July 4, 1776 marked the creation of the United States through the Declaration of Independence. Hawaii proudly celebrates that date as part of our heritage because Hawaii joined the union.

July 4, 1894 marked the creation of the Republic of Hawaii through the publication of its Constitution. At least five delegates to the Constitutional Convention were native Hawaiians; the Constitution was published in both English and Hawaiian; the Speaker of the House was former royalist John Kaulukou.

July 4, 1960 marked the date when the U.S. flag with 50 stars was first officially displayed, by being raised at 12:01 AM at the Fort McHenry National Monument in Baltimore, Maryland (where Francis Scott Key had written “The Star Spangled Banner”). Although Hawaii’s statehood was ratified by 94.3% of Hawaii voters and proclaimed by President Eisenhower in 1959, the tradition is to make the date for official display of an updated flag the following July 4.

A webpage provides a description of what Hawaii was like on July 4, 1776; the significance of the creation of the Republic of Hawaii on July 4, 1894 and annexation of Hawaii to the U.S. in 1898. It includes links to the Constitution of the Republic of Hawaii; a political biography of President Sanford B. Dole; photos of the original letters personally signed by emperors, kings, queens, and presidents of 20 nations on 4 continents in 11 languages recognizing the Republic as the legitimate government of Hawaii; a proposed treaty of annexation to the United States written in 1854 by King Kauikeaouli Kamehameha III which failed of the King’s signature by reason of his death; the Morgan Report of February 1894 (an 808-page report of the investigation into the events surrounding the Hawaiian Revolution of 1893, and the alleged role of U.S. peacekeepers in the overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani); full text of the Treaty of Annexation between the Republic of Hawaii and the United States of America (1898), and of the resolutions whereby the Republic of Hawaii legislature and the U.S. Congress ratified it; Hawaii Great Statehood Petition of 1954 — 120,000 Signatures Gathered in 2 Weeks On a Petition for Statehood for Hawaii; the Statehood vote count in 1959, broken down by representative districts; The Native Hawaiians Study Commission report of 1983; and other items relevant to the significance of our July 4 holiday. See

http://tinyurl.com/68u7nz

Break out the champagne and the 12-pages of Hawaiiglish, it’s OHA grant application time!  (What is Hawaiiglish?  It’s the name I’ve come up with for the bizarre hybrid of English and Hawaiian that is especially popular in the field of obtaining Hawaiian grants or talking about Hawaii when you’re running for office.  You know . . . when you get sentences like, “The kapuna understand the matrix of needs required to foster care of the ohana.”  Yes, this is a pet peeve of mine, since I feel like it’s pandering–as though Native Hawaiians are going to applaud anything you say just because you stuck the word “pono” in the sentence.)

By Malia Blom Hill

Anyway, as part of its announcement of the new granting year, OHA also published its list of priorities.  And, to be scrupulously fair, many of them are completely reasonable and even necessary.  For example, there is a huge emphasis placed on increasing economic self-sufficiency for Native Hawaiians, with a specific goal of increasing family income and housing stability.  There are also laudable mentions of the need to exceed education standards and preserve Hawaiian culture.  Heck, I don’t even have a quarrel with the emphasis on preserving the environment and protecting the land.  There are places in this country where I might not be moved by that (I’m looking at you here, Newark), but Hawaii . . . well, that is some beautiful, beautiful stuff.

Of course, what I’ve done here is once again (like a broken CD or KPOI’s playlist) come back, yet again, to the same theme.  In effect, laudable goals do not equal laudable programs.  That’s why this exercise in transparency is so necessary.  Native Hawaiians deserve to know if all of these efforts to increase their family income, preserve their land, and protect their culture are actually good and effective program, or if they’re nothing more than vanity projects, giveaways to favored groups, or noble ideas that just don’t work in the real world.  Or whether they’re working like crazy and just need some more publicity and support to really help.  Some people get threatened by transparency efforts like 4HawaiiansOnly.  They think we’re trying to attack people or take away their support.  That’s a very defensive and short-sighted view.  All we’re doing is giving people the information they need to make an informed judgment about how their money is being spent.  You have to wonder about the motivations of those who want to prevent people from having that knowledge.

Taken from Politico by Andrew Glass:

On this day in 1898, the House approved Senate Joint Resolution 55 providing for the annexation of Hawaii as a U.S. territory. At the time, Hawaii was an independent republic. The vote was 209-91.

The Republic of Hawaii had been declared on July 4, 1894, under the presidency of Sanford Dole, a native speaker born in Hawaii into a family of Protestant missionaries from Maine. Dole, a cousin of the pineapple magnate, advocated the Americanization of Hawaiian society and culture, while pressing for annexation of the Pacific island chain.

An alliance of anti-imperialist Republicans and Democrats in the House — including Speaker Thomas Reed (R-Maine) — opposed the annexation treaty negotiated under President William McKinley. For nearly a month, Reed blocked the resolution from coming up for debate.

The resolution was largely the handiwork of Rep. Francis Newlands (D-Nev.). Proponents of annexation eventually prevailed by sponsoring a joint resolution, which needed simple majority approval, rather than a vote on McKinley’s treaty, which would have required a two-thirds Senate majority.

Earlier in the year, the Senate had rejected the proposal after being presented with a petition signed by 38,000 Hawaiians.

Eventually, overwhelming sentiment in the House in favor of annexation forced Reed to relent — though he voted against it.

The Senate approved the measure on July 4, 1898; McKinley signed it on July 7. In August, a ceremony on the steps of the former royal palace in Honolulu marked the impending transfer of sovereignty.

Hawaii officially became a U.S. territory on April 23, 1900. Robert William Wilcox, who had sought to restore the Hawaiian monarchy through several unsuccessful rebellions, served as its first delegate.

In 1959, Hawaii became the 50th state.

Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0610/38513.html#ixzz0r2foN2HI

June 11 is Kamehameha Day — an official holiday of the State of Hawaii.

The greatest accomplishment of King Kamehameha The Great was to unify all the Hawaiian islands under a single government 200 years ago.

But now once again we are threatened with the Akaka bill in Congress, whose primary purpose is to rip us apart along racial lines.

The Kingdom founded by Kamehameha was multiracial in all aspects. John Young (Englishman) was so important to the founding of the Kingdom that his tomb is in Mauna Ala (the Royal Mausoleum on Nu’uanu Ave.), where it is the only tomb built to resemble a heiau, and is guarded by a pair of pulo’ulo’u (sacred taboo sticks). His bones are the oldest bones in Mauna Ala. Yet the Akaka bill would deny John Young membership in the Akaka tribe.

The first sentence of Hawaii’s first Constitution (1840), known to historians as the kokokahi sentence, was written on advice of American missionary William Richards. In English, it can be translated into modern usage as follows: “God has made of one blood all races of people to dwell upon this Earth in unity and blessedness.”

The Akaka bill would do exactly the opposite of the one-blood concept, ripping us apart for no reason other than race, establishing a binary opposition of “us vs. them,” dividing Hawaiian children from non-Hawaiian parents, spawning jealousies between members of the Akaka tribe and their cousins who are not allowed to belong. This is not aloha.

The Kingdom of Hawaii was founded by people of different races working together on the battlefield and in the government. That cooperation continued throughout the Kingdom’s history. Every person born in the Kingdom, regardless of race, was thereby a subject of the Kingdom with all the same rights as ethnic Hawaiians. Immigrants could become naturalized subjects of the Kingdom, with full rights; and many Asians and Caucasians did so. From 1850 to 1893, about 1/4 to 1/3 of the members of the Legislature at various times were Caucasians appointed by the King to the House of Nobles and also elected to the House of Representatives (and later elected to the House of Nobles after a Constitutional change).

There has never been a unified government for all the Hawaiian islands that included only ethnic Hawaiians, either among the leaders or among the people.

We’ve all heard the closing line spoken by ministers presiding over weddings: “What God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.” Today, in honor of Kamehameha Day, let’s say: What Kamehameha hath joined together, let not Akaka rip asunder.

A more detailed version of this essay is at:
 http://tinyurl.com/2c3ue8v

By Malia Hill

When you’re a blogger, you dream about finding something as neatly symbolic as today’s OHA filing against the state for past due land revenues. How lucky is it to find a perfect storm of problems and issues to define everything about Hawaii that makes you want to pull your hair out? Race problems? Economic issues? A government that puts problems off for later so that they can get worse and more divisive? It’s all there.

As you may have heard, OHA has filed a writ of mandamus against the State seeking to compel the legislature to act regarding the payment of hundreds of millions of dollars in past due ceded land revenues. (OHA has submitted proposals for payment to the Legislature for the past three years, but the proposals have all been rejected.) You gotta love the timing here, considering that the country (and state) are still reeling from the economic downturn. Especially in light of the recent legislative session, teacher negotiations, and so on. The State isn’t exactly swimming in funds, and OHA seems to be determined to make itself more unpopular in its ham-fisted approach to the issue. I’m sure the average Hawaii taxpayer will be thrilled by this turn of events.

Though one wonders whether the average Hawaii taxpayer has given up and is busy drinking mojitos on the beach rather than deal with an elected leadership that has created a tradition of avoiding hard decisions. Sure, there are those who buck the trend, but I don’t see OHA deciding that they’ll just write off $200 million any time soon. So this isn’t a problem that is going away. Instead, it promises to add to the already growing divisiveness about race, the ceded lands, sovereignty, and the Islands. Honestly, it’s a little depressing sometimes to watch the slow erosion of the island spirit thanks to these issues.

But hey, at least the weather is awesome and the beaches are great. People from crummier locales probably have nothing better to do than engage in responsible governance.

By Malia Hill

When I grow up, I want to be an editorial writer for the Honolulu Advertiser. What a sweet gig that would be. I’d just have to get up in the morning, come to the office, change around a few sentences in a press release from some favored organization (or on a really strenuous day, check in with the head of Hawaii’s Democratic Party for the official line), then head out for a good lunch and a refreshing siesta.

What? You say there’s more to it than that?

You’re right. Sometimes I might have to go to staff meetings. But still . . . .what a great gig.

Too harsh? Well, perhaps you should consider the Advertiser’s recent editorial on the OHA suit against the state (mentioned in Wednesday’s post by the way). Titled “Real leaders find a way to pay debts,” it is little more than a rearrangement of OHA’s press release, accompanied by the wonderfully obvious title point. I’m sure that in response, Hawaii’s leaders are slapping themselves in the forehead and saying, “Of course! It’s all so clear now! Since we aspire to be real leaders, we’ll just hand over the $200 million tomorrow! I don’t know why we didn’t think of it before!”

It’s just so darned easy to be a left-leaning editorial writer. The Hawaiians deserve their money. Teachers deserve to be paid more. The environment needs to be protected better. The state of our health system needs to be improved. Government housing is a scandal. There isn’t a problem under the sun that can’t be addressed by the state treasury. Unfortunately for the actual real leaders involved, there isn’t a money tree sitting outside the state house. (Believe me, I’ve looked. Something has to explain the way the rationale of the state budget process.) And Hawaii’s taxpayers–though mellower than many–still have this weird desire to hold on to the bulk of their earnings. So sometimes, no matter how much something is deserved, there is no easy solution. Because that $200 million owed to the Native Hawaiians doesn’t come from some mysterious fountain of gold coins in the Governor’s office. It comes from our paychecks. And a lot of us have seen those paychecks take a hit lately. So we’re hurting. And the state is hurting. And it makes the whole thing a lot more complicated than OHA or the Advertiser want to admit.

Many property deeds nationwide include easements to guarantee ownership and access for electric, cable, water, and sewer lines. But Hawaii is unique among the 50 states in having racial entitlements which strip government and private landowners of property rights commonly recognized elsewhere and give superior rights to one racial group.

Here are some of the racial entitlements that strip landowners of rights they would expect in other states.

The public trust doctrine for water gives superior status to taro over rice or sugar. The PASH decision allows ethnic Hawaiians to trespass on private property to gather materials and/or to get access to the shoreline, while apparently not allowing such trespass to other races. If an ancient Hawaiian burial is discovered during a construction project, no further construction can take place until a committee of ethnic Hawaiian cultural practitioners decides whether the bones can be moved or must remain in place; and a decision to remain in place is generally taken to mean that nothing can be built on top of the bones.

While such decisions might normally be regarded as regulatory takings for which property owners could demand compensation through inverse condemnation, these decisions circumvent any such outcome by claiming to be based on newly rediscovered “traditional and customary” practices which have always been part of Hawaii’s common law or written law even though long forgotten.

For no good reason at all, a Hawaiian language phrase in royal patent deeds from the time of the Mahele has been translated as “reserving the rights of the native tenants” when in fact the word “native” does not belong there.

For no good reason at all, the regulations for the Northwest Hawaiian Islands are written to recognize all “Native Hawaiians” as having special rights to access for religious and cultural practice even though very few ethnic Hawaiians actually engage in such things and even though Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, and Caucasian bones are there which should guarantee those racial groups the same rights of access.

For no good reason at all, legislation was proposed to give ethnic Hawaiians a majority of seats on a new commission proposed to regulate bioprospecting on all public and private lands. The commission would be empowered to collect permit fees from landowners and a portion of the royalties due to landowners for the use of the samples collected from their lands, and to allocate a large portion of the fees and royalties to the exclusive use of ethnic Hawaiians.

For no good reason at all, Waimea Valley on Oahu, purchased with Honolulu County tax dollars and private funds, was simply turned over to OHA. There were recently bills in the legislature (which failed) regarding at least three valleys on O’ahu (Haiku, Kahana, and Makua) that proposed to create cultural reserve commissions with explicitly guaranteed majorities of ethnic Hawaiian commissioners, place them under the authority of OHA, and then automatically turn those valleys over to the Akaka tribe once the tribe has achieved federal recognition.

For no good reason at all, the public lands ceded to the U.S. at annexation and ceded back to Hawaii at statehood are assumed to have a racial easement on them — a special right to collective ownership by ethnic Hawaiians, including a right to derive income from them and to prohibit the state from selling any parcel of them.

For details see the new webpage at

http://tinyurl.com/24zngaf

Parade Magazine on 5/30/10 contained a brief discussion of the appointment of Kimberly Teehee as the first White House senior policy advisor for Native American Affairs. Teehee says; “Job creation is a huge priority: unemployment rates on some reservations are as high as 80%”. To my knowledge and I expect, yours, there are no special unemployment problems at all with mainstream Americans who have Indian ancestry but have opted out of their “Indian Nation”. Why would that be so?

“ Indian Country has great needs, but our future is far from bleak—more than $3 billion was directed to Indian tribes through the Recovery Act, and the 2011 budget provides a 5% increase over 2010”, says Teehee. But these tribal Indians will get access to that money only through abiding by the whims of their tribal chiefs. None of them have the option of governing their own lives unless they leave the “safety” of the reservation.

If problems like unemployment and extreme obesity disappeared from these Indian reservations— and they certainly should with $3 billion plus 5%—would Kimberly Teehee have a job? Could it be that Teehee’s continued prosperity and power are connected to the persistence of Indian tribes’ unemployment, extreme obesity and other severe social problems?

The Akaka bill, pending in the U.S. Senate, makes, by law, native Hawaiians an Indian tribe. Would that push our friends, neighbors and family members of native Hawaiian ancestry into the Indian atrocity model described above? We should hope not. No one knows for sure.

Do you want to risk it?

Though there has been a great deal of talk about the pros and cons of the Akaka Bill regarding the future of Hawaii, it is surprising to see how little of that debate takes into account the established precedents that govern those Native American tribes already recognized by the federal government. While there has been some debate over the extent to which the Bill creates a “tribe” in the same sense for Native Hawaiians as it has for Cherokees or Seminoles, it is certain that all existing precedent (and indeed the Constitutional provision that—probably—allows Congress to act in the case of the Akaka Bill) come from the laws governing Indian tribes. In other words, if we want to peer into the future of a post-Akaka Hawaii, we ought to take a look at what’s happening with tribal law.

And when you consider just how haywire things can go, it’s hard to find a better example than the Indian Child Welfare Act. The Act was passed in 1978 in response to real and serious concerns about the alarmingly high number of Indian children who were being removed from their homes (and their tribes) to be placed in non-Indian homes—threatening tribal stability and even survival. In response, Congress gave tribes an extremely strong voice in child custody proceedings involving an Indian child, including exclusive jurisdiction over cases where the child resides on the reservation or is a ward of the tribe.

Doesn’t seem so bad, does it? Enter the law of unintended consequences.

While the Act certainly served its function in protecting the survival of the tribes and their culture, the obvious potential for abuse of the Act’s provisions have also created a heartbreaking collection of cases where the welfare of children and families takes a back seat to political intrusion and people exploiting the system for their own purposes. It’s all there: children returned to a home where the State had evidence of sexual abuse—and over the objections of the children’s own natural parents—by a tribal court exercising its exclusive jurisdiction over the case. Children taken away from a non-Native parent by the family that can use the Act to settle old scores. And the list goes on and on.

And now consider what the Indian Child Welfare Act could mean for a Native Hawaiian tribe—especially in a state where people are proud to call themselves “hapa.” If the Act is determined to apply to the new Native Hawaiian government (and there’s no evidence that it won’t), family law in Hawaii may take a very ugly turn, with the Native Hawaiian government (or that side of the family) having the power to set the rules and run the show in child custody cases—even to the point of being able to come in long after custody has been settled and remove a Hawaiian child from a “non-Hawaiian” home. The pain that this could cause to a community and culture that has such a proud tradition of ohana is profound.

Our islands are different. Our culture is different. There’s a reason that the opponents of the Akaka Bill point to our history to show that Hawaii has always been an inclusive society, not a tribe. What a shame it will be if this Bill tears apart our long tradition of unity by creating a new tribe.

Malia Blom Hill is a Research Fellow of Grassroot Institute of Hawaii, where one of her major projects is centered on www.4hawaiiansonly.com Please visit and consider helping by adding your research, commentary, or support. Malia may be contacted by email at 4hawaiiansonly@gmail.com