Mo'ili'ili man fights OHA programs
By Yasmin Anwar
Advertiser Staff Writer
Outside the Burger King restaurant in Mo'ili'ili, Patrick Barrett lighted another Winston cigarette and shuddered.
As the sole plaintiff in a high-profile challenge to government-financed Hawaiian entitlements, Barrett had just finished testifying in his first-ever deposition, and was feeling exposed.
"Lawyers," he scowled, rolling his eyes.
This is a man so reclusive he barely noticed when his telephone ringer was turned off for two weeks. Moreover, his phone number is unlisted, which means another Patrick Barrett likely gets the nasty calls in Kailua.
"I just want to be invisible," Barrett said recently, in his first in-depth interview since he filed a federal lawsuit last October against a state constitutional provision that created the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, adopted the federal Hawaiian Home Lands program and provided for native gathering rights on private property.
But even Barrett, who refused to be photographed, knows his days of anonymity are numbered.
A hearing on OHA's motion asking the judge to dismiss the case, on grounds that Barrett lacks legal standing, is set for April 12.
If U.S. District Judge David Ezra grants that motion, Barrett's lawyers are poised to take the case to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.
Either way, the 53-year-old native of Redlands, Calif. — who was partially paralyzed during a shooting in the parking lot of his family pizza business in 1976 — is about to face the circus.
He says he's not trying to destroy indigenous rights, but could use an OHA loan from the Native Hawaiian Revolving Loan Fund to start a small copy-machine business and would like to receive a dollar-a-year Hawaiian Home Lands lease as well.
"I'm not angry," he said. "I'm a liberal Democrat and a child of the '60s. I'm an American who gives a damn about equality."
Equality is what Big Island cattle rancher Harold "Freddy" Rice preached when he sued the state in 1996 for his 15th Amendment right to vote in OHA's Hawaiian-only elections.
Desegregation was the slogan used by Kenneth Conklin, a retired Boston math teacher who was among 13 non-Hawaiian residents suing for his right to run for the OHA governing board.
Pro-democracy is the term preferred by Barrett, a mustachioed Mo'ili'ili man fueled by Coca-Cola and Winston cigarettes.
He jokes a lot. But beneath his wry facade, Barrett knows that what he's doing is "grim business" and that he might not be the most charismatic plaintiff to lead the march against state-backed programs restricted to Hawaiians.
"I'm no Freddy Rice," he said.
That's not the opinion of his lawyer, John Goemans, who selected Rice as the perfect plaintiff to topple OHA's Hawaiian-only election restriction. Goemans says now Barrett is the man of the hour.
"Barrett is exactly the needy kind of guy who could use the preferential programs that are now restricted to Hawaiians," Goemans said.
If things go his way, the courts would strike down the Hawaiian ancestry requirement for scores of publicly financed programs. Barrett believes that applicants for such programs should be assessed on the basis of need.
'Not member of dying race'
But lawyers defending such programs say Barrett is ignoring the history that led to the near extinction of Native Hawaiians and the subsequent need for rehabilitation programs specifically intended for Native Hawaiians.
"As far as I know, Mr. Barrett is not a member of a dying race that Congress attempted to return to their own homelands," said Robert Klein, a lawyer representing the state Council of Hawaiian Homestead Associations in the Barrett case.
"Thousands of people on the Hawaiian Homes waiting list and their children will be affected if they find themselves in line with the Mr. Barretts of the world for a limited amount of property."
Barrett says he recognizes that his case could bring about radical and perhaps painful changes. But he says if he doesn't raise the constitutional question, someone else will.
He was born in Redlands in 1948, when that community in San Bernadino County was a small orange-grove town with just a two-lane highway linking it to the rest of the world.
His Irish-Catholic American parents were staunch Democrats and admirers of John F. Kennedy, who was killed when Barrett was 15.
Barrett graduated from high school in 1966, and bloomed into a child of the '60s. Among his favorite pop bands were Peter, Paul and Mary, and the Beach Boys.
During the winter of 1969, he took a trip to Mazatlan, Mexico, and basked in the warm ocean.
A year later, he decided to move permanently to more tropical climes, and looked at a map. There was Hawai'i.
"A slice of America close to the same latitude as Mazatlan," he said.
Barrett arrived in Honolulu in 1970, and started his new life in Waikiki, working restaurant and desk jobs.
In 1975, his stepfather died and he was summoned home to take over the family's pizza business. At the time, he was a moderately robust young man who could haul around 50-pound bags of flour. He gave his family a three-year commitment, but that was cut short in 1976.
Paralyzed in shooting
On his way to deposit $1,000 in the bank, Barrett was shot by a robber in the parking lot of the pizza parlor. He was paralyzed from the shoulders down.
Overnight, he says, he turned from a 28-year-old into someone in his 60s. The bullet damaged his fifth cervical vertebra, causing neurological damage.
Police never caught the shooter.
During rehabilitation at a Seventh-day Adventist hospital, Barrett learned how to use a stick to enable him to position magazines for reading, as well as to hold a cigarette.
In 1978, Barrett returned to Hawai'i, sadder but still determined to make a go of his life in the Pacific.
Though he enjoyed Hawai'i's ethnic diversity, he never was a follower of Native Hawaiian culture. In fact, Hawaiian sovereignty didn't hit his radar screen until 1984, when he was house-sitting for a friend on the Wai'anae Coast.
Barrett recalls listening to a radio-show debate between KGU personality Bill Maniaci and University of Hawai'i-Manoa professor Haunani-Kay Trask. He says he was stunned by what he heard.
"Here was a highly educated woman who went to the best Mainland universities, and what she was saying was just goofy," he said.
He bought historian Ralph Kuykendall's three volumes on Hawaiian history. By 1993, he was observing debates and rallies held to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy.
It was around then that he watched the 'ñlelo public access channel's telecast of a mock tribunal for war crimes. He found himself wanting to sit in the empty courtroom seat that was meant to represent the United States.
"I kept thinking, 'I could win this for America'," he said.
Barrett took the position that Hawaiian entitlements were racial preferences that violate constitutional equal-protection guarantees. So when he saw Rice and Goemans talking about their case at a TV press conference in 1996, he called Rice and asked for his lawyer's phone number.
Then he walked down Kapahulu Avenue to Goemans' oceanside apartment near Diamond Head to donate $100 to their cause.
Ideal plaintiff
After the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Rice in February 2000, Barrett joined a group of 13 non-Hawaiians who sued the state for their right to run for OHA's governing board.
Barrett says he barely knew the other plaintiffs, and met them once or twice during the course of the case. When they won, he recalls, five of them celebrated quietly at O'Toole's Pub in downtown Honolulu.
Meanwhile, Goemans had decided that Barrett would be an ideal plaintiff in his more sweeping challenge to Article 12 of the Hawai'i Constitution. The lawyer approached Barrett with his proposition in mid-August.
At first Barrett was reluctant to take the spotlight: "I said, 'Can't you find a better guy, someone brighter, better-looking, wearing a cowboy hat?"
He told Goemans to go away and spend a week looking for a better plaintiff, but to come back if he hit a dead end.
Goemans didn't even look. He was certain he'd hit the jackpot. He got back to Barrett and told him, "You're the guy."
"You think I'm ready for primetime?" Barrett asked.
Barrett says he's confident Goemans will emerge victorious from a May 27 hearing on the request for a preliminary injunction to halt operations at OHA and the state Department of Hawaiian Home Lands.
Goemans, on the other hand, expects to appeal the case to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. The federal judge presiding over the case in Honolulu is Ezra, who had dismissed Rice's claim that OHA's Hawaiian-only elections violate constitutional equal voting rights.
Goemans does not expect Ezra's position to have changed.
Win or lose, Barrett has no intention of leaving Hawai'i. He likes his neighborhood. He looks forward to the Friends of the Library book sale every year at McKinley High, and the No. 1 bus gets him where he needs to go.
Meanwhile, on the Windward side, the other Patrick Barrett gets the plaintiff's fan messages and hate phone calls.
"We'll have to do lunch one day," said the Barrett whose lawsuit may end up changing Hawai'i.
