More voices of na kanaka
Land and culture have been lost; now we risk losing our soul — our aloha spirit

By Robert Kamahalu Mauweli Kaumuali'i Kauakahilau Kasher

As a Mainland Hawaiian, part of the vast diaspora of our people who had to leave Hawai'i to find opportunity elsewhere, I offer a few comments on the debate over Hawaiian rights between Alani Apio, Ken Conklin and others.

Hawaiians danced during a rally in front of the U.S. Capitol in the summer of 1998, marking the 100th anniversary of the U.S. annexation of the Hawaiian Islands: Today more readers respond to Alani Apio's Feb. 25 commentary, "1,000 little cuts to genocide," and its sequel, "Kanaka lament" (March 11. Associated Press file photo

Who are the Hawaiians? What is Hawaiian culture? What is owed to the Hawaiian people for their historic grievances, if anything? Why is it owed? And how do we best deal with these questions and tensions within our society and among our people?

Unlike either Mr. Apio or Mr. Conklin ("From the na'au," March 11), I find the gut a very poor instrument to think with. When our ancestors began down the path of intermarriage, acceptance of the inevitability of contact with the west and the desire to find a peaceful path for the welfare of our people and the maintenance of our culture, they did not think with their guts. They thought with their heads.

They understood from firsthand knowledge the impact that disease, greed, alcohol abuse, spiritual uncertainty, cultural deterioration and technological change were having on our people. As a result, our great leaders, Kamehameha, Ka'ahumanu, Kaumuali'i and others, undertook a path to transform our people, educate them and modernize our ancient society. They did this as a culturally sophisticated but technologically Stone Age people in the midst of a biological holocaust under tremendous economic and political pressures from within and without.

Rather than fight our visitors we embraced them. We gave them lands and married them to our sons and daughters. We taught them our ways and learned theirs, trying to draw the best of what we could from what the west had to offer while maintaining the essence of what it was to be Hawaiian.

In the process we rejected the concepts of racial "purity" and cultural isolation as a means of preserving our culture. Instead our ancestors were confident that the essence of what it was to be a Hawaiian, our sense of aloha, our politics of the heart and head, would sustain itself in any crisis.

None of them could have foreseen just how deep that crisis would go. The depopulation of the Hawaiian people continued unabated for almost 100 years. Royal lineages died away by the score. The population of Hawaiian males declined precipitously, then that of Hawaiian females. We lost our lands, our country, our wealth, our property and came precariously close to losing our spirit and our culture.

But we survived. So did the essence of who we were and what we are. It survived because we followed the ways our ancestors had put into place so many years ago. We did not fight, we continued to embrace. We transformed and we each carried within us the seeds of our "Politics of the Heart and Head," known as the aloha spirit. These were seeds we then planted in our visitors who were now our neighbors.

Unique among plantation economies in the world, Hawai'i did not practice racial or cultural segregation between natives and newcomers. Oh, there were plenty of tensions between our peoples throughout the years and they are there still. But in the end none of us has cut ourselves off from the other and that is a good thing, for most of us here are — in some way or another — the other.

What was once the Hawaiian people, an already mixed Polynesian-Micronesian polyglot of peoples, has become a Creole race of mixed Hawaiian, European and Asian backgrounds. I myself am an example, being Hawaiian and a mixture of European and South Asian. One wonders how much of Alani's genealogy and those of other sovereigntists and Hawaiian activists aren't similar to my own. Can you all tell me, in all honesty, that you can turn your back on that other part of what you are?

As far as I'm concerned I don't tan, I bleach.

Our culture, slowly being reborn and revisited, is equally diverse, encompassing elements of the Spanish paniolo in our music, Asian and European flavors in our food, a Western-based alphabet and musical notation.

It seems easy — when thinking with the head about where we are now — to casually dismiss the overwrought rhetoric Alani Apio uses in his commentary about the injustices meted out to the Hawaiian people.

But it is dangerous for those who would follow Mr. Conklin's lead to dismiss so cavalierly what is in Mr. Apio's gut.

I and other Hawaiians like me understand those grievances all too well from our personal experiences, no matter how successful our own lives have become. I grew up knowing my grandmother lost her land on Kaua'i because she was so poor she couldn't afford to pay the taxes on it. That at the age of 50, single, alone and rejected by the haole family she married into, she, a proud and accomplished woman, had to accept welfare because she could not find a job.

Many other people of Hawaiian ancestry live with similar stories as they saw their heritage, their identities and their lives hurt or destroyed, humiliated or compromised by people in power or those who did their bidding for them. To our great shame some of those were Hawaiians.

Yes, that is the sad secret we Hawaiians all live with. While the greater among us did what they could to preserve our culture, our power and our heritage, the lesser among us sold our lands, our votes and our souls for a barrel of rum or a handful of coins. This is a hard thing for Hawaiians to accept, but it is one we are going to have to come to grips with if we are to regain our self-esteem and deal squarely with the disaster that happened to us.

But for every seller there was a buyer and a buyer who often conned our people into their fates, only to ensure that those injustices were then made permanent through legislation by taking away what few rights and privileges we still had. The separation of peoples in Hawai'i that occurred then was not only one of race but also of wealth and privilege. Oddly enough the losers tended to be the darker ones. I wonder why, Mr. Conklin?

Mr. Conklin talks about ending the race-based politics of Hawaiian sovereignty. What he fails to mention is that we didn't choose this path. Historically it was chosen for us.

What we wanted was simple justice for our people, who had been systematically ripped off by a well-placed minority with access to capital and power. What we eventually got in return from this minority — the Hawaiian Home Lands Act, the Bishop Estate and other ancestrally defined welfare legislation — was a sop thrown to us for our votes. This wasn't done by that minority out of a sense of justice or fairness. It was done in order to prevent the growing population of Asian people in our islands from achieving their justifiable democratic rights and more liberal political aims.

These legislative remedies are not "race"-based legislation in the strict sense of the word. These "Estate" lands are ancestral lands held in common trust for the use of an ancestral group. This is social ownership, not private ownership.

Some precedents here in American jurisprudence do exist: the village and town squares owned in common by people who live in a certain area, for instance. Ancestral common lands, however, are much better known in Europe and the United Kingdom.

I notice that while Mr. Conklin attacks the role of the trusts of OHA, Hawaiian Homes and the Bishop Estate he doesn't talk about those for Punahou and other private schools that have historically been the educational institutions of Hawai'i's other peoples.

Nor does he talk about the wealth of the many non-Hawaiian trusts and land holdings here in the islands, which have historically only served those other groups. Only the Hawaiians are to be deprived of their "race-based" institutions.

I would argue that these are not race-based, but open to everyone on the basis of common ancestral roots, not racial purity.

I too, like most Hawaiians, would like to see the politics of race end. I too am offended at times by the overweening and petulant militancy that often is a hallmark of current Hawaiian politics on both sides of the question.

But I also want justice for the ancestral people of this land.

If supposedly well-meaning people like Mr. Conklin — who have undertaken to learn our language and culture but fail to see what is so evident around them: the suffering and relative impoverishment of our people — if they then fail to do anything about it except try to take away the few rights we wrested away from those in power in payment for years of deprivation and loss, then what can be expected but bitterness and anger?

A third path must be found somewhere between Mr. Apio's anger and Mr. Conklin's arrogance. If we want to identify with and be a part of Hawai'i's ancestral culture, we must come to grips with the injustices done to those same ancestors and the culture of these islands. To ignore such things is to ignore reality and fuel the fires of embitterment and desperation.

By the same token, we of Hawaiian ancestry must come to accept the fact that all who came here and chose our ways, are now Hawaiian People.

To be a part of that society, however, we must all understand and repay the debt owed to our ancestors who held these islands in trust for thousands of years and bequeathed to us a heritage we all embrace: of aloha, brotherhood and good will.

My great fear now is that while we Hawaiians may win the legal battle for land and money, we may nevertheless lose our souls in the process. The precious gifts that we, a small people in a very large world, have to offer to people everywhere are important ones. The name Hawai'i connotes peace, good will, tolerance and acceptance the world over.

Let us not tarnish our name with the rhetoric of brutality and violence or with a denial of the injustices meted out to the ancestral people of these islands. Let us do what we can to rectify them and continue to live in harmony with our land and each other.

Along with Burl Burlingame, Robert Kasher co-authored "Da Kine Sound: An Oral History of Hawaiian Music." He has also written six other books and pieces for the Toronto Globe and Mail, Latin American Perspectives, New Politics and En Route magazine and is co-owner of Database Directories in Canada.