While Senators Dan Inouye (D-HI) and Dan Akaka (D-HI) pledge to bring the Akaka Bill back for a vote next session, a "Nation Building Proposal to the Trustees" published in the HawaiiReporter.com on June 28th indicates that after 6 years of attempts, OHA is no longer going to continue waiting for the Akaka Bill.

Instead, the document, “Hooulu Lahui Aloha – To Raise a Beloved Nation” outlines a non-Akaka strategy patterned on state-recognized Indian tribes.

The OHA document, labeled “draft-confidential,” outlines six steps ending with “convening of a representative governing entity.” These are followed by a seventh step; “Negotiating the transfer of Hawaiian assets to the Native Hawaiian Governing Entity.” An eighth step envisions further efforts to win federal recognition as a tribe. Without federal recognition, the tribal government is unlikely to succeed in shielding Kamehameha schools and other Hawaiians-only entitlements from federal lawsuits alleging racial discrimination. Also there is also no precedent for a state tribe to organize its own legal system as some federal tribes do.

The Supreme Court decision in Rice v Cayetano presents a more immediate obstacle. In this landmark 1999 ruling, the Supreme Court invalidated the use of a Hawaiians-only voter roll in OHA elections and the restriction of candidate eligibility to only those with Hawaiian ancestry.

The document states: “… Hawaiian delegate elections will not be considered State elections since no State funds will be utilized, it will still behoove us to follow the various legal precedents which have been established concerning elections to avoid legal challenges in the future.”

If this is an attempt to dodge Rice by claiming the elections are not State of Hawaii elections, it is a pretty thin dodge. The document itself is evidence that state funds are being used to organize the elections.

Another possibility is that elections will be open to all Hawaii voters, as OHA elections currently are. If so, that would bring into question exactly what it is that is being organized, since the electorate and candidates are not restricted to members of the purported Hawaiian "tribe."

There is noting in the document which indicates this will be OHA’s plan. OHA, however is a state of Hawaii body, elected by the entire electorate of the State and led by elected officials of any racial background.

The state of Hawaii is organizing a racially defined subsection of the population into a tribe whether they want it or not. The Kau Inoa registration list is claimed by OHA to have “approximately 50,000 registrants” as of June 2006, “including individuals who are…under the age of 18 years.”

According to the document, Kau Inoa will form the electorate for the Hawaiian tribe. A timeline is proposed working toward a Hawaiian Constitutional Convention which will run from June 11, 2007, to Sept. 14, 2007, conveniently missing the 2007 legislative session.

According to OHA’s timeline, Kau Inoa will close registration April 7, 2007. While Kau Inoa tribal registration continues, apportionment of Constitutional Convention Delegate districts will be conducted starting Aug. 1, 2006, until Nov. 15, 2006. The deadline for candidates to file to run for delegate to the Hawaiian Constitutional Convention is Jan. 17, 2007. Elections for delegates will occur three months later, April, 21, 2007.

Fifty thousand out of 401,000 Hawaiians is not exactly a rousing mandate for tribal government, but Kau Inoa is not an effort to register every Hawaiian -- just those who support establishing a government or believe that signing up will give them an edge in claiming some future benefits.

The Kau Inoa registration form reads in part: “The Native Hawaiian Registration Form should be completed by Native Hawaiians who would like to participate in the formation of the Native Hawaiian government.” A poll conducted for the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii in June 2006, shows 59.5 percent support for the Akaka Bill among native Hawaiians.

OHA’s Numbers Game

In its document, OHA plays a strange little number game in order to make the 50,000 seem larger than it is. Of 401,000 Hawaiians about 240,000 are living in Hawaii and 161,000 living on the mainland. OHA’s numbers ignore Hawaiians living outside Hawaii and start with a 2000 census figure of 177,328 Hawaiians over age 18 living in Hawaii. From this they extrapolate potential registration numbers of 118,378 based on 66.7 percent voter registration levels in the population of Hawaii as a whole.

From that number they again extrapolate another 66.7 percent voter participation leaving 78,891 ballots expected to be cast. This number doesn’t look half bad compared to “approximately” (OHA-speak for “less than”) 50,000 Kau Inoa registrants -- including those under age 18. All one need do is forget about the Hawaiians living outside Hawaii, forget the unknown number of minors on the Kau Inoa rolls, forget about the native Hawaiians who do not support the Akaka Bill and forget about the fact that 78,891 is only 19.7 percent of 401,000 and then “almost 50,000” almost looks good.

The fact that Hooulu Lahui Aloha is a “confidential” nation-building proposal “to the Trustees” says it all. As long as OHA has the nearly unanimous backing of Hawaii’s political class, participation by actual Hawaiians is secondary.

With a state-recognized tribe likely unable to protect Hawaiian entitlements against court challenges to their constitutionality why would OHA go forward? One reason comes from Sen. Dan Inouye (D-HI).

Inouye’s office indicates that the Senate has appropriated more than $1.2 billion for Native Hawaiian programs over the past 26 years. Inouye’s total of federal pork is equal to about $3,000 for every Hawaiian, but in this spoils system, "trustees" are more equal than other Hawaiians.

In Inouye’s scheme of things, a native Hawaiian "tribal" government is just one more excuse to feed taxpayer dollars into Hawaii’s oligarchic state-capitalist economy.

State recognized tribes are usually allotted very limited land, benefits and other assets, but much more could be on offer from the State of Hawaii. It is possible that ownership of as much as one-fifth of all “ceded lands” -- former property of the government of the Hawaiian Kingdom which passed to the Hawaii Republic, then to the US federal government and in 1959 to the state of Hawaii -- could be transferred to a Hawaiian tribe by the state. OHA already receives 1/5 of the revenues of the ceded lands every year. Between federal and state pork, land ownership and development deals, the income possibilities for a state tribe are enough to make even the greediest and most ambitious professional “trustee” blush.

Hawaiian Lumbees?

State recognized Indian tribes operate in a little known grey area of Indian law with few legal precedents and under varying state laws. In Hawaii state law there is no precedent at all. Lack of clear legal precedent creates a playground for corrupt politicians and their many friends in the judiciary.

The largest state tribe is the Lumbee Tribe of North Carolina. With over 40,000 members, the Lumbees have been recognized by the state of North Carolina since 1885 but are still denied full federal recognition as a tribe.

One issue surrounding challenges to federal recognition of the Lumbee is whether they are truly an Indian tribe or whether they are a community descended from an Indian tribe (the Cheraw or Cherokee of South Carolina) which then evolved into a refuge for escaped slaves, free blacks and any other people over the last 150 years who were on the outs with the North and South Carolina slave-owning Democrat elite, the Confederate dictatorship, or the Democrats’ Jim Crow system of segregation.

Civil Rights After 86 Years of Shooting at Democrats

Lumbee formed the nucleus of a community which resisted the Democrats system of slavery until slavery’s Civil War defeat in 1865. Toward the end of the Civil War and during Reconstruction, armed Lumbee guerillas fought Confederate and ex-Confederate Democrat planters who were attempting to steal Indian landowners’ property and force Indian men into indentured servitude. This conflict is known as the Henry Berry Lowrie War. Eighty six years after the Lowrie War ended, as many as 1,000 armed Lumbee men shot up a 1958 rally of the terrorist wing of the Democrat Party, the Ku Klux Klan.

By 1964 the civil rights movement had made it impossible for Democrats to maintain the support of white southerners as a voting bloc by sustaining segregation. Jim Crow segregation collapsed. In order to replace their lost white dependency voters Democrats enacted the mis-named “Great Society” programs in order to build a new dependency base (at taxpayer expense) among the victims of their former dependents.

In 1968, 10 years after they shot up the Klan rally, the Lumbee got federally funded social services programs under the newly formed “Lumbee Regional Development Association, Inc. (LRDA)” Notably the LRDA describes its goal in non-racial terms as working “aggressively to improve services for members of the Lumbee River community.”

The evolution of the Lumbee community from a group of displaced Indian families to a center of resistance to Democrat slavers and segregationists to a means of distributing social services benefits poses some of the same legal and historical issues as native Hawaiian recognition. Are the Lumbee really an Indian tribe -- or a socio-political "tribe"? These issues are at the core of why the Lumbee have not been federally recognized.

Ethnicity Becomes an Ideology

Jon Osorio, taro protester and chair of the U.H. Manoa Department of Hawaiian Studies calls for the Hawaiian Nation to include the “activist community.” In a recent OHA infomercial touting the need to pass the Akaka Bill, OHA Chair Apoliona suggested that a future Hawaiian Nation would be open to non-Hawaiians.

The Lumbee, including enemies of racism in the Democrat South, were a community of progressive freedom fighters who understood the importance of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and knew where to aim their guns.

A future Hawaiian Nation, if politically selected to include those from the "activist community," would be an agent for the destruction of Hawaiian culture and the evisceration of a Hawaiian nation in order to transform it into a tool of an anti-American ideological agenda cooked up at University of Hawaii at Manoa.

In the view of the U.H. academic Marxist taxpayer funded "activist community," ethnicity is an ideology. If you have the right ideology, you can become any ethnicity you wish. On the other hand, actual Indians (or Hawaiians or African Americans for that matter) who dare to challenge "politically correct" dogma are personally attacked in terms once used by the Klan and labeled sell-outs. The transformation of Hawaiian ethnicity into an ideology would be the end of the Hawaiian people.

Like the Lumbee, Hawaiians did not proceed directly from tribal society to a recognized tribe with a reservation. King Kamehameha instead unified the islands and chose to form a modern Kingdom. The Hawaiian Kingdom adopted modern ways including individual ownership of private property, advanced technologies, a postal system, a national currency, international trade, and diplomatic relations with other nations around the world.

Connected to its modernization, the Hawaiian Kingdom also chose to admit non-Hawaiians as equal subjects and even as high level officials.

Because of King Kamehameha’s wisdom and all of the history which has occurred since the arrival of Captain Cook, native Hawaiians have the greatest degree of political liberty, personal independence and freedom and highest standard of living of any Polynesian group. Since a state tribe will not be able to defend Kamehameha Schools or Hawaiian Homelands against "the lawsuits" it is a mystery why anybody not personally benefiting from pork and corruption would want to trade the modern Hawaiian lifestyle for a mid-Pacific Indian reservation.

If OHA goes through with its plan, this is where they will be leading Hawaiians over the next 14 months.

Hooulu Lahui Aloha – To Raise a Beloved Nation

http://www.hawaiireporter.com/file.aspx?Guid=7bcc9072-3c5a-4083-b247-6dcef18813ec

LRDA http://www.lumbee.org/administration.htm

State and other non-federal tribes:

http://kstrom.net/isk/maps/tribesnonrec.html

Henry Berry Lowrie War, 1865-72 http://www.lumbee.org/hbl.htm Lumbee Shoot up Klan Rally, 1958

http://www.uncp.edu/nativemuseum/collections/victory/index.htm

Andrew Walden is editor of the Hilo, Hawaii-based Hawaii Free Press. He may be contacted at mailto:hfpeditor@email.com

HawaiiReporter.com reports the real news, and prints all editorials submitted, even if they do not represent the viewpoint of the editors, as long as they are written clearly. Send editorials to mailto:Malia@HawaiiReporter.com

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