Federal Recognition for Hawaiians
by Peter Apo
As I write this, it’s been 114 years since the flag of the Hawaiian Kingdom was lowered at ʻIolani Palace. In the Hawaiian struggle to restore our cultural dignity, honor, wealth, relevance, health, and wholeness we have become a divided people. We have spent most of our time looking backward at our painful and tragic past and seeking justice from a democratic system of government for which we’ve had little tolerance and less akamai. And we have spent too little time looking forward and working toward a common vision of a Hawaiian future.
There are more than a few Hawaiian voices that do not acknowledge the benefits of federal recognition, and who advocate a complete separation from the State of Hawaiʻi and the United States. These Hawaiian Nationals adamantly reject that they are subject to these governments and insist that OHA, as a creature of the State, works against “the people” by seeking federal recognition and therefore is complicit in denying a full measure of justice for Hawaiians. Whatever your opinion of Hawaiian Nationals, they do have a point that seeking federal recognition is an illogical appeal to a State and National Government who perpetuated the very political and cultural genocide from which we seek recovery in the first place.
So what do they propose? Some call on the United Nations to declare the overthrow of 1893 illegal and demand that the U.S. cease and desist from exercising their sovereign jurisdiction over Hawaiʻi, return our lands, and set us free as an independent nation in some restorative rejuvenation of the Kingdom model. Sound crazy? Maybe, but it is a mistake to dismiss them or to be offended by their passion, zeal, and activism no matter how vociferous. While some poke fun at these separatist ideas, I find some truth in their claim that federal recognition cannot possibly come close to any truly meaningful measure of sovereignty and will most likely result in a brokered redefinition of our relationship with the federal government, one in which our ambition for political sovereignty will yield a condition of being under house arrest but free to rearrange the furniture. An example of this is the red flag provision of the Akaka Bill that would prohibit Hawaiians from establishing casinos. Whatever your opinion is of casinos, the point is that our sovereignty is diminished by such a prohibition. I’m convinced that there will be more “you can’t do this – you can’t do that” realities of federal recognition.
But while I respect many aspects of the case for separatism, I am a die-hard pessimist about their United Nations strategy yielding even a modicum of success. It is naïve to think that the United Nations – a global body politic that allows the massacres occurring in the Middle East, the massive genocidal operations of fanatic militarists of the African continent, the destruction of the rain forests, the tolerance of starving children by the millions – will be inclined to tell the most powerful nation in the world that they are bad guys if they don’t “free” the Hawaiians and walk away from the country’s strategically most important geographic possession that is the very foundation of the nation’s forward thrust into the Pacific-Asian theater that includes China, Japan, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Korea, and the rest of the world. To hope for a U.N. fix is a fantasy. I wish it were not so, but it is.