I’ve been looking back at prior things I’ve written that deal with issues raise by the current Hawaiian uprising on Mauna Kea.
On the top of my list: “Ian Lind: Dangerous Intersection of Social Policy and ‘Sacred’“, Civil Beat, April 29, 2015.
To the extent that opposition to the construction of the TMT is grounded in ideas of what is considered “sacred” according to particular current beliefs about Native Hawaiian religious traditions, we’re in that dangerous territory where public policy and religious beliefs collide. Working through such differences in a diverse society such as ours is necessarily difficult.
Luckily, we’ve evolved a legal approach to religious rights that, with time and a bit of luck, allows different religions and religious communities to co-exist within our society.
With this in mind, it’s instructive to look at how the issues of the sacredness of Mauna Kea, along with the protection of traditional Hawaiian religious and cultural practices, were dealt with during the prolonged contested case hearing conducted under the auspices of the Board of Land and Natural Resources.
“Ian Lind: The ‘Kingdom Defense’ Is a Dead End for Mauna Kea Protesters,” Civil Beat, July 22, 2015.
I can understand and sympathize with those who rely on the Kingdom defense in order to make a very public political statement that they oppose the state’s policy for development of Mauna Kea. That’s well and good. But they shouldn’t have any expectation that this particular defense has any chance of prevailing in court or shielding them from the legal consequences of civil disobedience.
Asserting the jurisdiction of the Kingdom may make for lively political theater, but as a legal argument, it’s clearly a loser. And holding the approach out as a realistic legal strategy does a disservice to these and other potential defendants.
“Hawaii Monitor: Is Part of the Sovereignty Debate Just a Matter of Faith?”, Civil Beat, March 5, 2014.
Here’s the problem that I see. Hawaiians have experienced a prolonged period of downward relative social mobility. They might be better off than before, but have lost ground relative to other ethnic groups. In my view, this decline doesn’t date back to 1893, or 1898, but to the post-WWII period.
After all, in the first decades of the 20th Century, following annexation, Hawaiians made up the largest segment of the islands’ electorate. Many Hawaiians, probably a majority, followed leaders like Prince Kuhio and John C. Lane, into the Republican Party, even during those decades when the Big Five and the Caucasian elite dominated the islands’ politics and economy through the GOP.
During the decades that followed, up through World War II, Hawaiians benefited greatly from political patronage, and dominated the ranks of police officers, firefighters, teachers, and other government employees.
That changed in the post-war years, as the Democratic Party gained power by building a political coalition around the Japanese-American voting block. Although many Hawaiians also worked hard for Democratic victories, the ethnic makeup of the government workforce clearly changed, to the detriment of the Hawaiian community.
Somehow, while other, more recently arrived ethnic groups have climbed up the social ladder, Hawaiians still have more than their share of poverty, ill health, poor housing, imprisonment, unemployment, and other social problems. Progress, economic development, and the passage of time have brought fewer benefits to Hawaiians than to other segments of the community, or so it seems.
Anyway, the links will take you to the full columns. Food for thought.
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Hawaiians arrived here by navigating the stars. Reframe this to the Polynesian voyager tradition and there’s room to take that tradition into the future – Hawaiians helping map the stars with these telescopes and eventually Hawaiians in space helping navigate and explore. Sorry, been watching a lot of Star Trek recently.
UH law professor Williamson Chang has a lengthy essay in Friday/Saturday’s online newspaper “Indian Country Today.”
https://newsmaven.io/indiancountrytoday/opinion/hawai-i-law-professor-provides-insight-on-mauna-kea-to-university-of-hawai-i-board-of-regents-mtsT94lbqE61-23Sy404Fw/
Chang explains that the concept of Mauna Kea being “sacred” is not at all about religion — he explains “sacred” is used in the sense we say a child is sacred to its parents, or even a dog [dare I add cat?] is sacred to a family. Chang’s main point is his view that neither the State of Hawaii nor UH has jurisdiction over Mauna Kea because (he claims) there is no Treaty of Annexation. I wrote an online comment providing evidence Chang is wrong about the Treaty. But my main point from Chang is that the whole brouhaha over Mauna Kea is about Hawaiian Sovereignty, not religion.
In my own view the whole religion “sacred” thing for Mauna Kea is pure shibai. The adz quarry up there proves that even before Western contact the natives did not hesitate to send low-class maka’ainana there (not “wao Akua” reserved for high chiefs or priests) to dig into the ground (desecration?) to harvest basalt rock for commercial purposes (they took it down and traded it for goods and services). They further desecrated the place by leaving behind their piles of poop and trash whose middens are still there.
Very few ethnic Hawaiians today actually believe in the old gods or pray to them for anything other than ceremonial protocol to honor the ancient culture.
Today’s activists disrespect the clear choice of their ancestral leadership by trying to revive the dead religion they killed, and also by using it as a mere pawn in today’s political game.
The old Hawaiian religion was abolished in 1819, the year BEFORE the Christian missionaries came. It was abolished by the freely made decision of the 4 top leaders of the natives themselves, exercising self-determination on behalf of their “lahui”, who abolished it at a huge lu’au by publicly breaking the ‘aikapu (men and women must eat separately). They jointly ordered the destruction of all heiau and burning of the god idols, throughout the Kingdom.
1. King Liholiho Kamehameha II; the elder son of Kamehameha The Great;
2. Keopuolani, his biological mother, the “sacred wife” of Kamehameha The Great, had the highest spiritual mana in all Hawaii and the kapumoe (anyone nearby must lie face down in the dirt to avoid polluting her mana);
3. Ka’ahumanu his stepmother and favorite wife of Kamehameha The Great, who made a political coup by stepping forward at the lu’au immediately after breaking the ‘aikapu, standing next to Liholiho, and announcing “We two shall rule together” and proceeded to be his kuhina nui (regent) for many years;
4. Hewahewa, the kahuna nui (high priest) of the old religion.
Today’s activists disrespect the clear choice of their ancestral leadership by trying to revive the dead religion they killed, and also by using it as a mere pawn in today’s political game.
Pre-contact Hawaii was constantly at war. Using modern technology and hired guns, Kamehameha unified Hawaii, ushering in a new era of peace. The harsh old religion was out of place in this newly peaceful and prosperous world. The elements that led to the fall of the old religion included contact with the outside world and later Christianization, but the role of political unification under Kamehameha is overlooked. Maybe if Hawaii had been united but without contact with the outside world, the old religion might have persisted, but it probably would have evolved into different kind of religion in the new conditions.
Relative position is a little tricky. You can compare the Socio economic status of Hawaaian found in the last chapter of Hawaii pono to today. The problematic part of that is the multiethnic population in Hawaii. Where before people would choose mixed ethnicity the effect could go either way. Upper soci economic locals could choose Hawaiian as an ethnicity. As could lower ones.
“Hawaiian” identity today refers mostly to afflictions that hurt the poor, not to a common culture or community. “Hawaiians” are inherently disunited because they have only two things in common, the problems of the working class and some Hawaiian ancestry. Some “Hawaiians” create the “Hawaiian” identity by fabricating a crisis.
https://www.civilbeat.org/2019/08/trisha-kehaulani-watson-it-took-a-crisis-to-bring-hawaiians-back-together/
Everyone needs to understand that OHA does not actually oppose the TMT on Mauna Kea but wants to control access and the money to be extracted for granting same. If OHA or another entity controlled by Hawaiians were in charge, would the opposition cease or merely be redirected? Would this public political theater dramatically change? Have the “protectors” thought this through? Have their supporters? Has OHA? Not long ago, geothermal power on the Big Island was a “desecration” too. Then at some point it wasn’t anymore.
The spectrum of belief regarding Mauna Kea may vary, but at its core this dispute is about power, identity, ego, and control.
Young Hollywood stars love the protests. But in Hawaii, what will be the reaction against defending a religion that everybody knows doesn’t exist?
“A kingdom was overthrown, a nation dispossessed.” To what extent is this story a liberal story that places blame on old local Republican elites rather than the local Democratic Party? The typical Hawaiian was never dispossessed by the toppling of a monarchy because they had few possessions to begin with. The real “overthrow” of the Hawaiians was the Democratic Revolution of 1954 when government jobs that were a sure thing for Hawaiians became jobs for Asians. Liberals don’t want to talk about this, and neither do Hawaiians and Asians.
Then there is the Keystone Cops nature of government in Hawaii. We all have stories about Hawaii’s government, but how would it feel to know that a government job is out of reach for you and then you encounter government workers who are so comically inept and corrupt? They seem to hire people for the sake of hiring people, but they ain’t gonna hire you.
Over 85% of job losses are from automation. Garbage trucks in Hawaii used to have three or four big Hawaiian guys on board, now it’s just one guy driving a mechanized truck. Last time I saw a garbage truck in Hawaii, the driver was Vietnamese, and Vietnamese truck drivers want their sons to be engineers, businessmen and doctors. Some people can recover quicker from automation than others.
As governor, John Burns would have State workers fired if they had a family member who ran for political office as a Republican. Since Native Hawaiians used to be mostly Republicans, this policy might have had a disproportionate impact on Hawaiians.
How could one do credible historical research to find out if this was true? Could one look over the archives of State government employees throughout the 1950s and 1960s and early 1970s and assume that people with Hawaiian names are Hawaiian? Also, which Hawaiian names? The last name is surely proof of some ethnic background, but later it became fashionable to give children Hawaiian first and middle names. (People named Kam and Maile are usually total haoles.) Also, when Chinese came to Hawaii, they sometimes changed their family names from Lam, Han and Pan, etc., to Alama, Ahana and Apana, and so forth. Chinese were (are) also mostly Republicans, and Chinese men often married Hawaiian women, so that is another wrinkle.
In any case, if it was true, it was just one of many blows against Hawaiian socioeconomic status since Statehood.