As championed by Prince Jonah Kuhio Kalaniana'ole, the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act of 1920 was intended to address the decline and disenfranchisement of Native Hawaiians, great numbers of whom had been displaced from ancestral lands in the Mahele of 1848, by providing them lands on which to farm and live.
As U.S. Secretary of the Interior Franklin Lane was quoted as saying in a committee report, "The natives of the island who are our wards, I should say, and for whom in a sense we are trustees, are falling off rapidly in numbers, and many of them are in poverty."
The act set aside 203,500 acres as "available lands" for people of Hawaiian descent.
Those lands, however, were hardly conducive to the subsistence agriculture practiced by earlier generations of Hawaiians. Sugar companies had lobbied the government to exclude lands currently used for sugar production, then the state's economic engine. With no money to develop the second-tier lands, many lots were used strictly for housing.
As noted by a former director of the state Department of Hawaiian Home Lands, the administration of the program was hampered by a lack of funding and restriction on private financing. In the first 70 years of the program, only 3,000 families were placed on Hawaiian homestead land. Many caught in the backlog died waiting for their applications to be processed.
The act also had broad and problematic legal implications because it set forth the first legal definition of "Hawaiian" in terms of what came to be called blood quantum. To qualify for the properties, applicants had to prove 50 percent blood from ancestors living in Hawai'i before the arrival of Capt. James Cook.
