Monday, January 4, will mark the 40th anniversary of the first protest landing on Kahoolawe to protest the use of the island as a Navy bombing range.
This small demonstration somehow came at just the right moment, and communicated just the right message, and sparked a movement that still reverberates in island life.
Click on the photo to see all the pictures from that day!
It was a long time ago.
How long, you might ask?
My answer:
The Vietnam War had ended less than a year before. The American Bicentennial year was beginning. Gerald Ford was president. John Waihee, later to serve as Hawaii’s governor, was looking forward to graduating from the new University of Hawaii Law School. Construction of the new Aloha Stadium was finished. The term “personal computer” was coined later in the year to refer to a little gadget called the “Altair.”
I wrote a brief essay about the experience which appears on Civil Beat today (“Ian Lind: Kahoolawe 40 Years Later“).
And I’m sure there will be other retrospectives over the next week.
For the record, I decided to post a set of my photographs taken on that long ago day. Just click on the photo below to see the whole gallery.
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Back then the Navy recalled for active duty Reserve Officer Scotty Stone, the Big Island novelist and one-time Advertiser writer, to be its point-man public affairs officer responding to the Kahoolawe movement. The assignment awakened in Scotty an interest in his own blood line that included Native American roots which he decided to study for a clearer understanding of his own ethnic identity. Can’t recall the upshot of it all, except that he became sympathetic to the uprising he was supposed to counter on the Navy’s behalf.
A lot of us who are old enough to remember dishes and jalousie windows rattling every time a bomb exploded on Kaho’olawe appreciate all the efforts of everyone who helped bring an end to that.