims of Native Hawaiians. After Governor Lingle appealed to the US Supreme Court, the state court dropped the issue in favor of legislation (Act 176) in 2009 that made it more difficult to sell the Crown and Government Lands.

What all of this means legally remains unclear. What it means politically is that the State of Hawai驶i and the Hawaiian Nation have unresolved differences over the lands that legally belonged to the Crown and to our Kingdom鈥檚 government.

For purely practical reasons鈥擨’d like to avoid being labeled hysterical鈥擨 do not want five appointees of the Governor and the Legislature, whose interests are not necessary mine and every other Hawaiian beneficiary, to be in charge of developing these lands. The same 2009 legislation that supposedly made it slightly more difficult to sell Crown and Government lands, also facilitates exchanges of our lands with private property owners. Now the PLDC鈥檚 ability to circumvent zoning laws makes it even easier for individual parcels to be exchanged with corporate partners, with the added attraction of being freed from even having to pursue zoning changes. I predict that numerous exchanges will be taking place, and the Department of Land and Natural Resources will increasingly be managing lands that other people and companies do not want. Crown and Government lands that have been preserved and maintained as conservation or agricultural lands will be urbanized, and the most remunerative of those lands will wind up belonging to developers, their clients, and their customers. I certainly think that is the intent of Act 55.

Now I will be passionate. The Crown and Government lands of the Kingdom belong to the descendants of the citizens of the Hawaiian Monarchy. If the Governor and the Legislature want to manage our lands more effectively for the benefit of every resident in Hawai驶i while we sort out our legal disagreements, I support that. But exempting a government agency or a private company exempt from law is not effective management, and all of your finger pointing, Governor Abercrombie, will not make it so.

About the author: Jonathan Kay Kamakawiwo驶ole Osorio is a professor of Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

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The change in Hawai驶i over the past two decades is more spiritual than tangible. In 1990 we were closing in on a million residents, and now we have about 1.3 million. We were dependent on tourism then and anticipated 5 million visitors a year. Now the industry worries that we cannot get 7 million or more. Hawaiians were protesting evictions, urbanization of agricultural lands, and Hawaiian burial grounds, and concerns about the overwhelming American military presence. I think more of Hawaii鈥檚 residents then were confident that the social and economic transformations that had ended the plantations would now focus more seriously on native Hawaiian issues and would soon produce a society in which a sovereign Hawaiian government would coexist with the 50th State.

Partly as a result of a national movement to the right, a movement that produced, among other things, an economic free for all that has made Hawai驶i more expensive and less concerned about social justice, more Hawaiians now fight to distance ourselves from Americans, convinced that the United States has forsaken its idealism in its preoccupation with commercial and military power. In Hawai驶i the social activism of the unions and the Democratic Party is conflicted by their efforts to protect the status quo. Hawaiians have become the visionaries and that is a more portentous sign than anything else in Hawaii鈥檚 political culture. We know that we are in a struggle with a powerful nation, yet we believe that we can shape our own history through our struggle to be ourselves.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Jonathan Kay Kamakawiwo鈥榦le Osorio, PhD, is Professor of Hawaiian Studies at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, a historian of the Hawaiian Kingdom, and a practicing musician and composer. He has been an advocate for the restoration of Hawaii鈥檚 political independence, and writes about the sovereignty movement in Hawaii. He and his wife Mary live in Palolo, and have sent all of their children to public schools and Kamehameha High School.

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This assertion would have been considered an absurdity less than two decades ago, and its growing traction in the Hawaiian sovereignty 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. 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 鈥� these are all Pacific Islander 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 banks in America, and the economic crises that emerged from the mortgage-backed securities failure in 2008, have not led Americans or some Hawaii residents to question the reliability of an unchecked capitalist society. In fact, Hawaii鈥檚 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鈥檚 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 of 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 鈥� Hawaiian Kingdom and Crown Lands 鈥� 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.

The State seems to believe that it is easier to sell these lands off to meet this year鈥檚 budget deficit through one big yard sale, than to do the hard work of really managing these lands. 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 鈥� the chiefly land managers in the Hawaiian ahupuaa 鈥� did. They managed human and natural resources by knowing everything about the land division over which they were responsible. Some of today鈥檚 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 can 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 鈥� 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 puuhonua 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 1967, and what the taro farmers in Waiahole and Waikane were trying to do in 1974, and in the end, it is what the sovereignty movement is really about. We have seen what determined guerilla mahi ai (farming) can do to resurrect taro in urban places like Kanewai and 膧nuenue, and to rebuild fishponds along the Molokai shores, where the only government assistance required was that it not prosecute mahi ai for growing taro on public lands. Imagine what a partnership between government, the Bishop Estate, and people who want to grow food and live where they work might produce. Imagine homelessness addressed by a vigorous back-to-the-land movement, with training and housing and employment all located in ahupuaa 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 interdependency with all of the life around us. This is why we must end the military occupation of Hawaii, 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.

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Kuokoa 鈥� to stand apart 鈥� means a kind of intellectual as well as political independence. Kuokoa is an easier term for Americans to understand because it connects so easily to the image of the Minuteman, the yeoman farmer, the frontiersman.

Ea means that spiritual sovereignty as a kind of rightness, Ua mau ke ea o ka aina i ka pono. The sovereignty, the life force of the land, endured because of the rightness, the goodness of our people. Proclaimed by Kamehameha III on July 31, 1843, he acknowledged that the British had ceased their occupation of Hawaii and unlawful seizure of the government, setting a path for his heirs to follow 鈥� to trust in the rule of law and not armed might and to believe in their inherent right to be independent.

In one of the ironic warps of history, the Independent Party, established in 1883 and purporting to be an independent voice in the Kingdom, was principally responsible for ending the national government. The founders of the party included Lorrin Thurston 鈥� already a professed annexationist; William O. Smith, who joined him in his most nefarious political scheming; Sanford Dole and William Castle, all members of the haole business class in Hawaii, who would all play significant roles in the destruction of the independent Kingdom of Hawaii. As early as 1884 the founders of the Independence Party were confidentially referring to themselves as the Reform Party, although the newspapers and general public identified them as the Independents. Reform suggests something very different than independence and in fact bears the strong whiff of the Mission, something that Castle himself was anxious to avoid 鈥� missionary already having become a distinctly derogatory term in Hawaiian politics.

Their actions were not irony so much as deviousness. What was ironic was the membership in that party of Hawaiian patriots like Representative Joseph Nawahi, whose opposition to the King sprang from a deep fear that Kalakaua鈥檚 policies were disastrous for the nation. Nawahi was acting from the conviction, learned in part from his upbringing in mission schools, that he had a duty to be an independent voice in the legislature and to speak honestly and directly to those he felt threatening his country and in 1883, he believed that threat to be the King. When those same individuals who invited him to join their political party in the 1884 elections turned to military force in order to humiliate the King and institute the Bayonet Constitution that elevated the business community to control of the legislature, the courts and the cabinet ministry, Nawahi cut his ties with them and became a tireless opponent of the provisional haole government and American annexation.

Kuokoa was the name of the longest-running newspaper in the Kingdom鈥檚 history and given to be an independent analysis of the politics of the time. In fact, Ka Nupepa Kuokoa was published and edited by former members of the ABCFM mission 鈥� men like E.O. Hall and Henry Whitney, whose criticism of the Monarchy was most contemptuous when they were describing the native Hawaiian as voters and legislators. The ideology of the missionary turned publisher, land-owner, attorney and politician was fairly simple. The government of the Kingdom was more credible and reliable the more members of the white business class dominated it. And whether the much larger Native electorate believed this credo or not, it is worth pointing out that haole businessmen and attorneys represented close to 50 percent of the legislature despite the fact that haole were less than 6 percent of the population for most of the 1880s.

So long as Hawaii was a monarchy, however, a non-Hawaiian would never have complete control of the government and therein lies the tale of Bayonet, the Overthrow and the American annexation.

The same founders of the Independent/Reform Party in 1883 made up the committee of safety that took control of the government in 1893 under the protection of American soldiers and warships. In 1895, in a particularly spiteful and cynical piece of timing, they declared their republic on July 4, a 鈥済overnment鈥� that had all of 4,000 mostly white citizens, and declared Sanford Dole president for life. That this 鈥渞epublic鈥� was set up for no other purpose than to encourage the Americans to annex the islands makes it impossible to commemorate the Fourth as a day of independence. I cannot imagine how any Hawaiian, knowledgeable about this history and feeling any sense of kinship with his or her nineteenth century ancestors, celebrates the Fourth of July.

Even the word independence has become increasingly problematic in the 21st century. Is the American nation an independent country? Not of foreign oil, not of entanglements in other countries, not of the Chinese yuan. Americans mostly understand that they are either interdependent with other nations or that the U.S. should stop pretending that it is anything but an empire and get on with the business of running the world. It is interesting that the last blockbuster film about Independence Day featured an Earth nearly conquered by alien hordes that had ravished countless worlds before getting outsmarted by Americans. Globalization forces people to see themselves differently and to acknowledge on some level that all of humanity is connected.

Yet the word independent continues to drive the American imagination, so that now it is an unofficial almost third party in America. Without question, it is this group of independent voters that swings the national elections, especially in presidential contests in key states. But what do independents stand for? The answer is troubling. They stand for almost anything in the political spectrum but appear integrated by a common belief that the electoral system in America is so politicized by interest groups on the left and right, that government itself is the enemy. One hears terms like balancing, and making sure that one party never dominates, and while that is a legitimate political aim, it underscores the deep cynicism governing Americans鈥� view of politics and the conviction that the country is so divided and polarized that union and unity cannot be seriously entertained.

Today鈥檚 American politics, then, is simply trying to find a balance 鈥� pono is our word 鈥� between right and left that acknowledges both as uncompromising and divided. But for the little nation of Hawaii with fewer than 100,000 native subjects in 1843, there was no division. When our country was threatened by a renegade British naval officer, we called on the British to live up to their professed ideals and reaped the proper benefit: the restoration of our government and proof that our Kingdom was on the correct path to maintaining our independence. Independence 鈥� ea 鈥� for us was a basic right that was enshrined by law. We may either give in to the cynicism of the age and in the face of such enormous power wielded by the United States, conclude that self-determination is a foolish delusion, or we can press Americans to live up to a better standard of behavior and perhaps, a better version of themselves. But in the end, it is more important that we Hawaiians refuse to surrender our own faith in ea. We know better than the Americans how precious independence truly is.

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