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INDEX OF NEWS REPORTS AND COMMENTARIES FROM SEPTEMBER 1 THROUGH DECEMBER 31, 2024

September 7, 2024: Leon Siu, who imagines himself to be Foreign Minister of a still-living Kingdom of Hawaii, publishes a brief "Aupuni Update" entitled "The Queen Never Abdicated" and lists 4 reasons for that assertion; Ken Conklin provides rebuttals including photographic evidence and legal argumentation.

Sept 21: Leon Siu, who imagines himself to be Foreign Minister of a still-living Kingdom of Hawaii, describes techniques for making the nation more visible, thereby adding credibility to its claim of continued existence.

Sept 22: Honolulu Civil Beat online newspaper publishes propaganda "news report", paid for by a grant from the Abigail Kawananakoa Foundation, celebrating the fact that Native Hawaiians are now in control of numerous important state government agencies with large budgets and policy-making authority.

Sept 22: ThisDay, a business magazine in Nigeria, reports that Professor David David, renowned diplomat, researcher and the Director General of the Nigerian Books of record and research center in Lagos, has been appointed Ambassador of the Sovereign Kingdom of Hawaii to Nigeria.

Sept 23: Honolulu Civil Beat features another article by its recently hired race-activist columnist Naka Nathaniel, with headline: "The Military Wants New State Land Leases. What Should We Get In Return? Native Hawaiian groups should step forward to challenge the state and the military."

October 12, 2024: Leon Siu, who imagines himself to be Foreign Minister of a still-living Kingdom of Hawaii, says the lands of Hawaii belong forever to the natives of Hawaii, and cites Lili'uokalani's warning to the people of USA, following her overthrow and annexation, that soon the tables will turn and a day of reckoning will come, the lands restored and the biblical punishment of Ahab will fall upon the wrong doers.

Oct 21: Royal Australian Air Force Air Vice Marshal Carl Newman, Pacific Air Forces deputy commander, met with Kuhio Lewis, the Chief Executive Officer from the Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement (CNHA), for talks on developing relationships and fostering cultural understanding between the military and the Native Hawaiian community Oct. 17, 2024. The leaders and their team members connected through sincere discussions on systemic disadvantages faced by Native Hawaiians and underscored the complexity of addressing long-standing problems rooted in transgenerational trauma.

Oct 25: Hawaiian Kingdom blog [Keanu Sai] says Major General Kenneth Hara retired as Adjutant General of the Hawai‘i National Guard. At first glance, his willful failure to transform the State of Hawai‘i into a military government in accordance with U.S. Department of Defense Directive 5100.1, U.S. Army Field Manual 6-27—chapter 6, and the law of occupation, which is the war crime by omission, is now a problem for someone else. On the contrary, he exacerbated the situation. General Hara’s conduct and omission to establish a military government comes squarely under U.S. Department of Defense Law of War Manual, para. 18.22.1, which states, “Any person who commits an act that constitutes a crime under international law is responsible therefor and liable to punishment.

Oct 26: Leon Siu, who imagines himself to be Foreign Minister of a still-living Kingdom of Hawaii, says he has been tracking for years the dispute between the United Kingdom and the Republic of Mauritius over the Chagos Islands. It has a parallel to our dispute with the United States: the manipulation of the United Nations’ decolonization process by the “administrative power” (the colonial or occupying nation) to manufacture an outcome in its favor. ... What is significant to us in Hawaii, is that the Chagos case was successfully resolved, setting a clear precedence for correcting an error made in a botched UN decolonization process.

Oct 28: Ian Lind [retired newspaper investigative reporter] says: "A Maui woman who sparked several takeovers of private land based on a mistaken understanding of Native Hawaiian rights has pleaded “no contest” to criminal charges for her admitted role in the illegal occupation of the home and property of a retired state judge. ... This is believed to be the first time felony charges have been successfully brought against Hawaiians wrongly asserting native land rights under the false theory of “heirdom” promoted by Hueu, which asserts a “lineal descendant” of the original recipient of a Hawaiian Kingdom-era royal land grant retains an ownership interest “in perpetuity” that is superior to modern land titles and gives the right to control the property." Detailed online comment by Ken Conklin recalls the "Perfect Title" scam perpetrated by Keanu Sai in the 1990s.

November 10, 2024: Leon Siu, who imagines himself to be Foreign Minister of a still-living Kingdom of Hawaii, says "The recent American elections ... exposed Americans are deeply concerned about illegal immigrants overwhelming the local population and losing control of their communities and resources to foreigners. ... that is what happened to Hawaii" along with identity theft through assimilation of ethnic Hawaiians into American cultural values.

Nov 12: A history-twisting plaque has been permanently installed in front of the President William McKinley statue at the Honolulu high school by that name, saying that the statue misrepresents history because it depicts President McKinley holding the Treaty of Annexation despite what the plaque asserts as facts, that there was no Treaty of Annexation [false] and that there were 28,000 signatures [false] representing 80% of the adult Hawaiian population [false] on a petition in 1897 opposing annexation. Full text of the newspaper story, and Ken Conklin's detailed online comments, are provided, along with links to news reports and commentaries beginning in 2011 regarding resolutions in the legislature demanding the removal of the McKinley statue and renaming of the school.

Nov 23: Leon Siu, who imagines himself to be Foreign Minister of a still-living Kingdom of Hawaii, says "On November 28, 1843 (181 years ago) the Kingdom of France and the United Kingdom formally recognized the Sandwich Islands (the Hawaiian Kingdom) as a sovereign, independent nation-state. In Hawaii, King Kamehameha III declared the date a national holiday and La Ku'oko'a was joyously celebrated as a holiday in the Kingdom for over 50 years! ... until 1895 when it so happened the American holiday “Thanksgiving Day” fell on November 28. The usurping “Republic of Hawaii”, trying to curry favor for annexation, made the American Thanksgiving Day, the national holiday instead of La Ku'oko'a ... this year, the American Thanksgiving Day falls on November 28, the day of La Ku'oko'a ... an opportunity to increase and spread awareness of the significance of La Ku’oko'a among our friends and families…" [Ken Conklin comments that in 1895, 2 years after the revolution that overthrew the monarchy, the Republic of Hawaii was formally recognized as the rightful successor government by at least 19 nations on 4 continents personally signed by their emperors, kings, queens, and presidents, thereby ending the Kingdom of Hawaii under international law -- a far more significant recognition than the 1843 agreement between low-level diplomats from only 2 nations who addressed only each other and not anyone from Hawaii.]

December 2, 2024: Trump promised federal recognition for the Lumbee Tribe. Will he follow through? Following the presidential election, the Lumbee hope there will be momentum behind their cause, but they face deep-rooted opposition from tribal nations across the country. [Lumbee seek federal recognition through legislation in Congress rather than through the Dept. of Interior, similar to the Akaka bill to create a Hawaiian tribe that was active in Congress from 2000 through 2012 but failed and has not been attempted since then.]

Dec 6: Stacy Kealohalani Ferreira was hired in November 2023 to be Office of Hawaiian Affairs CEO. Honolulu Star-Advertiser newspaper gives space for her to describe in glowing terms the goals she will pursue.

Dec 9: Honolulu Civil Beat "Who Should Be Trusted To Manage Remains Of Hawaiian Royals? Proposals are floating for either the Office of Hawaiian Affairs or a private entity to take over at the Royal Mausoleum." Major explanation by Ken Conklin regarding history of ownership of Royal Mausoleum and how today's efforts to do a racial takeover are similar to efforts 25 years ago to counteract Supreme Court decision in Rice v. Cayetano and followup decision in Arakaki v. State.

Dec 11 and Dec 15: Hula master Vicky Holt Takamine won a $450,000 prize; combining both interviews at December 11 index because they reinforce each other.
Dec 11 Boston University Radio interviews her about why she sees hula as a form of resistance against USA. 11-minute interview includes portions of a pounding, combative hula/song/chant "Ku Ha'aheo" [stand proudly].
Dec 15: Forbes Magazine online describes in greater detail both Takamine's award and her usage of hula as a weapon of resistance.

Dec 11 2024/Dec 12 2024/Jan 2025: Very lengthy "Atlantic Magazine" propaganda article celebrating "The Hawaiians Who Want Their Nation Back". Article announced and made available for subscribers on December 11, full text published in "Free Hawaii" blog on December 12; will be published in hardcopy magazine edition for January 2025; therefore text is posted as last item at bottom of this webpage.

Dec 14: Leon Siu, who imagines himself to be Foreign Minister of a still-living Kingdom of Hawaii, describes an incident at Honolulu City Council when a testifier spoke in Hawaiian language followed immediately by giving the same speech in English; a later testifier complained that Hawaiian is a dead language; and then three members of the Council immediately replied that Hawaiian is an official language of the State of Hawaii, can be used in government forums, and there are 24,000 fluent speakers [unclear what their level of fluency is].

Dec 15: Ken Conklin letter to editor in Sunday Honolulu Star-Advertiser: "Blessed to be Americans, in 50th State of United States"

END OF INDEX

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FULL TEXT OF ITEMS IN THE INDEX FROM SEPTEMBER 1 THROUGH DECEMBER 31, 2024

http://freehawaii.blogspot.com/2024/09/ke-aupuni-update-september-2024-queen.html
Free Hawaii blog, Ke Aupuni Update Saturday September 7, 2024

The Queen Never Abdicated

September is Hawaiian History month. The article in the April 27, 2024 Ke Aupuni Update was titled: “The Queen Never Surrendered”. This one is about the so-called “abdication” of Queen Liliuʻokalani. It is true, sort of

Here’s a brief recap of events leading up to the so-called abdication.

On January 17, 1893 with a company of armed US Marines backing them, white insurgents seize control of the government.

On December 18, 1893 President Cleveland denounces the actions of the insurgents, and calls for the reinstatement of Queen Liliuʻokalani and the lawful government of the Hawaiian Kingdom.

The insurgents respond by telling the US to mind its own business, then on July 4, 1894, proclaim the Hawaiian Kingdom was now the Republic of Hawaii.

From January 6-9, 1895, Hawaiian Patriots fail in an armed uprising to overthrow the “Republic” and restore Liliuʻokalani to the throne.

The leaders of the “rebellion” are captured, tried for treason and sentenced to death. January 16, 1895, Queen Liliuʻokalani was arrested, confined to a room at Iolani Palace and, on February 8, 1895, tried for treason against the Republic.

On January 24, 1895, while under house arrest, representatives of the Republic presented Liliuʻokalani with a letter of abdication for her to sign. They made it clear to her that if she did not sign, the leaders of the “rebellion” would be executed.

Under those conditions, to save the lives of her dear followers and friends, she signed the document of abdication.

The Republic then announced to the world that the Queen had abdicated and used it to fortify their claim of legitimacy. Countries with treaties with the Hawaiian Kingdom, shifted to dealing with the Republic of Hawaii and business went on as usual.

But did the Queen abdicate? Actually, no: for several reasons.
** Each of Leon Siu's 4 reasons is accompanied by Ken Conklin's rebuttal, which of course was not part of Mr. Siu's blog.

** SIU: First, a document signed under coercion and duress is invalid.
** CONKLIN: Plea bargains are a normal procedure whereby accused criminals agree to plead guilty in return for a prosecutor's agreement to reduce a charge or a sentence, and the bargain is then approved by a judge. This routine procedure has been used throughout the USA and world millions of times, and has never been treated in the U.S. as "under duress", especially when defendant's attorney has given advice privately and is present publicly at the time the plea is entered. Two types of plea agreements recently in the news are "no contest" or "alfred plea" whereby the accused person does not admit guilt but acknowledges that the evidence is so overwhelming that a guilty verdict is probably inevitable. Lili'uokalani did not attempt any such evasion; she actually pled guilty unequivocally, after consulting her attorney; with her longtime personal attorney and her cabinet ministers watching and the signatures of everyone all certified by a notary public. See photographs of all the documents at
https://historymystery.kenconklin.org/2008/04/04/liliuokalanis-abdication-and-loyalty-oath/
Lili'uokalani's abdication was signed and published on January 24, 1895. A few months later, after a Constitutional Convention, the Republic of Hawaii was created through publication of its Constitution on July 4, 1895. A request was sent to the consulates of the nations which had local consuls in Honolulu asking them to notify their home governments and to request formal diplomatic recognition of the Republic. During the remainder of 1895 Emperors, Kings, Queens, and Presidents of at least 19 nations on four continents personally signed letters in 11 languages addressed to President Dole officially recognizing the Republic as the rightful successor government of the still-independent nation of Hawaii. The letters from reigning monarchs were especially significant because the Hawaiian revolution had overthrown a reigning monarch. The most politically impressive letter was signed by Queen Victoria of Britain whose golden jubilee had been personally attended in London by Hawaii's Queen Kapiolani and Princess [later Queen] Lili'uokalani, and who had sent a crib to Queen Emma, wife of King Alexander Liholiho Kamehameha IV for Hawaii's baby Prince Albert, whom Emma had named in honor of Victoria's husband. The 19 letters of diplomatic recognition obviously condone not only the revolution but also the legitimacy of Lili'uokalani's abdication. See the collection of 19 letters at
https://historymystery.kenconklin.org/recognition-of-the-republic-of-hawaii/

** SIU: Second, what she signed, was not her name. She signed, Lili’uokalani Dominis, a name she had never used before or since; nor was it her official name as the monarch of the Hawaiian Kingdom.
** CONKLIN: She used her married name as an individual, thereby strongly acknowledging that she was no longer queen. Everyone else in the room knew who she was, and their signed certifications confirmed it was really her; no identity switcheroo! She could as well have signed with an "X" as some illiterate defendants do, and even as voters do today who have writing handicaps and have their mark certified by witnesses.

** SIU: Third, in her autobiography, and in many other instances, she completely repudiated that “letter of abdication”.
** CONKLIN: Lots of jailhouse inmates continue to absurdly claim they were innocent, and repudiate their confessions or plea bargains.

** SIU: Fourth, the Queen worked tirelessly in the years immediately following that “abdication” to have the Hawaiian Kingdom government and herself as the sovereign, restored as an independent nation.
** CONKLIN: When leaders of criminal gangs eventually get out on parole, some of them go right back to running their gangs and sending hoodlums to commit more crimes. Mrs. Dominis (formerly Lili'uokalani) actually signed a document swearing an oath of loyalty to the Republic, witnessed and notarized during the same event as her document of abdication. A photo of that loyalty oath is included with the abdication document in the webpage at
https://historymystery.kenconklin.org/2008/04/04/liliuokalanis-abdication-and-loyalty-oath/
A magnanimous Sanford Dole, President of the Republic, kindly gave her a pardon from her parole allowing her to travel first on O'ahu, then throughout Hawaii, and then anywhere. By publicly opposing the Republic and traveling to Congress to oppose the Treaty of Annexation, she showed her ingratitude and betrayal of her solemn loyalty oath, displaying bitterness, selfishness, and a lifelong character flaw. Even fifteen years later she was still demanding money from USA in a lawsuit as compensation for the Crown Lands which she claimed to be her personal property (not the property of native Hawaiians as a group): see
Liliuokalani v. United States, 45 Ct. Cl. 418 (1910)
at
https://www.angelfire.com/hi2/hawaiiansovereignty/liliucrownlands.html

Words have been used to distort, embed and promote the false narratives in the telling of our story. It is up to us to set the record straight for us and for others who need to know the truth.

“Love of country is deep-seated in the breast of every Hawaiian, whatever his station.” — Queen Liliʻuokalani

Ua mau ke ea o ka ʻāina i ka pono. The sovereignty of the land is perpetuated in righteousness.

For the latest news and developments about our progress at the United Nations in both New York and Geneva, tune in to Free Hawaii News at 6 PM the first Friday of each month on ʻŌlelo Television, Channel 53.

"And remember, for the latest updates and information about the Hawaiian Kingdom check out the twice-a-month Ke Aupuni Updates published online on Facebook and other social media."

PLEASE KŌKUA
Your kōkua, large or small, is vital to this effort
To contribute, go to:
• GoFundMe – CAMPAIGN TO FREE HAWAII
• PayPal – use account email: info@HawaiianKingdom.net
• Other – To contribute in other ways (airline miles, travel vouchers, volunteer services, etc...) email us at: info@HawaiianKingdom.net
All proceeds are used to help the cause. MAHALO!
Malama Pono,
Leon Siu
Hawaiian National

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http://freehawaii.blogspot.com/2024/09/ke-aupuni-update-september-2024-making.html
Free Hawaii blog, Ke Aupuni update
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 2024

Making Our Country Visible!

You’ve heard the adage, “Out of sight, out of mind”? One of the biggest problems we face in reactivating the Hawaiian Kingdom is, because most people don’t “see” the Hawaiian Kingdom, they think it no longer exists!

When people think of the Kingdom as something of the past, not in the here and now or in the future, it’s hard for them to support (or even care about) a nation they canʻt “see” in the here and now.

But when you stop to think about it, the Kingdom did not go away. It’s all still here! — the land, the sea, the places, the people, the history, the legacy of Aloha remain. Only the name (the State of Hawaii), the people who run it (Americans) and the style they use, changed. Underneath that haole façade is still the Hawaiian soul and the deep culture of Kapu Aloha!

How do we reset our minds to raise up our still existing nation?

• By embracing the fact that we are Hawaiians, not Americans.
• By dropping words like “mainland” from our vocabulary
• By focusing our thoughts that we are living everyday, every moment in the Hawaiian Kingdom,
• By welcoming the return of the Hawaiian Kingdom as a sovereign nation,
• By inviting everyone from near and far, to join in CELEBRATING the return of the Hawaiian Kingdom!

Building Confidence!

Many say they would like Hawaii to be independent, but deep down don’t think it can really happen. And there are those who think, that even if we can become politically independent, we are not capable of governing, operating, or protecting our country. We need a celebration to build up confidence in our people and dispel those doubts!

• A celebration of the Hawaiian Kingdom as a living nation will build a sense of identity and purpose and bolster confidence among the people!

• Taking the celebration global, will allow others to “see” our nation and get excited that this is really happening!

• The celebration will bring forward a vision and roadmap for the future of Hawaii creating momentum and a snowball effect to realizing independence.

Other Benefits:

Even if people know we exist, they may not know there is a strong movement to actively pursue independence. This celebration will give us an opportunity to bring greater awareness to the movement to free Hawaii and provide a platform to demonstrate our political will for a Free Hawaii.

Will the US agree to pull out?

YES! and this celebration will help to give the U.S. the necessary encouragement to do the right thing.

Is there a plan in place to make a peaceful, orderly transition?

YES! and this celebration provides an opportunity to work out a road map on how to restore our nation with wide participation from our friends from all over the world.

“Love of country is deep-seated in the breast of every Hawaiian, whatever his station.” — Queen Liliʻuokalani

Ua mau ke ea o ka ʻāina i ka pono. The sovereignty of the land is perpetuated in righteousness.

"And remember, for the latest updates and information about the Hawaiian Kingdom check out the twice-a-month Ke Aupuni Updates published online on Facebook and other social media."

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https://www.civilbeat.org/2024/09/convention-highlights-new-prominence-of-hawaiian-leadership/
Honolulu Civil Beat online newspaper Sunday September 22, 2024

** Footnote from end of article brought to top by Ken Conklin to serve as warning about the strong bias at Civil Beat regarding how it reports on "Native Hawaiian" topics (the bias has always been clear, including censorship of comments, but now it is made explicit by editors who previously denied it): "Civil Beat’s coverage of Native Hawaiian issues and initiatives is supported by a grant from the Abigail Kawananakoa Foundation."

Convention Highlights New Prominence Of Hawaiian Leadership
This year's Native Hawaiian Convention focused on how Hawaiians have played a much bigger role in shaping policy.

By Blaze Lovell

Native Hawaiians now hold top leadership positions in tourism, Mauna Kea management and recovery efforts in West Maui after wildfires destroyed most of Lahaina in 2023.

It’s a scenario that seemed unlikely just five years ago after decades of Hawaiian-led protests over environmental issues, tourism and development culminated in a standoff on Mauna Kea between law enforcement and activists opposed to the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope.

There was the sense that Native Hawaiians weren’t given a seat at the table where decisions are made. Now, it seems, they run the show.

* Photo caption
Native Hawaiians now lead the state’s largest tourism agencies. From left: Hawaii Tourism Authority President Daniel Nahoopii; Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement CEO Kuhio Lewis; and Hawaii Convention and Visitors Bureau President Aaron Salā. (Blave Lovell/Civil Beat/2024)

The Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement wrapped up its annual conference at the Hilton Waikoloa on the Big Island last week. It was the largest gathering yet, with more than 2,000 attendees. Panel discussions explored what Native Hawaiian leadership would mean for the future of some of Hawaii’s biggest issues such as tourism and resource management.

While many of those initiatives are just getting started, conference attendees hope that the discussions will lead to a greater focus on caring for the land and its people.

Hawaiians Lead Tourism Agencies

CNHA CEO Kuhio Lewis recalled organizing protests against tourism in Waikiki as a college student.

“We still protesting guys,” he told a packed ballroom Thursday. “We’re just doing it at our computers and in boardrooms.”

Last year, the Hawaii Tourism Authority awarded CNHA a multi-year contract to manage tourism in the islands. The Hawaii Visitors and Convention Bureau won a similar contract to market tourism to the U.S. mainland, a job the bureau has held for the last 100 years.

* Photo caption
Newly installed leaders of tourism management want to see Hawaiian culture become a bigger part of the visitor experience. (David Croxford/Civil Beat/2024) Those three agencies are now led by Native Hawaiians. There’s Lewis at CNHA; Daniel Nahoopii, president of the HTA; and Aaron Salā, the HVCB president.

The three executives spoke at a panel on Hawaiian leadership in tourism on Thursday focused on weaving cultural education into the tourist experience. Nahoopii said the HTA needs to balance cultural values with the state’s need for tax revenue from tourism. He also views this moment as a stepping stone to change the business culture of the state. “We bring with us our Native Hawaiian values and worldview and we’re fusing it into the most predominant industry here in Hawaii,” he said. “If we succeed, we can change Bishop Street. We will change how the banks think, how the other industries here process.”

The CNHA and HCVB are in their first year of the new contracts. Salā said that the HVCB is undergoing a new strategic planning process for the first time in 15 years. He wants to explore opportunities to utilize artificial intelligence in the tourism industry.

* Photo caption
CNHA has set up new hula shows in Waikiki, aimed at delivering a more authentic cultural experience for visitors. (Blaze Lovell/Civil Beat/2024)

CNHA has restarted the 1950s-era Kodak Hula Show, now rebranded as the Kilohana Hula Show. It’s also started its own hula show, Na Lei Aloha, at the Hyatt Regency in Waikiki. Lewis said those initiatives and others like them are not part of the HTA contract. But they are part of a pivot in the tourism industry to provide a more genuine cultural experience to visitors. “These are things that wouldn’t exist if we’re not at the table,” he said. “Everything is still culminating, it’s still figuring itself out.”

Mauna Kea Under New Management

The new Mauna Kea Stewardship and Oversight Authority is also just getting off the ground.

It’s off to a slow start, with meetings filled mostly with status reports before the real work of transferring duties from the University of Hawaii and Department of Land and Natural Resources begins in the coming years. It’s also set to solicit proposals for its management plans for the mountain in October.

The authority is still trying to hire staff and find its own offices and a meeting space. Its current meeting location, in the DLNR forestry division’s Hilo office, is just large enough to fit three rows of tables with a little more than a dozen chairs.

*Photo caption
Hilo Bay with the majestic view of Mauna Kea with tiny dots on the summit, the observatories. A new authority tasked with overseeing Mauna Kea is still getting set up. (Cory Lum/Civil Beat/2019)

Despite the slow start, Noe Noe Wong-Wilson is surprised the authority exists at all. She was one of 38 kupuna arrested in 2019 while protesting construction of TMT. “It’s never where I would have gone initially,” Wong-Wilson, a member of the authority, said. “I didn’t think, politically, it would succeed.”

It started differently than most state agencies.

The idea for the authority came from a commission convened by House Speaker Scott Saiki in the aftermath of the 2019 protests that included those for and against the TMT project.

Another major difference from most state boards: A majority of the authority’s members – 8 of 11 – are Native Hawaiian, Wong-Wilson said.

*Photo caption
A majority of the Mauna Kea Stewardship and Oversight Authority’s directors, like Noe Noe Wong-Wilson, are Native Hawaiian. (Blaze Lovell/Civil Beat/2024)

The authority’s new director, John De Fries, is also Hawaiian. During a panel discussion on the future of Mauna Kea Wednesday, Wong-Wilson said that members made a concerted effort to recruit Native Hawaiians to fill seats on the board.

The board has been hosting community meetings to solicit feedback. Ideally, the community will drive the decision-making over Mauna Kea, which Wong-Wilson said is another key difference compared to other state agencies.

“There’s a huge intent that this not only be founded on our cultural principles and understanding of what the mauna means, but that the community has a huge role to play in our formation and in how the mauna gets managed and protected,” she said. “That is not the norm of how government works.”

Recovering From Disaster

Community leaders in West Maui hope that Hawaiian culture and community input will drive the rebuilding of Lahaina.

On Wednesday, cultural practitioner Keeaumoku Kapu led a panel on Lahaina recovery efforts. He showed the audience a map of Lahaina overlain by the locations of traditional fish ponds and other cultural sites. He hopes recovery plans will lead to the restoration of those sites, which could mean that residential lots or commercial areas may have to move to restore the wetlands that were drained and paved over when the town was developed. “Maybe we can find spots where the community was built too tight,” Kaipo Kekona, Kapu’s son-in-law, said.

*Photo caption
Community leaders like Kaipo Kekona want the community and Hawaiian culture to guide the rebuilding of Lahaina. (Blaze Lovell/Civil Beat/2024)

Kekona, a Lahaina resident, sits on the state’s Maui Economic Recovery Commission. Although he’s testified at and participated in boards and commissions at the county level, he said he’s been reluctant in the past to engage with state-level boards because their scope is often much broader than one geographic location, such as Lahaina. “But when I found this thing come up, and they asked if I could sit on it, and it’s all about us but on the state level — oh hell, yeah,” Kekona said.

Kekona is also the chairman for Maui’s Long-term Recovery Group through the nonprofit Ho’ōla iā Mauiakama. The nonprofit works to fill in gaps not covered by other federal and state assistance programs. The goal of that group is to put Lahaina’s people at the forefront of recovery efforts. “It’s not about long-term recovery of economics, the long-term recovery of landscapes — it’s of the recovery for people,” Kekona said.

Civil Beat’s coverage of Native Hawaiian issues and initiatives is supported by a grant from the Abigail Kawananakoa Foundation.

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https://www.thisdaylive.com/index.php/2024/09/21/prof-david-appointed-ambassador-of-the-sovereign-kingdom-of-hawaii-to-nigeria/#google_vignette

ThisDay [Nigeria business magazine] Sunday, 22nd September, 2024

Prof. David Appointed Ambassador of the Sovereign Kingdom of Hawaii to Nigeria.

A renowned Diplomat, researcher and the Director General of the Nigerian Books of record and research center Lagos, Prof David David has been Appointed Ambassador of the sovereign Kingdom of Hawaii to Nigeria.

Addressing Newsmen on arrival at Nnamdi Azikiwe international airport Abuja this morning, 21st September 2024, Prof David says he is overwhelmed with joy for such recognition and appointments. He promised to work to bring his experience to foster peace, development and progress between Hawaii and Nigeria. Accordi

ng to Prof David David, this prestigious appointment was officially announced by the King of the Sovereign kingdom of Hawaii through the office of its Ambassador in London Prof Oluwafemi Esan on Tuesday 17th September 2024.

In a speech read by Ambassador Prof Oluwafemi Esan at the presentation ceremony, expressed great confidence in Prof. David’s exceptional leadership, ability and diplomatic experience adding that Prof David is a man to be reckoned with. ”Professor David David’s exceptional image advocacy in the diaspora and diplomatic experience makes him an ideal candidate for this diplomatic role” “We are confident that he will foster stronger ties between Hawaii and Nigeria, promoting cultural exchange, trade, and education” Prof Esan said;

The appointment of Prof. David David as the Honorary Consul of Hawaii in Nigeria is seen as a significant step towards strengthening the ties between Nigeria and the kingdom of Hawaii With his proven track record in bilateral mediation and diplomatic leadership.

On the issue of promotion of cultural exchange and facilitation of trade and commerce, Prof Esan says; “Prof. David is well-equipped to promote cultural exchange, facilitate trade and commerce, and enhance the overall relationship between Hawaii and Nigeria”

As the newly appointed Honorary Consul, Prof. David David’s key responsibilities will include performing consular duties, fostering cultural cooperation, promoting trade and commerce, and creating a positive image of Hawaii in Nigeria. Additionally, he will be instrumental in providing assistance to Hawaiian nationals during emergency situations and facilitating business opportunities between the two Nations.

Prof. David David’s appointment is a clear testament to his unwavering dedication to international cooperation and education. His expertise and experience in the education sector will undoubtedly contribute to the advancement of bilateral relations between Hawaii and Nigeria.

The Sovereign Kingdom of Hawaii aims to strengthen its presence in Nigeria through this appointment. The Embassy in London, under the leadership of Ambassador Prof. Oluwafemi Esan, is committed to supporting Professor David in promoting Hawaiian interests and fostering international cooperation with Nigeria.

This appointment marks a significant milestone in the relationship between Nigeria and Hawaii, with Prof. David David poised to play a crucial role in promoting mutual understanding and cooperation between the two nations.

His appointment as the Honorary Consul of the Sovereign Kingdom of Hawaii in Nigeria represents a positive step towards enhancing diplomatic ties and fostering greater collaboration between the two countries.

About Us
https://www.thisdaylive.com/index.php/about-us/

THISDAY is published by THISDAY Newspapers Limited. It hit newsstands on January 22, 1995 and quickly carved out a niche for itself in business and political reporting and for breaking big news stories. It soon became Nigeria’s newspaper of record. In its first years of publication, THISDAY won the Newspaper of the Year Award for three consecutive years. In 1997 THISDAY also became the first Nigerian newspaper to introduce full colour printing. It now has printing plants in Lagos, Abuja and in the Niger Delta.
THISDAY remains the preferred newspaper among the business, political and diplomatic elite, and is easily the most recognisable and influential national media brand globally. It is also the corporate and political advertiser’s first choice. THISDAY is the only high profile newspaper that appeals to both young and old because of its straightforward news reporting, strong editorial content, lifestyle features and business coverage.

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https://www.civilbeat.org/2024/09/naka-nathaniel-the-military-wants-new-state-land-leases-what-should-we-get-in-return/
Honolulu Civil Beat Monday September 23, 2024

The Military Wants New State Land Leases. What Should We Get In Return?
Native Hawaiian groups should step forward to challenge the state and the military.

By Naka Nathaniel

A big question asked often at the Native Hawaiian Convention last week is what comes next for the leases for U.S. military wants to renew on state-owned land by 2029.

What is “the ask” of the military? Could the military be simply forced to give up the lands at the end of leases? Would it just seize the land? What lessons from the Mauna Kea protests could be applied?

And, perhaps the most poignant question of the convention: Which Native Hawaiian organization is leading the military lease negotiations?

The last question was asked by Mahina Paison [** SP: Paishon] of Aina Aloha Economic Futures to a ballroom of Native Hawaiian leaders. Her question was met with silence. There was no answer.

“It’s definitely the only opportunity in our lifetime to have a say in what happens,” Camille Kalama of Koʻihonua, said during an earlier panel discussion, “ʻAina Back: Military Lease Expirations in Hawaii.”

The leases expire and that thereʻs no provision to automatically renew them. Right now, the negotiations are between the Hawaii Board of Land And Natural Resources, led by Dawn Chang, and the Pentagon.

ʻTheyʻre Going To Bury Us In Paperʻ

The lengthy process involves environmental reviews and other assessments. Kalama, a former litigator for the Native Hawaiian Legal Council, said “they’re going to bury us in paper.”

Hereʻs whatʻs at stake: The Pentagon leased 30,000 acres in multiple parcels of state land in 1964 for 65 years for a dollar. Often, itʻs mistakenly said that the 65-year lease is for a dollar a year. Nope, it was $1 for 65 years. The lands include the Pohakuloa Training Ground not far from the site of the action on Mauna Kea that blocked the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope more than five years ago.

Many of the leaders of the Kiaʻi Mauna movement were on hand to share their views. “You have to remain visible,” said Pua Case, featured in “Standing Above the Clouds,” which will premiere at the Hawaii International Film Festival next month. Once you are not visible, she said, “they’re going to say, ‘Oh, they’re not standing anymore. Quick we go'” and start building.

Hence, the logical question: Could the successful activism from Mauna Kea be extended to the lease negotiations?

“It’s a different animal because it’s the military,” said Kyle Kajihiro, the board chair of Hawaii Peace and Justice. Kajihiro said the protests at Mauna Kea politicized a new generation of activists. There was a single access road to the summit that passed through Hawaiian homelands and the construction route could be blocked. Kajihiro said that it is harder to employ grassroots efforts in these negotiations. The talks “are happening in these administrative meetings,” said Kajihiro. “It is out of sight and out of our reach in many ways, and that’s by design.”

That conduct fits with the militaryʻs track record. No one in Hawaii can feel good about the militaryʻs stewardship of Hawaiian lands and waters. The list of sins are considerable. The contamination of the water supply from the Red Hill leaks, the wildfires caused by live fire exercises and a plane landing on a reef in Kaneohe Bay are just the most recent.

The military will spend any amount to hold on to the lands, but will selling out be politically and reputationally ruinous? Right now, Hawaiiʻs political leadership doesnʻt seem ready to upset the status quo.

Could other asks be made? Hereʻs an idea:

The Department of Defense just announced that it would give the Hawaii Department of Education $3.5 million for Spanish and Japanese language classes in Oahu schools. What if the Pentagon doubled the budget of the state Department of Education and funded our stateʻs public school system for the duration of the lease? Our schools could also be reformed by implementing the successful programs and approaches that make Department of Defense schools the envy of the educational world.

But there are others who believe that even asking is just further submission, especially since thereʻs such a strong hand to be played. Instead of asking, the state could just tell the Pentagon what will happen next.

“If we look at our Hawaiian political history, we know that all of our big Hawaiian wins have always come through activism,” said Andre Perez, a military veteran and activist. Perez cited Kahoolawe as one of those first wins. The military stopped bombing the island and started to clean up unexploded ordnance. Perez worked on Kahoolawe removing the UXO. No Renewal Or Extension, Then What? And finally, what would happen if the state just said, “No more, thatʻs it. Just like we took back Kahoolawe in 2003, we are taking back the Pohakuloa and Kahuku training areas and Makua Valley.” Due to the militaryʻs activities on those sites, those once thriving lands, like Kahoolawe, wonʻt be inhabitable even if returned.

And, by the way, the lands the military controls arenʻt just state lands. They also have taken lands from the Native Hawaiian alii trusts. Kehau Abad, vice president of strategy and experience at Kamehameha Schools, said the military seized close to 4,000 acres from the trust established by Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop to educate children in Hawaii. The land includes more than 40 acres in Waikiki where Fort DeRussy is located.

Lastly, the question that breaks everyoneʻs spirits is: What if the military just seizes the land? Thatʻs just a continuation of the hurtful way the United States and its citizens have treated a small group of islands in the middle of the Pacific whose Indigenous population is dedicated to the spirit of aloha.

Last weekend, I moderated a panel at the Hawaii Book and Music Festival with the young plaintiffs in the Navahine F. v. Hawaii Department of Transportation settlement. Speaking with them, I felt a sense of hopefulness. They, and their aloha-driven advisors, have found a less adversarial way of solving problems. The optimist in me wishes the Pentagon would see how we solved a problem in Hawaii with aloha and follow in those footsteps. Iʻm an optimist and trying to stay that way.

While there were certainly more questions than answers, the convention itself was a rendezvous point for the groups that will likely end up pushing on the Board of Land and Natural Resources. So while no one Native Hawaiian group has taken a lead in the negotiations, they are starting to coalesce. All the groups have a considerable stake in redefining the militaryʻs status in Hawaii for not only the next generation of Native Hawaiians, but all future residents of Hawaii.

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http://freehawaii.blogspot.com/2024/10/ke-aupuni-update-october-2024-our-land.html
Free Hawaii blog, Aupuni Update Saturday October 12, 2024

Our Land, Our Inheritance

One of the most profound expressions of who we are as a people is found in Queen Liliʻuokalani’s open letter that begins with, “Oh, honest Americans… ” It was her direct appeal to the American people to do what’s morally right and speak out for the return of the Hawaiian Kingdom.

Although her letter makes many profound points, I will concentrate on one particular passage… “…do not covet the little vineyard of Naboth's, so far from your shores, lest the punishment of Ahab fall upon you, if not in your day, in that of your children, for "be not deceived, God is not mocked."

As she often did, Queen Liliʻuokalani cited a passage from the Bible. In this instance, 1 Kings 21:1-24 that told of the deceitful way King Ahab and his evil wife Jezebel framed and executed a man, Naboth, so they could take his land which he had refused to sell to them… The reason Naboth wouldn’t sell the land was, he regarded it as his inheritance and a blessing, not a piece of commercial real estate. He had inherited the land from his forefathers and his kuleana was to make it productive (which is why Ahab wanted it) and then pass it on to his (Nabobʻs) children and descendants.

By citing this story, Queen Liliʻuokalani goes to the heart of the difference in how Hawaiians, as opposed to Americans and other colonizers, regard land. Hawaiians and other native peoples see land as an inheritance that comes from Akua with the kuleana (responsibility) to mālama (care for) so that it can bless them and their future generations. To our kūpuna, just like Naboth, land is not a commodity that can be bought and sold for instant gratification or to build empires, it was to bring and sustain abundant life and future generations.

When King Kamehameha III issued the Hawaiian Bill of Rights in 1839 and promulgated the Hawaiian Kingdom Constitution in 1840, instruments that are Western in form, he was careful to infuse them with Hawaiian values of kuleana, malama ʻāina, ola i ka wai, aloha ʻāina. When he redistributed the lands from traditional rights — where he as King had absolute rule over all the lands — he put the lands of Hawaiʻi (except for a little needed for the government) into the western system of private ownership, but with a caveat: that those lands would be held in perpetuity. Whether the King, chiefs or commoners held the title, these privately owned lands could not be sold outside of the family, their heirs and descendants.

Furthermore, customary international law holds that in the event of a regime change, internal or conquest or annexation by a foreign power, only the government lands would forfeit to the new government. Privately owned lands would remain in the hands of the title owner. Thus, by placing the lands of the Hawaiian Archipelago into the western legal system of private land ownership, King Kamehameha III safeguarded Hawaii’s lands from being sold outside the family or being seized in the event of an invasion, an annexation (lawful or fake) or certainly, an illegal occupation.

So why have we been dispossessed of our lands? Because every step of taking and pillaging of the Hawaiian Islands by the United States was done with total disregard of all laws except those the US imposed for its own benefit and purposes. Even today, Hawaiians’ lands are being stolen and Hawaiian are being evicted by corrupt judges weilding corrupt State of Hawaii laws.

The hope we have is that soon the tables will turn and a day of reckoning will come, the lands restored… and the punishment of Ahab fall upon the wrong doers.

“Love of country is deep-seated in the breast of every Hawaiian, whatever his station.” — Queen Liliʻuokalani

Ua mau ke ea o ka ʻāina i ka pono. The sovereignty of the land is perpetuated in righteousness.

"And remember, for the latest updates and information about the Hawaiian Kingdom check out the twice-a-month Ke Aupuni Updates published online on Facebook and other social media."

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https://www.5af.pacaf.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/3941554/pacific-air-forces-leadership-strengthens-ties-with-council-for-native-hawaiian/

Pacific Air Forces Leadership Strengthens Ties with Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement

Published Oct. 21, 2024
By Staff Sgt. Wren Fiontar
Pacific Air Forces Public Affairs
JOINT BASE PEARL HARBOR-HICKAM, Hawaii --

Royal Australian Air Force Air Vice Marshal Carl Newman, Pacific Air Forces deputy commander, met with Kuhio Lewis, the Chief Executive Officer from the Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement (CNHA), for talks on developing relationships and fostering cultural understanding between the military and the Native Hawaiian community Oct. 17, 2024.

The leaders and their team members connected through sincere discussions on systemic disadvantages faced by Native Hawaiians and underscored the complexity of addressing long-standing problems rooted in transgenerational trauma.

“A lack of respect is a systemic disadvantage we are working hard to overcome,” said Hinaleimoana (Hina) Wong-Kalu, a Hawaiian Cultural Ambassador, as she emphasized the legacy of past injustices they are challenged to overcome. “It’s seared into our minds from a young age that certain groups harmed the Hawaiian people.”

Both parties agreed the harm was real and difficult to address, yet they also expressed a strong desire to be stewards of each other’s culture to build a foundation of trust and collaboration. "We aim to be partners in this journey,” said Newman, “working alongside the Native Hawaiian community to honor and protect each other’s heritage."

Respecting the traditions and cultures of all native peoples is a priority for the U.S. Department of Defense and supports the strong desire of Native Hawaiians to maintain their rich history and tradition amidst other prevalent influences in American society.

Exchanges such as this are important steps to bridging cultural divides and establishing a way forward for cooperative engagement between PACAF and Native Hawaiian communities.

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https://hawaiiankingdom.org/blog/major-general-kenneth-hara-has-thrown-the-hawaii-army-national-guard-into-disarray/
Hawaiian Kingdom blog [Keanu Sai] Friday October 25, 2024

** Ken Conklin's note: Many phrases in this essay are clickable links to other documents if you read this essay on the blog at the URL above.

Major General Kenneth Hara has thrown the Hawai‘i Army National Guard into Disarray

On October 1, 2024, Major General Kenneth Hara retired as Adjutant General of the Hawai‘i National Guard. At first glance, his willful failure to transform the State of Hawai‘i into a military government in accordance with U.S. Department of Defense Directive 5100.1, U.S. Army Field Manual 6-27—chapter 6, and the law of occupation, which is the war crime by omission, is now a problem for someone else. On the contrary, he exacerbated the situation.

MG Hara, tasked his Staff Judge Advocate, also called JAG, Lieutenant Colonel Lloyd Phelps, to investigate the information on the American occupation of the Hawaiian Kingdom that Dr. Keanu Sai, as Head of the Royal Commission of Inquiry, provided to MG Hara at their meeting on April 13, 2023, at the Grand Naniloa Hotel in Hilo. LTC Phelps was unable to refute the fact of the American occupation, which led MG Hara to admit, on July 27, 2023, that Hawai‘i is an occupied State. Subsequently, the State of Hawai‘i Attorney General Anne Lopez, instructed MG Hara and the Deputy Adjutant General, Brigadier General Stephen Logan, to ignore Dr. Sai. It was also revealed later to Dr. Sai, that the Attorney General also instructed MG Hara to not request of her a legal opinion to answer the question:

Considering the two legal opinions by Professor Craven and Professor Lenzerini, that conclude the Hawaiian Kingdom continues to exist as a State under international law, which are enclosed with this request, is the State of Hawai‘i within the territory of the United States or is it within the territory of the Hawaiian Kingdom?

His failure to perform his duty and abide by Army regulations, as the most senior officer in the Army National Guard, led to him being the subject of the Royal Commission of Inquiry’s (RCI) War Criminal Report no. 24-0001. The report provides the evidential basis for the commission of the war crime, which is an international crime. It is commonly stated in the U.S. Army, that there are regulations for everything that regulate military life.

MG Hara’s conduct and omission to establish a military government comes squarely under U.S. Department of Defense Law of War Manual, para. 18.22.1, which states, “Any person who commits an act that constitutes a crime under international law is responsible therefor and liable to punishment. International law imposes duties and liabilities on individuals as well as States, and individuals may be punished for violations of international law.” The Commission’s report is the evidence to punish MG Hara, and there is no statute of limitation for the war crime by omission. In other words, he will be punished because there is no time limit to prosecute unless he dies. Germany prosecuted a 97-year-old woman for committing Nazi war crimes in 2022.

Paragraph 18.22.1 directs MG Hara’s punishment to be done by a court martial. Although the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) does not have any “war crime” offenses, prosecutions can be made by a military court for war crimes that are also offenses under the UCMJ. In the case of prosecuting MG Hara, the willful failure to establish a military government, which is a violation of Army regulations, would be to prosecute him under UCMJ’s §892 Article 92(1), being the failure to obey a regulation, and Article 92(3), being dereliction in the performance of duties.

MG Hara’s cowardly conduct appeared to have established a leadership trait that was followed by his chain of command in the Army National Guard to their detriment. Because MG Hara committed a war crime and subject to be punished by a court martial, BG Logan was supposed to assume command under Army Regulation 600-20, paragraph 2-11. This Army regulation states that the “senior officer, WO [warrant officer], cadet, NCO [non-commissioned officer], or junior enlisted Soldier among troops at the scene of an emergency will assume temporary command and control of the Soldiers present.”

Black’s Law Dictionary defines an emergency as “A sudden unexpected happening; an unforeseen occurrence or condition; perplexing contingency or complication of circumstances; a sudden or unexpected occasion for action; exigency; pressing necessity. Emergency is an unforeseen combination of circumstances that calls for immediate action without time for full deliberation.” A scenario of this sort, in battle, would be where a platoon’s leadership was killed by the enemy that left only soldiers of the rank of Private alive. The regulation would require the most senior enlisted Private to assume command of the platoon until relieved by a more senior soldier. The criteria would be which of the Privates had the longest time in the Army. Failure to assume command in an emergency is an offense under UCMJ Article 92(1) and 92(3). The regulation to assume command is para. 2-11—Emergency command, Army Regulation 600-20.

When BG Logan was the subject of War Criminal Report no. 24-0002, it became the duty of Colonel Wesley Kawakami, Commander of the 29th Infantry Brigade, to assume command. When Colonel Kawakami was the subject of War Criminal Report no. 24-0003, it became the duty of Lieutenant Colonel Frederick Werner, Commander of 1st Squadron, 299th Cavalry Regiment, to assume command. When LTC Werner was the subject of War Criminal Report no. 24-0004, it became the duty of Lieutenant Colonel Bingham Tuisamataele, Jr., Commander of 1st Battalion, 487th Field Artillery Regiment, to assume command. When LTC Tuisamataele, Jr. was the subject of War Criminal Report no. 24-0005, it became the duty of Lieutenant Colonel Joshua Jacobs, Commander of 29th Brigade Support Battalion, to assume command. When LTC Jacobs was the subject of War Criminal Report no. 24-0006, it became the duty of Lieutenant Colonel Dale Balsis, Commander of 227th Brigade Engineer Battalion, to assume command. When LTC Balsis was the subject of War Criminal Report no. 24-0007, it became the duty of Lieutenant Colonel Michael Rosner, Executive Officer, 29th Infantry Brigade, to assume command.

LTC Rosner was spared, for now, being the subject of a war criminal report, because Senator Cross Makani Crabbe did what MG Hara did not have the courage to do. Senator Crabbe made a formal request of Attorney General Lopez, as a member of the State of Hawai‘i legislature under Hawai‘i Revised Statutes §28-2, for a legal opinion answering the question:

This act by Senator Crabbe has temporarily protected LTC Rosner from incurring criminal culpability for not establishing a military government as those before him did. LTC Rosner, however, is faced with the performance of his duty of assuming command under Army Regulation 600-20, paragraph 2-11. What would prevent him from assuming command is that the Hawaiian Kingdom is not an occupied State under international law. If this were the case, surely the Attorney General Lopez could settle this matter by providing a legal opinion that the “State of Hawai‘i [is] within the territory of the United States” and not “within the territory of the Hawaiian Kingdom.”

What the Attorney General faces, however, is that under customary international law, as explained by the legal opinions of Professor Craven and Professor Lenzerini, is that the Hawaiian Kingdom continues to exist as an occupied State, which places the State of Hawai‘i “within the territory of the Hawaiian Kingdom.” The Attorney General’s silence, in fact, reinforces what customary international law already concludes, and that the RCI’s war criminal reports are authorized and valid. Dr. Sai, as Head of the RCI, explained this to LTC Rosner in his letter dated September 23, 2024.

The severity of the consequences of the conduct of MG Hara, as a war criminal, cannot be underestimated. LTC Rosner will assume command and then perform the duty of transforming the State of Hawai‘i into a military government. Time is not on the side of LTC Rosner to perform his Army duties.

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http://freehawaii.blogspot.com/2024/10/ke-aupuni-update-october-2024-chagos.html
Free Hawaii blog, Ke Aupuni Update Saturday October 26, 2024

The Chagos-Hawaii Connection

An international case we have been tracking for years is the dispute between the United Kingdom and the Republic of Mauritius over the Chagos Islands. It has a parallel to our dispute with the United States: the manipulation of the United Nations’ decolonization process by the “administrative power” (the colonial or occupying nation) to manufacture an outcome in its favor.

The Chagos Islands is an archipelago that was part of Mauritius, a colony of the UK in the Indian Ocean. When Mauritius gained its independence in 1968 and became the Republic of Mauritius, the UK arbitrarily withheld the Chagos Islands from the new nation saying it was needed for defense purposes. The UK forcibly evacuated the inhabitants (a couple of thousand people) from all the Chagos Islands, then leased the largest island, Diego Garcia, to the United States.

The US then built a huge Air Force base on Diego Garcia to assert the United States’ military power in the region, especially in the Middle East. Thus, Diego Garcia was the key forward base for the US Air Force in the Gulf War, the Iraqi War, the Afghan War, the war against al-Qaeda, the war against Isis, and numerous other conflicts in the region. And so it remains…

After years, of complaining to the UK and international bodies such as the UN about the illegal withholding of the Chagos Islands from their nation, Mauritius filed a complaint with the International Court of Justice (the ICJ) located at The Hague, Netherlands, asking for an Advisory Opinion from the ICJ regarding the matter.

In 2019 a landmark decision, the ICJ opined that the withholding of the Chagos Islands from the Republic of Mauritius, was in violation of the UN’s decolonization procedure and illegal. The ICJ said the United Kingdom had an international obligation to return the Chagos Islands to Mauritius.

When that news broke there was much celebration in Mauritius and among the Chagos descendants living in exile, and those of us hoping for this just and favorable outcome. But the UK made it known it considered the ICJ Opinion as non-binding, and it was not going to return Chagos to Mauritius.

This brings up a primary weakness of the International Court of Justice and the World Court system. Many of their rulings are either non-binding or unenforceable. Thus, countries, especially powerful ones, simply ignore rulings they think are bothersome.

It looked like this was going to be one of those times. But, amazingly, in August 2024, five years after the ICJ opinion, to their credit, the UK announced in that it would indeed return the Chagos Islands to Mauritius. Apparently, an agreement was reached to allow the UK/US base at Diego Garcia to remain. And plans are being made for Chagosians to return.

What is significant to us in Hawaii, is that the Chagos case was successfully resolved, setting a clear precedence for correcting an error made in a botched UN decolonization process. Thus, because Hawaii’s case is also one of a botched UN decolonization process (the “Statehood Plebiscite”) we could leverage this international precedence to resolve our situation as well. And so could Alaska… and perhaps, West Papua.

“Love of country is deep-seated in the breast of every Hawaiian, whatever his station.” — Queen Liliʻuokalani

Ua mau ke ea o ka ʻāina i ka pono. The sovereignty of the land is perpetuated in righteousness.

"And remember, for the latest updates and information about the Hawaiian Kingdom check out the twice-a-month Ke Aupuni Updates published online on Facebook and other social media."

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https://www.ilind.net/2024/10/28/false-theory-about-kingdom-land-patents-leads-to-first-felony-convictions/
Ian Lind blog Monday October 28, 2024

False theory about Kingdom land patents leads to first felony convictions

A Maui woman who sparked several takeovers of private land based on a mistaken understanding of Native Hawaiian rights has pleaded “no contest” to criminal charges for her admitted role in the illegal occupation of the home and property of a retired state judge.

Alicia Napuaonalani Hueu entered a “no contest” plea in a Maui courtroom earlier this year to 1st degree theft, a Class B felony, as well as two misdemeanor charges, obstructing a government function and criminal property damage. Two of her co-defendants also pleaded guilty to felony charges, one to 1st degree theft and another to 1st degree burglary. Charges against two others were dropped by prosecutors as part of their plea deal with Hueu.

All three defendants were granted a deferred acceptance of their pleas, and released on 4-years probation. If they stay out of trouble and comply with the terms of their probation, the convictions will be removed from their records.

This is believed to be the first time felony charges have been successfully brought against Hawaiians wrongly asserting native land rights under the false theory of “heirdom” promoted by Hueu, which asserts a “lineal descendant” of the original recipient of a Hawaiian Kingdom-era royal land grant retains an ownership interest “in perpetuity” that is superior to modern land titles and gives the right to control the property. In this view, neither time nor valid prior property sales or transfers can extinguish the ownership rights of descendants.

Whether its proponents are able to suspend their sense of reality enough to accept this theory as true, or have cynically weaponized it as a narrative to generate support for native Hawaiian land rights and sovereignty, isn’t clear from the record.

Other similar property takeovers based on claimed family ties to specific properties have generally been treated as civil disputes over land title, no matter how flimsy the claims put forward under the guise of native rights. This has left the legal owners to fend for themselves, and bear the substantial cost, in time and money, of defending their title and regaining access to their own property through protracted civil court proceedings.

Although courts have upheld some challenges to past takings of land from Hawaiian families, those victories required evidence showing title had never been validly sold or otherwise legally transferred over the intervening century and a half since the original royal patents were issued.

The theory of “heirdom,” in contrast, eschews analysis of title claims and instead relies entirely on genealogical ties to the original land grant recipient.

“Cease and Desist”

Hueu was arrested on January 4, 2020 after she and others took over 3.3 acres of land and 2-bedroom small two-bedroom home located along Hana Highway in Kipahulu, Maui. The property was owned by retired District Court Judge Douglas McNish and his wife, who had purchased it in 2006 for $1.55 million, and had listed it for sale in 2019, real estate records show.

McNish served as a family court judge on Maui from 1984 until his retirement at the end of 1999. News clippings show he was well regarded, and is credited with launching a program in 1988 requiring couples who have filed for divorce to attend a workshop concerning the impact of divorce on children. The program was later expanded into courts statewide and is now known as “Kids First.”

On November 29, 2019, five weeks before the confrontation that led to Hueu’s arrest, she sent a “cease and desist” letter by certified mail to McNish and his wife alleging they were trespassing,”illegally” occupying an “unpermitted” home on the property, and conducting an “unauthorized” land sale.

The site was identified as part of 273-acres conveyed by royal land patent No. 1902 to Kaumaia and nine others in December 1855.

The letter itself identifies Hueu as “Governor of Maui” in the “Kingdom of the Hawaiian Islands.” After her arrest, Hueu also described herself as “representative and caretaker for descendants of Kaumaia.” Elsewhere, she described herself as “a Hawaiian National and Prisoner of War residing on the Island of Maui within the Kingdom of the Hawaiian Islands / Sandwich Islands.” She also claimed the titles of “Captain” and “Judge Advocate General” in Occupied Forces Hawaiian Army, a Hawaiian nationalist group that purports to be the military of the Hawaiian Kingdom, now engaged in “civil affairs” while under occupation. Later, in a federal court proceeding, Hueu said she is a “foreign national, subject and or citizen not belonging to the United States[.]”

The “cease and desist” letter includes a replica of the Hawaiian Kingdom royal crest, and uses a return address, “Kingdom of the Hawaiian Islands” at a post office box in Haiku used by Hueu. The letter meanders from citations to Hawaiian Kingdom laws of 1859 to references to 20th century international laws of war, The Hague and Geneva Convention, and boldly claims authority to order McNish to vacate.

The Kingdom of the Hawaiian Islands hereby gives you notice that the descendants of Kaumaia are the sole kuleana holders of the properties described above. As the kuleana holder, the descendants of Kaumaia hold exclusive rights to exercise its authority over the subject properties as governed under Kamehameha III 1850 self-executing Ratified Treaty with the United States of America.”

Under said authority, the Kingdom of the Hawaiian Islands has NOT granted permission for use of the subject properties, in whole or in part, to you or any organization you are affiliated with. You and any other parties or groups you represent or are otherwise affiliated with are therefore trespassing on Kaumaia kuleana land; LCA helu 1902….

…The Kingdom of the Hawaiian Islands demand that you immediately remove all structures and personal property from the subject properties. Access for removal of structures and personal property can be requested from the Kingdom of the Hawaiian Islands Governor of Maui office and removals must be completed by 12/13/19. Be advised that any existing or new structure(s), and equipment remaining on the property after 12/13/19 is subject to disposal pursuant to Kamehameha III Treaties, 1852 Constitution, Civil and Penal Codes of the Hawaiian Islands.

Sometime in the latter part of December, following the letter’s deadline, an associate chained and locked the gate into the McNish, according to Hueu’s later testimony before the Maui Police Commission. McNish apparently removed them, prompting Hueu’s associate call Maui police and file a complaint of criminal property damage, valuing the missing broken chain and locks at $95.

It was an audacious scheme, breaking into and taking over someone’s land and house, changing the locks, then accusing the legal owner of tresspassing when they try to reenter their own property, and asking the police to enforce your fictitious title. It didn’t work for long. Two days later, on January 3, a police report said Hueu was trespassing on the property. The following day, police returned, cut a new set of chains and locks that had been placed on the entry gate, and entered the property. Hueu was taken from the scene in handcuffs and later charged with extortion, theft, and burglary, all felonies, along with a long list of related misdemeanors. After languishing in court for over three years, the case was concluded when Hueu accepted a plea bargain.

It remains to be seen whether prosecutors will be inclined to consider felony charges when the victim of this kind of calculated land theft is a regular citizen without the resources and connections of a retired judge.

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** Addendum posted by Ian Lind on October 31, 2024
https://www.ilind.net/2024/10/31/peeking-down-a-rabbit-hole/

Peeking down a rabbit hole

You may wonder how Alicia Napua Hueu got the title “Governor of Maui” that she used in the “cease and desist” letter decribed in Monday’s post concerning the January 2020 takeover of a property in Kipahulu.
I puzzled over that, wondering how one comes to believe they are an island governor in the Kingdom of the Hawaiian Islands.

Then I recalled something I had found online a couple of years ago while reporting on the takeover of several acres of agricultural land in Kunia, above Waipahu. Hueu was a cheerleader and advisor to the group involved in that incident which involved several other members of Occupied Forces Hawaii Army. Hueu claimed the rank of Captain in OFHA as well as “Judge Advocate General.” She took her role seriously enough that she appeared in court and attempted to represent OFHA, but of course was not allowed to do so because she is not an attorney.

A little backtracking and I found this item in my files. Welcome to the fantasy lineup of one of the competing sovereignty groups out there in the wild, this one associated with the musician, Leon Siu.

Kingdom of the Hawaiian Islands [Leon Siu], website
https://www.hawaiiankingdom.net/
Leon Siu page on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/leon-siu-25976349/

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** Ken Conklin's online comment:

Thank you Ian for your longtime persistence in following the topic of land title claims by Hawaiian sovereignty activists or "clients" relying on their "research."

See my very large webpage providing news reports and commentaries about a similar case over a period of years: "The Perfect Title Scam -- Self-Proclaimed Regent of Hawaiian Kingdom Collects Huge Fees, Causes Grief to Property Owners, Messes Up Land Titles, Escapes With Probation and $200 Fine" at
https://www.angelfire.com/hi2/hawaiiansovereignty/fraudperfecttitle.html

One of the earliest fraudsters of this sort of scam was Keanu Sai, who has continued similar activities for many years even after being convicted in 1999 of a felony (attempted grand theft of a house). About a decade earlier, having declared himself Regent Pro-tem, Keanu Sai launched a series of lectures throughout Hawai'i, including on public television, saying that all land title in Hawai'i is clouded because of the history of illegal overthrow, annexation, and statehood. He further told people that "native tenants" during the Kingdom had special rights which were never extinguished [the phrase "allodial title" is often used by activists to this day]. Once he was officially Regent pro-tem, Keanu Sai then claimed the authority to officially condone and certify prior land title transfers that had been recorded at the Bureau of Conveyances during the periods of the Kingdom, (illegal) Republic, (illegal) Territory, and (illegal) State. Thus, people could pay a fee to Keanu Sai to have him research the chain of land title to their property and then to record a warranty deed signed by the "Regent pro-tem" at the Bureau of Conveyances. A real estate title search company was established under the name "Perfect Title" to manage the title searches, collect the fees, and process the paperwork. Each client ended up paying somewhere between $1500 to $2000 for the title search, warranty deed, and recording fees; and news reports indicated there were at least 400 clients.

In at least one case a client of Keanu Sai, a married couple who had lost their home through foreclosure, claimed to nevertheless be the rightful owners of that home, even after it had been subsequently purchased by someone else; and when the new owner left home one day, the previous owners broke in and resumed living there. After the police were summoned and the new owners retook possession, criminal charges were filed against the previous owners for the break-in and against both them and Keanu Sai and his real-estate business partner for a felony charge of attempted grand theft (of the home).

Mr. Sai demanded and received a jury trial. The multiracial jury on December 1, 1999 unanimously found Mr. Sai guilty beyond a reasonable doubt of attempted theft of title to a house (value approximately $300,000) for his role as an accessory to that man and woman. Not even one member of the jury had any reasonable belief that Mr. Sai's fanciful theories could possibly be correct. The maximum sentence for Keanu Sai's crime was 10 years in prison. But Judge Sandra Simms (known as a bleeding-heart liberal who gave light sentences even to hooligans who beat up tourists while robbing them) sentenced Keanu Sai to 5 years probation and a $200 fine. At sentencing on March 7, 2000 I, Ken Conklin, was present in court. Perhaps a hundred Hawaiian sovereignty activists also packed the courtroom [I sat between Bumpy Kanahele and Kekuni Blaisdell], while more people stood in the hallway unable to fit inside. When Judge Simms entered the courtroom and the bailiff loudly proclaimed the customary "All rise!" the sovereignty activists defiantly remained seated to show their contempt for a court they consider invalid. Judge Simms, playing to the crowd, said she admired Mr. Sai for his commitment to his cause, but that even the noblest protesters and seekers of social justice must be subject to the laws as they now exist. She then gave her absurdly light sentence, and apparently in response to a presentencing motion she also granted him permission to travel out of Hawai'i and out of the United States for his anticipated hearing at the "World Court."

To this day, there appears to have been no accounting for the hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees charged to the several hundred clients of Perfect Title, and no apparent restitution or even apology to the hundreds of people who lost their homes to foreclosure or whose lives and finances were severely disrupted by having bogus clouds placed on their property titles because of Mr. Sai's activities. Many of Perfect Title's clients knew exactly what they were doing. They were sovereignty activists, convinced that Kingdom law still prevails and the State of Hawai'i is illegal. They were happy to put their homes on the line for their hero, Keanu Sai. But other Perfect Title clients were victims of their own ignorance, or innocent homeowners victimized by having their property titles messed up by Perfect Title clients acting for a political purpose. Nevertheless the prosecutor in the Sai case asked for a sentence of only 30 days jail, when 10 years was available. The judge gave only probation and a $200 fine. A decade later Keanu Sai was back in business again with a similar scam. Nowadays he is threatening U.S. military officers with arrest and imprisonment related to demands for a takeover of Hawaii's government under his theories of "international law."

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http://freehawaii.blogspot.com/2024/11/ke-aupuni-update-november-2024-identity.html
Free Hawaii blog, Ke Aupuni update Saturday November 9, 2024

The recent American elections raised several issues that pertain to us who maintain our homelands, the Hawaiian Islands, is being illegally occupied by the United States. The election exposed Americans are deeply concerned about illegal immigrants overwhelming the local population and losing control of their communities and resources to foreigners.

They are right to be concerned, because that is what happened to Hawaii, along with another insidious tactic that undermined our standing as a Hawaiian nation.

You hear these days many ads about protecting yourself from criminals who steal your identity and use your identity to take everything you have, even your home, leaving you destitute and powerless to fight back. Isn’t that the definition of colonialism? Isn’t that what happened to us in Hawaii but more sinister and pervasive?

It didn’t happen overnight. It took a couple of generations, the first half of the 20th Century. During that time any vestige of our identity as loyal subjects of the Hawaiian Kingdom was wiped out and Hawaiians were morphed into loyal citizens of the United States, willing to sign on to the scam of statehood and buying into pursuing “the American Dream.” Having the victim agree to his own captivity.

But with the rediscovery in the 60s and 70s of the richness of hula kahiko, our moʻolelo (stories), and the exploits of our ancestors who crisscrossed this vast ocean in voyaging canoes made of wood and leaves, and doing it a thousand years before the lead-colonizer, Columbus, was even born; our true identity as the heirs and descendants of a great people began to emerge. And the questions began to be asked: What really happened? Who are we really? How did we lose control of our nation?

Haunani Kay Trask startled us with her shocking declaration: “We are not Americans! We are not Americans! We are not Americans! We are not Americans! We are Hawaiians! And we will always be Hawaiians!” It was the wake-up call to confront who we really are. What is our true identity? American or Hawaiian?

Since that day, we have been learning, reclaiming and embracing that identity for ourselves, and in the process, reclaiming and embracing our Lāhui, our nation, our kuleana (responsibility) and our calling as a people.

“Love of country is deep-seated in the breast of every Hawaiian, whatever his station.” — Queen Liliʻuokalani

Ua mau ke ea o ka ʻāina i ka pono. The sovereignty of the land is perpetuated in righteousness.

"And remember, for the latest updates and information about the Hawaiian Kingdom check out the twice-a-month Ke Aupuni Updates published online on Facebook and other social media."

=============

https://www.staradvertiser.com/2024/11/12/hawaii-news/plaque-near-mckinley-statue-addresses-misrepresentation/

Honolulu Star-Advertiser Tuesday November 12, 2024

Plaque near McKinley statue addresses misrepresentation

By Victoria Budiono

The Association of Hawaiian Civic Clubs unveiled a new plaque Monday at the President William McKinley High School campus. The plaque, placed near the statue of the school’s namesake, seeks to address Hawaii’s contested annexation history and the statue’s representation of it.

The statue depicts President William McKinley holding a “Treaty of Annexation” document, which, according to the association, was never ratified by the U.S. Senate, as required by the Constitution. The portrayal, the group asserts, promotes an inaccurate narrative of Hawaii’s annexation.

Hawaii became a U.S. territory during McKinley’s administration.

In 1911, a decade after McKinley’s assassination, a bronze statue of him was unveiled in front of the school. In McKinley’s right hand is a scroll inscribed with the words “Treaty of Annexation.”

Although the association’s plaque was installed Sept. 9, its formal unveiling took place Monday, coinciding with the 107th anniversary of Queen Lili‘uokalani’s death. The event included a blessing by Kahu Hailama Farden, the association’s immediate past president.

The association — a nonprofit organization and confederation of 59 autonomous Hawaiian Civic Clubs across Hawaii and the mainland advocating for Native Hawaiian welfare in culture, health, economic development and education — has pushed for historical corrections to the McKinley statue since 2009.

In 2020 the organization specifically requested the addition of a plaque. Previously, the association in an unsuccessful effort had proposed altering the statue to remove the document from McKinley’s hand.

The COVID-19 pandemic delayed the plaque’s installation, but this year the state Department of Education worked with McKinley High School administration to make the changes.

The newly installed plaque reads, “Hawai‘i was not annexed to the United States by a treaty, as suggested by the statue before you of U.S. President William McKinley with a document in his right hand. Such a treaty was never ratified by the Senate as required by the Constitution of the United States.”

It continues, encouraging viewers to learn the history of the 1893 insurrection led by Western business interests and backed by U.S. Marines, which resulted in the illegal overthrow of Queen Lili‘uokalani and Hawaii’s contested annexation under McKinley in 1898.

The plaque also highlights the protest petitions signed by over 38,000 Native Hawaiians against annexation.

In 1897, McKinley signed an annexation treaty with representatives of the republic of Hawaii. However, the U.S. Senate did not ratify the treaty. Instead, Congress passed a joint resolution requiring only a simple majority in both the House and Senate. McKinley signed this resolution into law on July 7, 1898, formalizing Hawaii’s annexation.

In 2021 a state House resolution sought to rename McKinley High School and remove the statue, arguing that the statue and school name imply widespread Hawaiian support for annexation, despite the 1897 Ku‘e Petitions, signed by 80% of the adult Hawaiian population, opposing it. However, this resolution did not pass.

“We are grateful for the cooperation of the Hawai‘i Department of Education and the administration of McKinley High School for supporting the installation of this plaque,” Julian Ako, past first vice president of the association, who spearheaded this effort, said in a statement. “We celebrate this achievement in correcting this historical misrepresentation, acknowledging that the plaque is just one means of addressing the broader issue of accurately representing our history.”

The ongoing concern highlights the deep political and cultural ramifications of this historical distortion.

This week the association is hosting its 65th annual convention in Waikiki. Founded by Prince Kuhio in 1918, the Hawaiian Civic Club movement is the oldest Native Hawaiian community- based advocacy movement.

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** Ken Conklin's online comment(s) prepared in advance and posted all at the same time on Tuesday November 12, 2024.

This plaque is an outrageous desecration of the historic McKinley statue, and it has been done with the connivance of the state Department of Education. At least they waited to schedule the formal ceremony on the anniversary of Lili'uokalani's death -- very appropriate because her Kingdom of Hawaii has been dead since January 17, 1893; and as Kamala Harris and Jill Tokuda's Tshirt said at the Dem convention: We are "not going back."

The plaque and this news report spew numerous falsehoods, including saying there is no Treaty of Annexation and also saying there were 38,000 signatures on a petition "signed by over 38,000 Native Hawaiians against annexation ... 80% of the adult Hawaiian population." In the following comments I will prove the truth of both rebuttals.

There was a protest against annexation in the form of a petition signed by 21,269 Hawaii residents in 1897. Most of the signatures are by ethnic Hawaiians, but some are by people of other ethnicities. Interpolation of census data shows there were about 39,542 ethnic Hawaiians in 1897; so if all the signatures were from ethnic Hawaiians then 54% of them signed. Thus, on average, an ethnic Hawaiian today who looks for the signatures of his ancestors will find that only about half of them alive in 1893 actually signed the petition. However, all people were eligible to sign the petition, regardless of ethnicity and regardless whether they had voting rights (for example, women and children did not have voting rights but thousands of them signed the petition). Therefore the entire population of Hawaii at the time is the appropriate number for assessing the percentage who signed. Interpolation yields 120,265 as the population in 1897, which means the 21,269 signatures represent only 18% of the population. The Great Statehood Petition of 1954, with 120,000 signatures (see below), had a higher percentage of signers.

There was allegedly another petition signed by about 17,000 people. But it has never been found. The real petition with 21,269 signatures is in the national archives because it was actually submitted to the U.S. Senate in 1897. The smaller petition is not in the archives because it was never submitted. Furthermore, the smaller petition was on a very different topic -- demanding that the monarchy be re-established. History twisters like to add together the signatures on both petitions to arrive at 38,000. But it seems logical that most of the 17,000 signatures demanding restoration of the monarchy were also among the 21,269 opposing annexation. Thus the number of people signing the combined petitions is probably not much larger than 22,000. It's also interesting that approximately 4,000 people who opposed annexation also opposed restoring ex-queen Liliuokalani.

Yes there is a Treaty of Annexation. See my webpage "Treaty of Annexation between the Republic of Hawaii and the United States of America (1898). Full text of the treaty, and of the resolutions whereby the Republic of Hawaii legislature and the U.S. Congress ratified it. The politics surrounding the treaty, then and now." [Google that quote]

U.S. courts have repeatedly cited the Treaty of Annexation as a legitimate part of U.S. law. Perhaps the best example is "Liliuokalani v. United States, 45 Ct. Cl. 418 (1910)" [Google that quote and click the angelfire link] where the entire Treaty of Annexation is included as an exhibit in the Court's decision, both to prove that the ceded lands were legitimately ceded to USA as required by the Treaty and to prove that the U.S. court had jurisdiction to decide the case because the Treaty made Hawaii a part of USA and therefore subject to jurisdiction of U.S. courts.

The U.S., like any nation, has the right to decide for itself what method to use for accepting an offer of a treaty. It's a matter of U.S. law, not international law, whether the U.S. can use a joint resolution as a method of ratifying a treaty. The same method of joint resolution had been used to accept the annexation of Texas in 1845. No protest against the idea of annexation or the method of ratifying annexation was filed by any nation, either with the U.S. or with the Republic of Hawaii. All the treaty-partners of the Kingdom of Hawaii accepted the Republic, and later the U.S., as the rightful sovereign successor governments to carry forward those treaties following the revolution of 1893 and annexation of 1898. See webpage "LETTERS OF FORMAL DIPLOMATIC RECOGNITION (DE JURE) OF THE REPUBLIC OF HAWAII, RECEIVED FROM AUGUST 1894 THROUGH JANUARY 1895." These letters were signed by Emperors, Kings, Queens, Princes, and Presidents, addressed to His Excellency Sanford B. Dole, President of the Republic of Hawaii. [Google the quote to see photos of 19 of them] These letters were signed by Emperors, Kings, Queens, Princes, and Presidents, addressed to His Excellency Sanford B. Dole, President of the Republic of Hawaii.

** On Tuesday November 12, 2024 there was robust discussion, pro and con, in the online comments to Victoria Budiono's news report about the newly installed plaque at the McKinley statue. However, all those comments mysteriously vanished during a 3-day period, Wednesday through Friday, when the newspaper notified readers that some sort of mysterious and unexplained software glitch had made it impossible to do any further commenting. Then, on Saturday morning (a day when there is no printed newspaper but only a shortened online newspaper), the ability to make online comments had been restored; but all previously published comments on the Budiono article remained erased forever. Ken Conklin thereupon re-posted, for the record, his original comments at the end of the original Tuesday article in case anyone in the future chooses to read that article.

Legislation seeking to remove the McKinley name and statue from the school go back to 2011. News reports and commentaries, including access to hundreds of pages of testimony pro and con, can be found in the following webpages:

HR258 and HCR293 in the Hawaii legislature of 2011 -- A resolution to rip the Treaty of Annexation out of the hand of President McKinley in his statue in front of McKinley High School
https://www.angelfire.com/big09/HR258McKinleyHawLegisl2011.html

McKinley High School in Honolulu, regarding school name and statue -- Open letter to students, alumni, teachers, administrators, staff, community, and Board of Education explaining why the school's name and statue deserve to remain in place, and why a Hawaiian secessionist demand to remove them should be strongly rejected. Webpage posted November 26, 2020 at
https://www.angelfire.com/big11a/McKinleyHSNameStatue.html

March 17-19, 2021: Hawaii House Committee on Education holds hearing on resolution asking Department of Education to remove the name of President McKinley from that high school and to remove his statue from that campus; resolution draws strong testimony in opposition and gets shelved. See news reports and testimony on those dates in the webpage "History of efforts to create a Hawaiian tribe from January 1 through April 30, 2021" at
https://big11a.angelfire.com/AkakaHist117StartJan2021.html

MARCH 20, 2021: Addendum to open letter of November 26, 2020: On Thursday March 18, 2021 a hearing was held in the Hawaii House Committee on Education regarding a resolution whereby the Legislature would request the Department of Education to remove the name and statue of President William McKinley from that high school. At the end, after hearing testimony and after a recess for private discussion, the committee decided to "defer" the resolution -- a polite way of saying it is dead even though there was no official vote to defeat it. Links are provided to the legislature's webpage providing the hearing notice, text of resolution, files of testimony, and results; an activist blog entry and two news reports the day before the hearing, two lengthy files of written testimony, a video of the hearing, a news report after the hearing, and an activist blog entry the day afterward. Ken Conklin's oral and written testimony is also provided.
https://www.angelfire.com/big11a/McKinleyHSNameStatue.html

Hawaii Legislature 2022 -- Bills and Resolutions Related to Hawaiian Sovereignty and Racial Entitlement Programs. Text, testimony, and outcome.
https://www.angelfire.com/big11a/LegislatureHawSov2022.html
Look near the end of the items, regarding
HCR26/HR24
URGING THE BOARD OF EDUCATION AND DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION TO CHANGE THE NAME OF PRESIDENT WILLIAM MCKINLEY HIGH SCHOOL BACK TO HONOLULU HIGH SCHOOL AND REMOVE THE STATUE OF PRESIDENT MCKINLEY FROM THE SCHOOL PREMISES.

=================

http://freehawaii.blogspot.com/2024/11/ke-aupuni-update-november-2024.html
Free Hawaii blog, Ke Aupubi update

Saturday November 23, 2024

Celebrating La Ku'oko'a – Independence Day

On November 28, 1843 (181 years ago) the Kingdom of France and the United Kingdom formally recognized the Sandwich Islands (the Hawaiian Kingdom) as a sovereign, independent nation-state. In Hawaii, King Kamehameha III declared the date a national holiday and La Ku'oko'a was joyously celebrated as a holiday in the Kingdom for over 50 years!

That is, until 1895 when it so happened the American holiday “Thanksgiving Day” fell on November 28. The usurping “Republic of Hawaii”, trying to curry favor for annexation, made the American Thanksgiving Day, the national holiday instead of La Ku'oko'a.

From then on, under increasing American domination, the Hawaiian Kingdom high holiday of La Ku'oko'a was overshadowed, fell by the wayside and lost to memory. But about 30 years ago an intrepid group of Aloha ʻĀina (Hawaii patriots), led by Papa Kekuni Blaisdell started to revive the observance of La Kuʻokoʻa, along with La Hoʻihoʻi Ea which had also been forgotten. Ever since, these holidays have been increasingly celebrated with activities and events in several communities throughout the Pae ʻĀina, our nation.

It so happens that this year, the American Thanksgiving Day falls on November 28, the day of La Ku'oko'a… Let's see if we can turn this 181st anniversary into an opportunity to increase and spread awareness of the significance of La Ku’oko'a among our friends and families.

This is the perfect opportunity for those who celebrate the tradition of Thanksgiving to take a few minutes that day to share with our families and friends about the significance of La Ku'oko'a, Hawaii's Independence Day and to give thanks that our country survived despite 131 years of efforts to erase our true identity and suppress our existence.

Telling our stories like La Ku’oko'a will help to awaken in our people a sense of pride in our heritage and help fuel the vision of Hawaii as a vibrant independent country! This is an opportunity to effectively teach more of our 'ohana, in the intimacy of our homes, about the story of Hawaii's Independence Day and that, because of the wisdom and courage of Queen Liliʻuokalani and our kūpuna who stood in solidarity with her, that we are positioned and empowered to bring our country out of captivity!

In this intimate setting with loved ones all over the islands and, indeed, all over the world, we can reach more people than a series of public rallies. And what if families posted a shout-out to La Kuʻokoʻa on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, X, etc? Every time we tell our country's story, it affirms who we are; it becomes more personal; it becomes our story… and the fervor for restoration of our nation spreads.

“Love of country is deep-seated in the breast of every Hawaiian, whatever his station.” — Queen Liliʻuokalani

Ua mau ke ea o ka ʻāina i ka pono. The sovereignty of the land is perpetuated in righteousness.

"And remember, for the latest updates and information about the Hawaiian Kingdom check out the twice-a-month Ke Aupuni Updates published online on Facebook and other social media."

** Comment by Ken Conklin:
In 1895, 2 years after the revolution that overthrew the monarchy, the Republic of Hawaii was formally recognized as the rightful successor government by at least 19 nations on 4 continents in letters addressed to President Sanford B. Dole personally signed by their emperors, kings, queens, and presidents, thereby ending the Kingdom of Hawaii under international law -- a far more significant recognition than the 1843 agreement between low-level diplomats from only 2 nations who addressed only each other and not anyone from Hawaii. A webpage provides photos of all those letters and some accompanying documents and envelopes, along with explanations of the significance of each letter, at
https://historymystery.kenconklin.org/recognition-of-the-republic-of-hawaii/
See also
"(In)Significance of Hawaiian Kingdom Independence Day vs. Republic of Hawaii International Recognition" at
https://www.angelfire.com/hi5/bigfiles/LaKuOKoaInsignif.html

================

[Lumbee seek federal recognition through legislation in Congress rather than through the Dept. of Interior, similar to the Akaka bill to create a Hawaiian tribe that was active in Congress from 2000 through 2012 but failed and has not been attempted since then.]

https://ictnews.org/news/trump-promised-federal-recognition-for-the-lumbee-tribe-will-he-follow-through-
Indian Country Today Monday December 2, 2024

Trump promised federal recognition for the Lumbee Tribe. Will he follow through? Following the presidential election, the Lumbee hope there will be momentum behind their cause, but they face deep-rooted opposition from tribal nations across the country

by Graham Lee Brewer, ASSOCIATED PRESS

OKLAHOMA CITY — When Kamala Harris and Donald Trump campaigned in North Carolina, both candidates courted a state-recognized tribe there whose 55,000 members could have helped tip the swing state.

Trump in September promised that he would sign legislation to grant federal recognition to the Lumbee Tribe, a distinction that would unlock access to federal funds. He ultimately won North Carolina by more than 3 percentage points, in part due to continued support from Lumbee voters. Now, as Trump prepares to return to the White House in January, the promise will be put to the test. He has Republican allies in Congress on the issue, and now the Lumbee, as well as tribal nations across the country, are watching closely to see what comes next.

Tribal nations typically receive federal recognition through an application with the Department of the Interior, but the Lumbee have been trying for many years to circumvent that process by going through Congress. Chairman John Lowery called Interior’s application process “flawed” and overly lengthy and said it should be up to Congress to right what he calls a historic wrong. “It’s just crazy that we’re sitting here fighting this battle, and I have to tell you that I am real in 2024,” Lowery said.

Following the presidential election, the Lumbee hope there will be momentum behind their cause, but they face deep-rooted opposition from tribal nations across the country.

There are questions about Trump's next move

Several tribes, including the only one that is federally recognized in North Carolina, argue that if the Lumbee Tribe wants federal acknowledgment, it should go through the formal process in the Department of the Interior. One person familiar with Trump's thinking said the president-elect will require the Lumbee Tribe to do just that, and he won't sign a Lumbee recognition bill. The person requested anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly speak about Trump's views.

Trump's spokeswoman, Karoline Leavitt, said "no policy should be deemed official unless it comes directly from President Trump.”

Federal recognition is of enormous importance, as it comes with access to resources like health care through Indian Health Services and the ability to create a land base such as reservations through the land-to-trust process. But before that happens, a tribal nation has to file a successful application with the Office of Federal Acknowledgement, a department within the Interior.

The Lumbee Tribe was denied the ability to apply for federal recognition in 1987, based on the interpretation of a 1956 congressional act that acknowledged the Lumbee but stopped short of granting them federal recognition. In 2016, the Interior reversed that decision, allowing the Lumbee Tribe to apply, but the Lumbee have opted for the congressional route. The Lumbee's approach to gain recognition through legislation has stoked a simmering debate in both Indian Country and Congress about Indigenous identity and tribal nationhood.

The Lumbee have received support from members of both parties

Members of Congress from both parties have supported recognizing the Lumbee through legislation, including Oklahoma Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin, a member of the Cherokee Nation who campaigned for Trump in North Carolina and backed the legislation.

But perhaps the state-recognized tribe’s most ardent ally in Congress is North Carolina Republican Sen. Thom Tillis, who is up for reelection in 2026. Tillis introduced the Lumbee Fairness Act last year and has been a vocal supporter of the Lumbee. In interviews with The Associated Press, several tribal leaders, lobbyists, and advocates said they were told by Tillis directly or by his staff that the senator is currently and will continue to block certain bills backed by tribal nations unless the leaders of those tribes support the Lumbee. One of the bills he's promised to block, according to those interviewed by the AP, is a land transfer that would allow the Tennessee Valley Authority to return 70 acres of land to the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, the only federally recognized tribal nation in Tillis’s state. It would allow the tribe to put the land in Monroe County, Tennessee into trust. The plot is part of the tribal nation’s homelands and contains the birthplace of Sequoyah.

“It’s appalling to me. It’s disgraceful,” Principal Chief of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians Michell Hicks said. He said that Tillis told him earlier this year that he would stop any legislation dealing with the Eastern Band unless Hicks pledged his support.

Hicks is among the tribal leaders who question the validity of the Lumbee’s historical claims, and he said that is out of the question. At one point about a century ago, the Lumbee were known as the Cherokee Indians of Robeson County, and for many years now all three Cherokee tribes — the Eastern Band, the Cherokee Nation, and the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians — have denounced this and been vocal opponents of granting the Lumbee federal recognition. Representatives for Tillis declined to comment.

Tillis held up legislation last week that would have allowed for the preservation of the site of the Wounded Knee massacre. While doing so, he singled out the heads of the Oglala Sioux Tribe and the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, who have backed the preservation measure, for not supporting his efforts to federally recognize the Lumbee. “This is not about you,” Tillis said to the two tribal nations, who he acknowledged had been trying for a century to preserve the site of the massacre. “But you need to know that your leadership is playing a game that will ultimately force me to take a position.”

Tillis suggested it was a “casino cartel” in part driven by the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and an Osage attorney named Wilson Pipestem working for the tribe, that is trying to keep the Lumbee from gaining recognition, which could one day lead to the Lumbee opening their own casinos. Tillis threatened to continue publicly naming tribal leaders and their employees who he felt were standing in the way of his bill.

In a statement to the AP, Pipestem said Tillis should “apologize to the Tribal leaders for his false allegations and unscrupulous tactics.” Lowery acknowledged that Tillis has held up both pieces of legislation, but he said that Tillis has not done so at the direction of the Lumbee. “If he’s put a hold on the bill it’s because he reached out to tribal leaders to see where they stand on his bill, and they apparently have told him that they’re not in support,” Lowery said. “So, he said ‘well, if you can’t be supportive of my bill, I can’t be supportive of your bill.’”

A previous version of this story stated the Lumbee Tribe was denied federal recognition in 1985. The story was corrected to state that the Lumbee Tribe was denied the ability to apply for federal recognition in 1987.

Graham Lee Brewer is an Oklahoma City-based member of the AP’s Race and Ethnicity team.

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https://www.staradvertiser.com/2024/12/06/editorial/5-questions-with/5-questions-stacy-kealohalani-ferreira-office-of-hawaiian-affairs-ceo/
Honolulu Star-Advertiser Friday December 6, 2024

Questions: Stacy Kealohalani Ferreira, Office of Hawaiian Affairs CEO

** Excerpts plus online comments by Ken Conklin

Title: Chief executive officer, Office of Hawaiian Affairs, since Nov. 1, 2023
Background: Joined OHA in November 2023. Previously, budget chief for Hawaii Senate, and executive strategy consultant for Kamehameha Schools
Community: Omidyar fellow; member of Prince Kūhio Civic Club; haumana (student), Halau Hula Ka Lehua Tuahine

Question: You’ve said a priority is implementing OHA’s Strategic Plan, Mana I Mauli Ola, with its four directions: educational pathways; health outcomes; housing; and economic stability. Tell us more.

Ferreira's answer: "The scope of OHA’s mission requires careful navigation of complex issues such as systemic racism, inequitable resource allocation and historical trauma. However, challenges also present opportunities to reaffirm our commitment to Native Hawaiian well-being and self-determination. Our work remains grounded in the understanding that OHA’s north star is Native Hawaiian recognition. Mana i Mauli Ola provides the framework and “GPS” to guide us toward this."

** Ken Conklin's online comments, using the CEO's own words to illustrate OHA's racial divisiveness, focus on grabbing race-based political power, and hatred for USA as colonial oppressor:

Ferreira identified "Systemic racism" as a major part of OHA's focus. Here is how she actually plans to steer OHA to implement its own brand of systemic racism: "Ensuring Native Hawaiians are at the center of every decision and strategy we implement. ... facilitating self-determination while advancing outcomes that better the lives of Native Hawaiians."

Ferreira identified "Inequitable resource allocation" as a major part of OHA's focus. Here is how she actually plans to steer OHA to implement its own brand of inequitable resource allocation: OHA's operating expenses and grants "for the betterment of Native Hawaiians" are always far less than its income. As a result, OHA's assets have increased by huge amounts every year. OHA's most recent annual report, for fiscal year ending June 2023, shows total assets of 903 MILLION DOLLARS. The new annual report for fiscal year ending June 2024 is scheduled for release in January, and will probably be close, or exceeding A BILLION DOLLARS. No other branch of state government has anywhere near such a huge stash nor allowed to roll it over year after year. And it's all set aside exclusively for Hawaii's favorite racial group.

Ferreira identified "Historical trauma" as a major part of OHA's focus. Here is how she plans to steer OHA to make use of historical grievances to intimidate U.S.A. and non-native citizens of Hawaii to give restitution in the form of land, money, and political power: Grievances from more than 130 years ago will never be forgotten or forgiven. Bitter activists clinging tightly to anger, resentment, racial hatred that provide them with excuses to claim victimhood and to demand restitution of racial privilege (ancestral pedigree ali'i at the top of race-based social stratification) and racial restrictions on ownership or leasing of land (State of Hawaii Department of Hawaiian Homelands).

"Native Hawaiian recognition" and "self-determination". Ferreira said "OHA’s north star is Native Hawaiian recognition." The 20% of Hawaii's people who have at least one drop of the magic blood will make the decisions affecting all Hawaii's people regarding how to divide Hawaii's people and lands along racial lines: for example, create a Hawaiian tribe and get federal recognition for it along with racial enclaves called "Hawaiian homelands"; or else for example force USA to withdraw from Hawaii and thereby make Hawaii an independent nation like Samoa or Fiji with racial restrictions on political power and land ownership.

==============

https://www.civilbeat.org/2024/12/who-should-manage-mauna-%CA%BBala/
Honolulu Civil Beat Monday December 9, 2024

Who Should Be Trusted To Manage Remains Of Hawaiian Royals?
Proposals are floating for either the Office of Hawaiian Affairs or a private entity to take over at the Royal Mausoleum.

By Blaze Lovell

Management of Mauna ʻAla, the burial place for many of Hawaiʻi’s monarchs, is at a crossroads.

The state Department of Land and Natural Resources picked a new curator for the burial grounds in Nuʻuanu without consulting with key Native Hawaiian organizations or the family that has cared for the remains for the last 200 hundred years.

That set off a fierce debate that will spill out into the Legislature next year. Lawmakers will propose that the state lands department step aside and transfer management of the grounds to the Office of Hawaiian Affairs.

Meanwhile, descendants of the customary caretakers — who say the lands department broke with decades of tradition in picking the new curator — are trying to build support to hand over management to a private nonprofit.

Burials in Hawaiian culture — and those of royal lineages in particular — are considered highly sacred. The debate over which entity gets to manage Mauna ʻAla is intertwined with who should be responsible for caring for those remains.

*Photo captions
Mauna ʻAla is photographed Wednesday, Dec. 4, 2024, in Honolulu. Currently under DLNR jurisdiction, the Royal Mausoleum of Hawaii is the final resting place for the Kamehameha and Kalākaua. (Kevin Fujii/Civil Beat/2024) The debate over who should manage Mauna ʻAla, the resting place of the Kamehameha and Kalākaua dynasties, will likely extend into the legislative session. (Kevin Fujii/Civil Beat/2024)

Amid the debate, one thing has become clear: keeping Mauna ʻAla under the state lands department is unpopular to many involved. “I don’t think it being housed in DLNR is a good fit,” Sen. Tim Richards, who chairs the Senate Hawaiian Affairs Committee, said.

Unanswered Questions Abound

Proposals to transfer management authority come with many unanswered questions, including who pays for the upkeep and what would happen to the current curator, Doni Chong.

Kai Kahele, newly elected to chair the board of trustees of OHA, said his agency, established to represent the interests of Hawaiians, is the right pick to oversee the burial grounds. “We have the talent here to do it, we just have to work with the administration to bring that to fruition,” Kahele said.

Sen. Lorraine Inouye, who chairs the Senate Water and Land Committee, said she plans to introduce a bill transferring management of the grounds to OHA. Inouye is worried that keeping Mauna ʻAla under the land department, whose director is a political appointee of the governor, means that policies could change with each new administration every four years. “If we leave it with OHA, that would be continuous,” Inouye said.

Proposals in the Senate will seek to transfer management of Mauna ʻAla to OHA. (Ben Angarone/Civil Beat/2024)

While Inouye supports transferring management authority, she’s not sure that lawmakers would approve of giving OHA additional funds for Mauna ʻAla. Inouye thinks the office, which oversees vast trust resources worth $600 million, should be able to cover the costs for Mauna ʻAla itself.

OHA has some experience managing historical sites. In 2012, the office acquired the land in Wahiawā that houses the Kūkaniloko birthing stones, the birthplace for many of Oʻahu’s high-ranking chiefs.

But Inouye also acknowledged that OHA comes with some baggage. The office and its trustees have previously been criticized for mismanaging the office’s finances. An audit two years ago found possible instances of waste, fraud and abuse in OHA contracts within the last decade, which prompted the office’s leadership to tighten its internal controls.

In addition to the state, the Aliʻi Trusts, whose namesakes are buried at Mauna ʻAla, have also contributed to improvements at the site under an agreement with DLNR from 2013. Three of the largest trusts — Lunalilo Home, Liliʻuokalani Trust and The Queen’s Health System — either declined to comment or didn’t respond to requests for comment on the future of Mauna ʻAla.

In a written statement, Kamehameha Schools said that the care and guardianship of Mauna ʻAla “demands the highest standards from all who are entrusted with this sacred responsibility.” “We trust that OHA and DLNR will continue to work together, alongside the community, to malama this special place.”

After Chong was appointed earlier this year, DLNR Director Dawn Chang said that she met with the Aliʻi trusts, royal societies, Hawaiian civic clubs and members of the family that have traditionally cared for the burials, but there was no consensus among them regarding the proposed transfer of Mauna ʻAla to OHA. There was also a proposal at one point to create a new position to deal with the cultural aspects of Mauna ʻAla. Chang said there also wasn’t consensus from those groups on what exactly that position would entail.

* Photo captions
Mauna ʻAla is photographed Wednesday, Dec. 4, 2024, in Honolulu. Currently under DLNR jurisdiction, the Royal Mausoleum of Hawaii is the final resting place for the Kamehameha and Kalākaua. (Kevin Fujii/Civil Beat/2024)Congress removed Mauna ʻAla from the public land inventory in 1900. (Kevin Fujii/Civil Beat/2024)

At recent land board meetings, testifiers and board members have raised concerns that the land department planned to turn parts of Mauna ʻAla, including the curator’s house, into a sort of museum. While the department is undertaking a $325,000 renovation project of the curator’s house, Chang said the goal isn’t to turn it into a commercial enterprise. After the renovations are complete, Chong and future curators would still live on site.

Chang said she believes Chong has been doing a good job. She said that Chong has been getting assistance from Kahu Kordell Kekoa on cultural protocols and recently hosted a graduating class of Honolulu firefighters. “I have not received any concerns or complaints,” Chang said. “If anything, we’ve been receiving positive comments about her work there.”

Prior to Chong, a family that traced its lineage to chief Hoʻolulu had served as caretakers of Mauna ʻAla for decades. Hoʻolulu, along with his brother, hid the remains of Kamehameha I.

Remains And Spiritual Power

In Hawaiian tradition, iwi, or bones, contain a person’s mana, or spiritual power. In ancient times, high-ranking chiefs would often have their remains hidden from people who sought to steal that power. Hoʻolulu and his descendants were entrusted with protecting the remains of Hawaiʻi’s aliʻi into the afterlife.

Mauna ʻAla was established in 1864 to house the remains of Kamehameha’s descendants and their close advisers. It later became the resting place for relatives of David Kalākaua and other royal lineages. Now, the descendants hope to see a nonprofit established that could manage Mauna ʻAla in partnership with the Aliʻi trusts — removing the site from state government management entirely.

“The OHA solution is just too political,” Mary ‘Amaikalani Beckley Lawrence Gallagher, one of the Hoʻolulu descendants, said. Mary Gallagher wants to see management of Mauna Ala returned to her family members. (Screenshot)

James Maioho, who comes from a branch of that family, is trying to get support from the Alii trusts and other royal societies to eventually transfer management to a nonprofit run by the family. “You’re giving that 3.3 acres back to Kanaka control, back as sovereign land,” Maioho said.

Gallagher said that family members have already been discussing who could be the next caretaker and who should be trained to succeed them should the family take over management of Mauna ʻAla. She said the family has weathered through numerous regime changes over the years as management passed from the Hawaiian Kingdom, to the territory and now to the state. “We’ll keep our chins up,” Gallagher said, “and keep ourselves out of the monkey business.”

** Ken Conklin's note: This confession of conflict-of-interest is now being published at the bottom of every Civil Beat "news report" including this article:
"Civil Beat’s coverage of Native Hawaiian issues and initiatives is supported by a grant from the Abigail Kawananakoa Foundation."
** A couple years ago, anticipating she would soon die, Abigail Kawananakoa launched a huge publicity campaign displaying her genealogy and demanding that she had a right to have her burial tomb located at Mauna 'Ala; and her campaign was successful.

------

** Ken Conklin's note: In the Mahele of 1848 King Kauikeaouli Kamehameha III gave up sole ownership of all the lands of Hawaii which he possessed by right of conquest by his father, and divided the lands into Crown Lands (kept by the King as his own personal property), Government Lands (owned by the government on behalf of all the people), and private lands distributed among high-ranking chiefs. Mauna 'Ala (Royal Mausoleum) was part of the Crown Lands. During the 1860s King Lota Kamehameha V ran up huge gambling debts and mortgaged the Crown Lands. When he could no longer pay the mortgage, it foreclosure was threatened that would result in the Crown Lands being owned by non-Hawaiians. The Kingdom legislature on January 3, 1865 passed a law issuing government bonds to pay off the mortgage, and taking ownership of the Crown Lands by the government. The King was happy to sign that law. Thereby the Government Lands and Crown Lands (including Mauna 'Ala) were merged as the Public Lands, with the only differences being that the income from the (former) Crown Lands was set aside for use by the office of monarch to support royal activities (such as palace, banquets, travel), and the government was forbidden to sell or encumber the former Crown lands. From then until now Mauna 'Ala, like all the public lands, has been property owned by the Kingdom, Republic, Territory, and State of Hawaii. Mauna 'Ala is administered by the Department of Parks, which is part of the Department of Land and Natural Resources; its maintenance expenses, building permits, etc. are managed in the same way as other parks. Contrary to the mystery-mongering of Midweek Newspaper editor Don Chapman in articles dated May 19 and May 26 of 2004, Mauna 'Ala was NOT carved out as an exception to the ceding of Hawai'i's public lands to the United States at the time of the Annexation, and does NOT "remain today a piece of the Kingdom of Hawai'i where the laws of the United States and the State of Hawai'i do not apply." For details see webpage "Mauna Ala (Royal Mausoleum) -- History, Mystery, Ghost Stories, and A Claim of Continuing Hawaiian Sovereign Territory" at
https://www.angelfire.com/hi5/bigfiles2/MaunaAlaMidweekMay2004.html
Proposals to transfer ownership of Mauna 'Ala to the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, or to a race-based private corporation, are simply part of a larger effort to undermine the sovereignty of the United States and the State of Hawaii, to re-create Hawaii as an independent nation under racial supremacy by ethnic Hawaiians. Current proposals for Mauna 'Ala resemble racist proposals in the legislature 25 years ago for how to overcome the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Rice v. Cayetano that forced the State of Hawaii to allow all registered voters, regardless of race, to vote in government elections for "trustees" of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, and the followup decision by the local federal court in Arakaki v. State of Hawaii that forced the state to allow all registered voters, regardless of race, to run as candidates in those elections for OHA.

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https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2024/12/11/vicky-holt-takamine-hula

Boston University Radio December 11, 2024, Here & Now Newsroom

Award-winning Hula master on why she sees her craft as a 'form of resistance'

Here & Now's Scott Tong speaks with hula master teacher Vicky Holt Takamine about winning the prestigious Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, valued at more than $450,000.

Holt Takamine has long advocated for the art form and the rights of Indigenous Hawaiians.

** Audio file only; 11 minutes:
https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2024/12/11/vicky-holt-takamine-hula
** To hear this audio you must click the little yellow circle with the ">" inside it, and you cannot go back partway to reply something interesting. ** However, if you're very clever, you can click on the almost invisible little grey icon just below that yellow circle and you'll download the audio file with a slide bar that lets you go to any spot within the 11 minute audio.
https://dcs-spotify.megaphone.fm/BUR9858642683.mp3?key=ba0bc190e78ec94b5c3d1b7c1c48f26e&request_event_id=49c6328e-9fd7-4301-8935-bcfffb78b7df&timetoken=1733986306_79637E5C4D8D6D4D94074E50FE3B942D

The song/chant in that audio file that is most concerning is "Ku Ha'aheo", a powerful, pounding, combative-sounding song-chant about standing proud to defend the Lahui; written by Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu.

A webpage published 3 days previously presumably written by an instructor of a college course "Music 150" at a mainland college describes the chant and provides a video of a hula expressing it:
https://globaltrumpeteducation.knight.domains/published/ku-haaheo-e-kuu-hawaii/

Ku haʻaheo E Kuʻu Hawaii – is a song written in 2007 by Kumu Hina Wong and was the “anthem” of the Mauna Kea protests, where Native Hawaiians blocked the access road to the top of Mauna Kea(The highest mountain in the world from its base, which is below sea level, to the peak). The state had just approved building a Thirty Meter Telescope(TMT) despite the voiced concern for Natives because of Mauna Kea’s cultural significance. Thousands of Native Hawaiians (young and old) stayed on the mountain for months in a peaceful protest. While on the mountain, the people partook in many different cultural activities such as mele(song) and dance(hula). This song became popular because of its lyrics. The song’s lyrics are a call to all Native Hawaiians to unite, stand up for our culture and beliefs, and be proud to be Hawaiian. There is a music video on YouTube with some of the most popular Hawaiian artists who sang the song together, and it became very popular during the protests. To a lot of people from Hawaii, that music video gives goosebumps cause of how powerful it was(That’s what my best friend from there describes it as). But this is really a song of patriotism to Hawaii and a call for Hawaiians to stand proud. Within the song, you can hear how passionate and prideful they are about the movement they support.

I chose this song because one of my roommates/best friends is from Hawaii and has told me this story about this song plenty of times over the past two years. I have always been fascinated by it. So, being able to research this more over the past few days and talk to my buddy about it has been awesome. I have been able to bond with him and learn more about how powerful music can be.

I found this cool website with a video of the artists singing it.
https://www.oha.org/ku-haaheo-e-kuu-hawaii/

This website also has the translated English version if you want to see it. Just scroll down on the website, and you will find it!

** Ken Conklin's note: The website oha.org is owned by the Office of Hawaiian Affairs. The video shows the singer in a yellow dress who is composer Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu, who proudly identifies as a mahu [biological male displaying dress and personality as female while claiming to be simultaneously both genders spiritually]. The translation of the song lyrics as provided on that webpage is:

The sea of Hawai’i surges in turmoil
The earth of Haumea rumbles and shakes
The highest heavens shudder up above
Alas! Woeful indeed are the heartless foreigners

*Stand tall my Hawai’i
Band of warriors of my land
The new dawn for our people of Hawai’i is upon us
For my nation I give my all so that our legacy lives on

Where are you soldiers of Keawe
Along with those of Maui and O’ahu
Unite, join together with those of Kaua’i
Marching alongside the descendants of Ni’ihau

Move forward young ones and drink of the bitter waters
Be fearless, steadfast for there is no turning back
Let’s press onward straight on the path of victory
Alas! Woeful are the heartless foreigners!

Be honored always oh beloved descendants of the land
Let us wear the honored ‘a’ali’i of our beloved land
Paddle on in our pursuit of civil justice
Until our dignity and independence is restored

---------------

https://www.forbes.com/sites/chaddscott/2024/12/15/kumu-hula-vicky-holt-takamine-becomes-first-native-hawaiian-to-win-the-gish-prize/
Forbes Magazine online, Sunday December 15, 2024

Kumu Hula Vicky Holt Takamine Becomes First Native Hawaiian To Win The Gish Prize

The Gish Prize is awarded annually to a figure from any discipline of the arts who has pushed the boundaries of an art form, contributed to social change, and paved the way for the next generation, with a cash prize this year of more than $450,000.

by Chadd Scott, Contributor
Chadd Scott has been covering the intersection of art and travel at Forbes.com since 2018. He specializes in stories related to Native American, African American, and female artists.

If you’ve never heard of the Gish Prize, you’re not alone. Vicky Holt Takamine (b.1947) hadn’t either. Not until the day the Native Hawaiian was informed she had won it.

“I got a call from the Gish Committee,” Takamine told Forbes.com. “I was here at work and (they) said, ‘You've won the Gish Prize.’ I was like, ‘Did I apply for this?’ I was totally unaware of what that was. I quickly started to look it up on my phone when I was talking to them.” Imagine Takamine, headset pressed between shoulder and ear, trying to talk and listen while simultaneously searching and scrolling.

Lillian Gish, legendary screen and stage actress, known as the First Lady of Cinema… ok… Lillian Gish Prize established in 1994 through her will… that’s nice… the Gish Prize awarded annually to a highly accomplished figure from any discipline of the arts who has pushed the boundaries of an art form, contributed to social change, and paved the way for the next generation… yada, yada, yada… a cash prize this year of more than $450,000!

A charge of electricity must have gone through Takamine’s body upon reading that. Takamine is a kumu hula (master teacher of Hawaiian dance) who will officially receive the 31st Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize on December 15, 2024, at a private ceremony at Washington Place, the residence of the governor of Hawaii. One of the most prestigious awards in the arts, Takamine is the first Gish Prize recipient from Hawaii, and the first whose artistic practice is inseparable from her activism on behalf of Indigenous culture, rights, and the environment.

Previous honorees include Bob Dylan, Robert Redford, and Spike Lee.

Oh, and she did not apply for the award. That’s not how the Gish Prize works. Each year, a new group of five experts forms a selection committee to select the winner.

“My mother was a dancer. My grandmother was a dancer, a hula dancer,” Takamine, who’s from Oahu, said. “On my father's side, I descend from Hawaiian royalty. After the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, they started both the Democratic and the Republican Party.”

Takamine’s family has played an essential role in Hawaiian history from helping start the first state legislature to promoting and preserving hula. “That’s our national dance,” Takamine said. “Because Hawaii didn't have a written language, it was a form of transferring history, knowledge, genealogies, from one island to the next through the oral traditions of chant and stories and hula.”

Hula is much more than the swaying of hips for the entertainment of tourists. “The hand gestures will interpret the text of the hula,” Takamine explains. “We make motions for flowers, we make motions for rain, we have motions for the sun and the wind and the trees and the land and the ocean, and there are many different variations of those motions that are used throughout hula. Then the feet. We have hula that's sitting down – some of them are just sitting and hand gestures and chanting – and others have very prescribed foot movement.”

The practice has spiritual significance as well. “Hula started with the goddess Laka, who's the goddess of hula, and shared hula,” Takamine continued. “Also, in the story of Pele, the goddess of fire and volcanos, her youngest sister, Hiʻiakaikapoliopele, learned the hula from a friend, Hōpoe, who taught her how to dance.”

Takamine began dancing as a 12-year-old. In 1975, she graduated as a kumu hula from hula master Maiki Aiu Lake. She went on to establish her own hālau, Pua Ali’i ‘Ilima (school of Hawaiian dance), in 1977 and has been teaching hula ever since.

Hula As Resistance

For Native Hawaiians, hula is language. Hula is culture. Hula is storytelling. Hula is family. To Takamine, hula is also resistance.

“In the 1830s, after Queen Ka‘ahumanu, who was the wife of King Kamehameha I, who united the islands under one kingdom–missionaries had come in 1820 introduced hymns and Christianity,” Takamine explains. “Ka‘ahumanu converted after the death of her husband and they convinced her that hula was pagan and lascivious so she banned hula as the Kuhina Nui, one of the rulers of Hawaii. Hula was banned from 1830 until 1883 when King David Kalākaua, the last king of Hawaii, revived the hula and said, no, hula is the language of the heart and the heartbeat of the Hawaiian people.”

Takamine was a dancer and instructor long before she was an activist, the combo which drew the Gish Prize committee’s attention. But when she made that jump in 1997, it was hula that helped take her there.

“I was just teaching hula and then the state legislature introduced a bill, and I guess the political side of me kicked in. This bill was so unfair to all of us Native Hawaiians. It required that Native Hawaiians would have to go to the land use commission, list everything we gathered, all the flowers, the ferns, all the fish, all the seaweed, and have a clear preponderance of evidence that our great-great grandparents did that prior to 1893,” Takamine remembers. “Then it said we could only gather in the district that you lived in. Hawaiians moved from island to island. They're not stationary. So, if you can't prove that your ancestors gathered and you had moved to the Island of Maui, and you can't prove that they gathered these resources, then you wouldn't be able to gather and that would literally kill our practices.”

Across the U.S. mainland, Alaska, and Hawai`i, Indigenous people have been fighting for the right to maintain their traditional practices related to the use and harvesting of plants and animals since colonization. Eagle feathers. Walleye. Whales. Orchids.

The white man came and exhausted these resources for profit, then attempted to forbid Native people from using them to sustain their cultures and traditional way of life, using laws and courts to claim the resources were too scarce.

Takamine testified before the state legislature, stressing the proposed bill’s irreparable damage to Native Hawaiian culture. “They passed the bill right out of the committee and I was like, ‘This is not happening,’” she said.

Takamine called and emailed every kumu hula and hula practitioner in the state, organizing and gathering them for a 24-hour drum chat vigil at the state capital. “We pretty much shut down the legislature at that point. They couldn't answer the phone –there's drumming and chanting, and ruckus,” Takamine said. “The news said, ‘Vicky Holt Takamine, a Hawaiian activist,’ and I was like, ‘I've been teaching for 20 years, how did I go from kumu hula to activist overnight?’ I was like, ‘I'm okay with that.’ We were able to kill the bill. They introduced it again the next the following year, we killed it again. Since then, the hula community has been more active and involved in in policy.”

Hula as resistance.

For Native people across what is today called America, speaking, reading, writing, dancing, praying, hunting, fishing, making art–what others may consider hobbies–are powerful forms of resistance against a government that attempted–with great success in many instances–a genocide against them. Getting out of bed in the morning as an Indigenous person in America can rightly be seen as resistance.

Hawai`i’s statehood itself results from a treacherous cabal of business interests–Dole among them–conspiring together on a scheme to wrest control of the land away from Native Hawaiians and give it the U.S. An action so rotten and corrupt that in 1893, President Grover Cleveland commissioned a report on the action, the Blount Report, detailing the nefarious corporate-backed, U.S. Marine-involved, coup d’état.

One hundred years later, President Bill Clinton signed legislation apologizing for the role the U.S. played in aiding the overthrow. He didn’t give the land back, though.

“When I started teaching the hula, people also started Hawaiian language immersion schools,” Takamine said. “My grandmother was reprimanded for speaking Hawaiian language and that's why she didn't want her kids to learn the language. My grandmother was fluent in the Hawaiian language. She had 10 children, and not one of them–she never allowed them to learn the language that was spoken to them. She felt that they should live in an English-speaking society and that English should be their first language.”

This story is common among Native parents across America, and territories that would become American, at the turn of the 20th century. Parents saw no future in their children learning Indigenous languages. Children needed to focus all their energies on surviving in the white man’s world.

Takamine received her Bachelor’s and Masters Degrees in Dance Ethnology from the University of Hawai`i where she also studied the Hawaiian language.

“Most of the mele (chants) are in Hawaiian language, and we teach the students the Hawaiian language,” Takamine said. “We teach them the English translation because most of them are not Hawaiian language speakers, but we also teach them the gestures, and that helps them to associate the gesture with the Hawaiian term, and then they understand what they're dancing about, they're better able to interpret the song and the chant with their interpretive movements, but also the feeling. We take them to the places that we sing and dance about to see what our ancestors were talking about, where the sun rises, where the sun sets, where these trees are, and imitate those movements, and why was it so important for them to write a song about this place? What was it that they loved about it? We have to do that now because Hawai`i is getting overdeveloped. Sometimes the names of these places are no longer being used, and so it's our job to revive these place names, and to perpetuate those histories before they get lost for another generation.”

Overdeveloped

Most people who experience Hawai`i do so as tourists. The state has a population of 1.4 million while hosting 10 million tourists annually. The strain of that crush of people on the state’s infrastructure, environment, and residents has become too great to bear. The tension between Hawaiians and the tourism industry reached an apex following the manic rush of post-COVID tourism followed by the Lahaina, Maui wildfire in 2023 which killed more than 100 and displaced thousands in the uber-popular resort destination.

Government officials sought an immediate return of tourists and their money, citizens wanted time to grieve and heal and devise a tourism model considering their needs along with the wants of visitors. Tourism in state has now returned to near pre-COVID peaks.

“This is a great vacation for them, but we struggle with balancing the economics of tourism that's vital for Hawaii–that's our number one industry here–and the protection of our natural and cultural resources. Development is not always the best,” Takamine said. “If you want to come and have the beautiful sand and beaches, then you need to help us protect these places and protect our way of life, otherwise those things that you are coming over here for will not be here a generation from now.”

In the weeks before COVID, the state’s tourism department launched a Mālama Hawaiʻi project hoping to inspire visitors to give something back to the islands and its people when they visit. Less extractive, more cooperative.

Visitors to the state can take simple, meaningful actions to assure their impact as a visitor is lighter on the islands and its people. Don’t litter. Stay on marked trails when hiking. Use only mineral sunscreen to avoid damaging coral reefs. Shop small and seek out food, art, crafts, jewelry, clothing, and souvenirs made by Hawaiians, not made to look like they were made by Hawaiians. These are all good tips to travel better no matter where those travels may lead.

Travel with the aloha spirit.

When selecting a luau to see hula dancing in person, do enough research to make sure it’s culturally appropriate, and owned and operated by Hawaiians.

“I used to run a luau show, but when they were trying to get me to put my my boobs in a coconut cup –we don't put our boots in that, that's what we serve awa and we serve poi in,” Takamine remembers. “When the tourist industry starts to dictate what we present and how we present, and what we wear, and they're not knowledgeable about our culture, that's when we're in trouble.”

And that’s where hula can come to the rescue.

==============

Dec 11 2024/Dec 12 2024/Jan 2025: Very lengthy "Atlantic Magazine" propaganda article celebrating "The Hawaiians Who Want Their Nation Back". Article announced and made available on December 11, 2024 for subscribers exclusively; full text published in "Free Hawaii" blog on December 12; full article including text and photos will be published in hardcopy magazine edition for January 2025; therefore text is posted as last item at bottom of this webpage.

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http://freehawaii.blogspot.com/2024/12/ke-aupuni-update-december-2024-dead.html
Free Hawaii blog Ke Aupuni update Saturday December 14, 2024

“Dead Language” or Learning Opportunity?

There was an incident at a City Council meeting a few days ago, that serves as a reminder of the ignorance of some people living in our midst.

At the City Council meeting, Kapua Keliʻikoa Kamae of Waianae gave her testimony in ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi (the Hawaiian Language), then repeated it in English. Right after, Kai Loring, a remote testifier from the North Shore, apparently had not heard the English version of Kapua’s testimony, complained: “I’m not sure what language it was. I’m assuming it was Hawaiian, and that is a dead language, so it would not work on translator.” [Actually, Hawaiian is on Google Translate and others]

Those in the audience immediately took umbrage at her remark; the internet exploded … and City Council members, to their credit, spoke out.

Councilwoman Esther Kiaʻaina quickly responded “It is not a dead language, it is very much alive…and if it wasn’t for the fact that those who helped to overthrow the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi banned our language, we would be speaking only Hawaiian now!” Councilwoman Andria Tupola said her children attend a Hawaiian immersion school and her family speaks Hawaiian in their home. Council Chair, Tommy Waters, reminded everyone that Hawaiian is an official language of the State of Hawaiʻi.

The public reaction shows how far we have come from 40 years ago when the first Punana Leo program opened quietly in Kekaha, Kauaʻi. At the time, the Hawaiian language was indeed on the brink of extinction with only a few hundred native speakers left. But now, there are well over 24,000 who are fluent in ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi. And that number is growing every year.

Much has transpired especially over the past decade to assert Hawaiian as an official language. Hawaiian is now used in the courts, government proceedings (like City Council and neighborhood boards meetings), official government forms and documents (like taxes, permits, driver’s licenses), ballots, ATM machines, announcements at the airport, etc., etc.

Some of you may remember that 11 years ago, Rep. Faye Hanohano from Puna was reprimanded by the State House of Representatives for speaking Hawaiian at a session of the House. The only one to speak up in defense of Hanohano’s right to speak in Hawaiian at the legislature was Rep. Gene Ward of Hawaiʻi Kai. Since that incident, the legislature has changed it’s tune. Hawaiian may be spoken on the floor, in public hearings and ceremonial proceedings at the State Legislature.

In many of the confrontations over Aloha ʻĀina issues, Hawaiians are choosing to speak Hawaiian at press conferences, public rallies and court appearances. The point is not that this is a legal right, ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi is a powerful means of expressing who we are. ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi embodies our ancestral roots — our origins, cosmology, stories, knowledge, culture, traditions, perceptions, understandings, values and principles that distinguishes who we are as a people. The language is not only a treasure from the past, more importantly, it is our blueprint for the future.

“Love of country is deep-seated in the breast of every Hawaiian, whatever his station.” — Queen Liliʻuokalani

Ua mau ke ea o ka ʻāina i ka pono. The sovereignty of the land is perpetuated in righteousness.

"And remember, for the latest updates and information about the Hawaiian Kingdom check out the twice-a-month Ke Aupuni Updates published online on Facebook and other social media."

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https://www.staradvertiser.com/2024/12/15/editorial/letters/readers-share-count-your-blessings-letters/
Honolulu Star-Advertiser Sunday December 15, 2024
Readers share ‘Count your blessings’ letters

Blessed to be Americans, in 50th State of United States

We Hawaiians are blessed to be Americans. In 1893: Kingdom subjects overthrew monarchy. 1895: Republic of Hawaii formally recognized as rightful successor government in letters personally signed by emperors, kings, queens, presidents of 19 nations on four continents; Republic thereby authorized under international law to speak on behalf of the still-independent nation of Hawaii. 1897: Republic of Hawaii offered Treaty of Annexation to USA, ceding public lands as all Territories did, and nullifying all Kingdom treaties. 1898: U.S. Congress and President McKinley ratified Treaty. 1959: 94% of Hawaii voters said YES to becoming U.S. 50th State.

We are blessed to be Americans. We are not going back to before 1959, 1898 or 1893.

Kenneth R. Conklin, Ph.D.
Kaneohe

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Dec 11 2024/Dec 12 2024/Jan 2025: Very lengthy "Atlantic Magazine" propaganda article celebrating "The Hawaiians Who Want Their Nation Back". Article announced and made available on December 11, 2024 for subscribers exclusively; full text published in "Free Hawaii" blog on December 12; full article including text and photos will be published in hardcopy magazine edition for January 2025; therefore text is posted as last item at bottom of this webpage.
Here is the very lengthy text as published on the "Free Hawaii" blog on December 12:

http://freehawaii.blogspot.com/2024/12/the-hawaiians-who-want-their-nation.html
Free Hawaii blog Thursday December 12, 2024

THE HAWAIIANS WHO WANT THEIR NATION BACK
In 1893, A U.S.-Backed Coup Overthrew The Islands’ Sovereign Government. What Does America Owe Hawai‘i Now?

By Adrienne LaFrance - Photographs by Brendan George Ko

At the edge of a forest on the island of O‘ahu, through two massive metal gates—if you can convince someone to let you in—you will find yourself inside the compound of the self-appointed president of the Nation of Hawai‘i.

Dennis Pu‘uhonua Kanahele came to possess this particular 45-acre plot only after a prolonged and extremely controversial occupation, which he led, and which put him in prison for a time, more than three decades ago. Since then, he has built a modest commune on this land, in the shadow of an ancient volcano, with a clutter of bungalows and brightly painted trailers. He’s in his 70s now, and carries himself like an elder statesman. I went to see him because I had, for the better part of 20 years, been trying to find the answer to a question that I knew preoccupied both of us: What should America do about Hawai’i?

More than a century after the United States helped orchestrate the coup that conquered the nation of Hawai‘i, and more than 65 years since it became a state, people here have wildly different ideas about what America owes the Hawaiian people. Many are fine with the status quo, and happy to call themselves American. Some people even explicitly side with the insurrectionists. Others agree that the U.S. overthrow was an unqualified historic wrong, but their views diverge from that point. There are those who argue that the federal government should formally recognize Hawaiians with a government-to-government relationship, similar to how the United States liaises with American Indian tribes; those who prefer to seize back government from within; and those who argue that the Kingdom of Hawai‘i never legally ceased to exist.

Then there is Kanahele, who has wrested land from the state—at least for the duration of his 55-year lease—and believes other Hawaiians should follow his example. Like many Hawaiians (by which I mean descendants of the Islands’ first inhabitants, who are also sometimes called Native Hawaiians), Kanahele doesn’t see himself as American at all. When he travels, he carries, along with his U.S. passport, a Nation of Hawai‘i passport that he and his followers made themselves.

But outside the gates of his compound, there is not only an American state, but a crucial outpost of the United States military, which has 12 bases and installations here—including the headquarters for U.S. Indo-Pacific Command and the Pacific Missile Range Facility. The military controls hundreds of thousands of acres of land and untold miles of airspace in the Islands.

It seems unrealistic, to say the least, to imagine that the most powerful country in the world would simply give Hawai‘i back to the Hawaiians. If it really came down to it, I asked, how far would Kanahele go to protect his people, his nation? That’s a personal question, Kanahele told me. “That’s your life, you know. What you’re willing to give up. Not just freedom but the possibility to be alive.”

Sitting across the table from us, his vice president, Brandon Maka‘awa‘awa, conceded that there had, in the past, been moments when it would have been easy to choose militancy. “We could have acted out of fear,” he said. But every time, they “acted with aloha and we got through, just like our queen.” He was referring to Hawai‘i’s last monarch, Queen Lili‘uokalani, who was deposed in the coup in 1893.

People tend to treat this chapter in U.S. foreign relations as a curiosity on the margins of history. This is a mistake. The overthrow of Hawai‘i is what established the modern idea of America as a superpower. Without this one largely forgotten episode, the United States may never have endured an attack on Pearl Harbor, or led the Allies to victory in World War II, or ushered in the age of Pax Americana—an age that, with Donald Trump’s return to power, could be coming to an end.

Some Hawaiians see what is happening now in the United States as a bookend of sorts. In their view, the chain of events that led to a coup in Hawai‘i in 1893 has finally brought us to this: the moment when the rise of autocracy in America presents an opportunity for Hawaiians to extricate themselves from their long entanglement with the United States, reclaim their independence, and perhaps even resurrect their nation.

Keanu Sai is, today, one of the more extreme thinkers about Hawaiian sovereignty. Growing up in Kuli‘ou‘ou, on the east end of O‘ahu, Sai was a self-described slacker who only wanted to play football. He graduated from high school in 1982 and went straight to a military college, then the Army.

In 1990, he was at Fort Sill, in Oklahoma, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, annexing it as Iraq’s 19th province. International condemnation was swift; the United Nations Security Council declared the annexation illegal. An American-led coalition quickly beat back Saddam, liberating Kuwait. “And that’s when I went, Wait a minute. That’s exactly what happened” in Hawai‘i, Sai told me. “Our government was overthrown.” The idea radicalized him.

Before Hawai‘i’s overthrow, it had been a full-fledged nation with diplomatic relationships across the globe and a modern form of governance (it also signed a peace treaty with the United States in 1826). As a constitutional monarchy, it had elected representatives, its own supreme court, and a declaration of rights modeled after the U.S. Bill of Rights. And, as people in Hawai‘i like to remind outsiders, ‘Iolani Palace had electricity before the White House did.

Then, in January 1893, a group of 13 men—mostly Americans or Hawai‘i-born businessmen descended from American missionary families, all with extensive financial interests in the Islands—executed a surprise coup. They did so with remarkable speed and swagger, even by coup standards. The men behind the effort referred to themselves as the Committee of Safety (presumably in a nod to the American and French Revolutions) and had good reason to expect that they would succeed: They had the backing of the U.S. foreign minister to the Kingdom of Hawai‘i, John L. Stevens, who called up a force of more than 160 Marines and sailors to march on Honolulu during the confrontation with the queen. Stevens later insisted that he had done so in a panic—a coup was unfolding! It was his duty to do whatever was necessary to protect American lives and property! A good story, but not a convincing one.

Months before the coup, Stevens had written a curious letter to his friend James Blaine, the U.S. secretary of state, in which he’d posed a bizarre and highly detailed hypothetical: What if, Stevens had wanted to know, the government of Hawai‘i were to be “surprised and overturned by an orderly and peaceful revolutionary movement” that established its own provisional government to replace the queen? If that were to happen, Stevens pressed, just how far would he and the American naval commander stationed nearby be permitted to “deviate from established international rules” in their response? The presence of U.S. Marines, Stevens mused, might be the only thing that could quash such an overthrow and maintain order. As it turned out, however, Stevens and his fellow insurrectionists used the Marines to ensure that their coup would succeed. (Blaine, for his part, had had his eye on the Islands for decades.) Two weeks after the overthrow, Stevens wrote to John W. Foster, President Benjamin Harrison’s final secretary of state: “The Hawaiian pear is now fully ripe, and this is the golden hour for the United States to pluck it.”

Queen Lili‘uokalani had yielded immediately to the insurrectionists, unsure whether Stevens was following orders from Harrison. “This action on my part was prompted by three reasons,” she wrote in an urgent letter to Harrison: “the futility of a conflict with the United States; the desire to avoid violence, bloodshed, and the destruction of life and property; and the certainty which I feel that you and your government will right whatever wrongs may have been inflicted on us in the premises.”

Her faith in Harrison was misplaced; he ignored her letter. In the last month of his presidency, he sent a treaty to the U.S. Senate to advance the annexation of Hawai‘i to the United States. (Lorrin A. Thurston, one of the overthrow’s architects, boasted in his Memoirs of the Hawaiian Revolution that in early 1892, Harrison had encouraged him, through an interlocutor, to go forward with his plot.)

Looking back at this history nearly 100 years later, Keanu Sai had an epiphany. “I was in the wrong army,” he said. Sai left the military and dove into the state archives, researching Hawai‘i’s history and his own family’s lineage prior to the arrival of haole (white) Europeans and Americans. He says he traced his family’s roots to ali‘i, members of Hawai‘i’s noble class. “I started to realize that the Hawaiian Kingdom that I was led to believe was all haole-controlled, missionary-controlled, was all—pardon the French—bullshit,” he told me.

That led him to develop what is probably the most creative, most radical, and quite possibly most ridiculous argument about Hawaiian independence that I’ve ever heard. Basically, it’s this: The Hawaiian Kingdom never ceased to exist.

Though Sai has plenty of fans and admirers, several people warned me that I should be careful around him. I spoke with some Hawaiians who expressed discomfort with the implications of Sai’s notion that the kingdom was never legally dissolved—not everyone wants to be a subject in a monarchy. There was also the matter of his troubles with the law.

In 1997, Sai took out an ad in a newspaper declaring himself to be a regent of the Hawaiian Kingdom, a move that he said formally entrusted him “with the vicarious administration of the Hawaiian government during the absence of a Monarch.” He had started a business in which he and his partner charged people some $1,500 for land-title research going back to the mid-19th century, promising to protect clients’ land from anyone who might claim it as their own. The business model was built on his theory of Hawaiian history, and the underlying message seemed to be: If the kingdom still exists, and the state of Hawai‘i does not, maybe this house you bought isn’t technically even yours. Ultimately, Sai’s business had its downtown office raided; the title company shut down, and he was convicted of felony theft.

It struck me that, in another life, Keanu Sai would have made a perfect politician. He is charismatic and funny. A decorated bullshit artist. Unquestionably smart. Filibusters with the best of them. (He also told me that Keanu Reeves is his cousin.) Although Sai’s methods may be questionable, his indignation over the autocratic overthrow of his ancestors’ nation is justified.

Sai says that arguments about Hawaiian sovereignty tend to distort this history. “They create the binary of colonizer-colonized,” he said. “All of that is wrong. Hawai‘i was never a colony of the United States. And we’re not a tribal nation similar to Native Americans. We’re nationals of an occupied state.”

Following this logic, Sai believes international courts must acknowledge that America has perpetuated war crimes against Hawai‘i’s people. After that, he says, international law should guide Hawai‘i out of its current “wartime occupation” by the United States, so that the people of Hawai‘i can reconstruct their nation. Sai has attempted to advance this case in the international court system. So far, he has been unsuccessful.

At one point, Sai mused that I’d have to completely rework my story based on his revelations. I disagreed, but said that I liked hearing from him about this possible path to Hawaiian independence. This provoked, for the first time in our several hours of conversations, a flash of anger. “This is not the ‘possible path,’ ” Sai said. “It is the path.”

The island of Ni‘ihau is just 18 miles long and six miles wide. Nicknamed “the forbidden island,” it has been privately owned since 1864, when King Kamehameha IV and his brother sold it for $10,000 in gold to a wealthy Scottish widow, Elizabeth Sinclair, who had moved her family to Hawai‘i after her husband and son were lost at sea.

Sinclair’s descendants still own and run the island, which by the best estimates has a population of fewer than 100. It is the only place in the world where everyone still speaks Hawaiian. No one is allowed to visit Ni‘ihau without a personal invitation from Sinclair’s great-great-grandsons Bruce and Keith Robinson, both now in their 80s. Such invitations are extraordinarily rare. (One of the two people I know who have ever set foot on Ni‘ihau got there only after asking the Robinsons every year for nearly 10 years.) The island has no paved roads, no electrical grid, no street signs, and no domestic water supply—drinking water comes from catchment water and wells. In the village is a schoolhouse, a cafeteria, and a church, which everyone is reportedly expected to attend. One of the main social activities is singing. The rules for Ni‘ihau residents are strict: Men cannot wear their hair long, pierce their ears, or grow beards. Drinking and smoking are not allowed. The Robinsons infamously bar anyone who leaves for even just a few weeks from returning, with few exceptions.

Ni‘ihau’s circumscribed mores point to a broader question: If one goal of Hawaiian independence is to restore a nation that has been lost, then which version of Hawai‘i, exactly, are you trying to bring back?

Ancient explorers first reached the archipelago in great voyaging canoes, traveling thousands of miles from the Marquesas Islands, around the year 400 C.E. They brought with them pigs, chickens, gourds, taro, sugarcane, coconuts, sweet potatoes, bananas, and paper mulberry plants. Precontact Hawai‘i was home to hundreds of thousands of Hawaiians—some scholars estimate that the population was as high as 1 million. There was no concept of private land ownership, and Hawaiians lived under a feudal system run by ali‘i, chiefs who were believed to be divinely ordained. This strict caste system entailed severe rules, executions for those who broke them, and brutal rituals including human sacrifice.

The first British explorers moored their ships just off the coast of Kaua‘i in 1778 and immediately took interest in the Islands. Captain James Cook, who led that first expedition, was welcomed with aloha by the Hawaiian people. But when Cook attempted to kidnap the Hawaiian chief Kalani‘ōpu‘u on a subsequent visit to the Islands, a group of Hawaiians stabbed and bludgeoned Cook to death. (Kalani‘ōpu‘u survived.)

Eventually, fierce battles culminated in unification of all the Islands under Hawai‘i’s King Kamehameha, who finally conquered the archipelago’s last independent island in 1810. The explosion and subsequent collapse of the sandalwood trade followed, along with the construction of the first sugar plantations and the arrival of whaling ships. Missionaries came too, and the introduction of Christianity led, for a time, to a ban on the hula—one of the Hawaiian people’s most sacred and enduring forms of passing down history. All the while, several waves of epidemics—cholera, mumps, measles, whooping cough, scarlet fever, smallpox, and bubonic plague—ravaged the Hawaiian population, which plummeted to about 40,000 by the end of the 19th century.

During this period, the United States had begun to show open interest in scooping up the Sandwich Islands, as they were then called. In the June 1869 issue of The Atlantic, the journalist Samuel Bowles wrote:

We have converted their heathen, we have occupied their sugar plantations; we furnish the brains that carry on their government, and the diseases that are destroying their people; we want the profit on their sugars and their tropical fruits and vegetables; why should we not seize and annex the islands themselves?

Elizabeth Sinclair’s descendants profited greatly from the sugar they cultivated, but they had a different view of what Hawai‘i should be. King Kamehameha IV is said to have sold Ni‘ihau on one condition: Its new owners had to promise to do right by the Hawaiian people and their culture. This is why, when the United States did finally move to “seize and annex the islands,” the Robinsons supported the crown. After annexation happened anyway, in 1898, Sinclair’s grandson closed Ni‘ihau to visitors.

On the other islands, everything seemed to speed up from there. Schools had already banned the Hawaiian language, but now many Hawaiian families started speaking only English with their children. The sugar and pineapple industries boomed. Matson ships carrying visitors to Hawai‘i soon gave way to airplanes. As exoticized ideas about Hawaiian culture spread, repackaged for tourists, Hawaiianness was suppressed nearly to the point of erasure.

Through all of this, Ni‘ihau stayed apart. History briefly intruded in 1941, when a Japanese fighter pilot crash-landed there hours after participating in the attack on Pearl Harbor, which killed an estimated 2,400 people in Honolulu. Ni‘ihau residents knew nothing about the mayhem of that day. They at first welcomed the Imperial pilot as a guest, but killed him after he botched an attempt to hold some of them hostage.

If the overthrow had marked the beginning of the end of Hawaiian nationhood, the attack on Pearl Harbor finished it. It also kicked off a three-year period of martial law in Hawai‘i, in which the military took control of every aspect of civilian life—in effect converting the Islands into one big internment facility. The government suspended habeas corpus, shut down the courts, and set up its own tribunals for law enforcement. The military imposed a strict nightly curfew, rationed food and gasoline, and censored the press and other communications. The many Japanese Americans living there were surveilled and treated as enemies—Japanese-run banks were shut down, along with Japanese-language schools. Everyone was required to carry identification cards, and those older than the age of 6 were fingerprinted. Telephone calls and photography were restricted. Sugarcane workers who didn’t report to their job could be tried in military court.

Martial law was fully lifted in 1944, and in 1959, Hawai‘i became the 50th state—a move the Robinsons are said to have opposed. But whether they liked it or not, statehood dragged Ni‘ihau along with it. The island is technically part of Kaua‘i County, the local government that oversees the island closest to it. Still, Ni‘ihau has stayed mostly off-limits to the rest of Hawai‘i and the rest of the world. (The Robinsons do operate a helicopter tour that takes visitors to an uninhabited beach on the far side of the island, but you can’t actually get to the village or meet any residents that way.) Those who have affection for Ni‘ihau defend it as an old ranch community on a remote island that’s not hurting anybody. The less generous view is that it’s essentially the world’s last remaining feudal society.

But no one is arguing that the rest of Hawai‘i should be run like Ni‘ihau. After all, the entire goal of the sovereignty movement, if you can even say it has a single goal, is to confer more power on the Hawaiian people, not less. The question is how best to do that.

John Waihe‘e’s awakening came the summer before he started seventh grade, when he checked a book out of the library in his hometown of Honoka‘a, on the Big Island, that would change his life. In it, he read a description of the annexation ceremony that had taken place at ‘Iolani Palace in 1898, when Hawai‘i officially became a territory of the United States. It described the lowering of the Hawaiian flag, and the Hawaiian people who had gathered around with tears in their eyes.

This was the 1950s—post–Pearl Harbor and pre-statehood—and Waihe‘e had never even heard of the overthrow. His parents spoke Hawaiian with each other at home, but never spoke it with Waihe’e.

“I remember rushing back to my father and telling him, ‘Dad, I didn’t know any of this stuff,’ ” Waihe‘e told me. “He looks at me, and he was very calm about it. He said, ‘You know, son, that didn’t only happen in Honolulu.’ ” His father went on: “They lowered the flag in Hilo too, on the Big Island, and your grandfather was there, and he saw all of this. ”

Waihe‘e was floored. Even nearly 70 years later, he remembers the moment. To picture his grandfather among those watching the kingdom in its final hours “broke my heart,” he said. Waihe‘e had never met his grandfather, but he had seen photos and heard stories about him all his life. “He was this big, strong Hawaiian guy. And the idea of him crying was—it was unthinkable.” The image never left him. He grew up, attended law school, and eventually became Hawai‘i’s governor in 1986, the first Hawaiian ever to hold the office.

Waihe‘e is part of a class of political leaders in Hawai‘i who have chosen to work within the system, rather than rail against it. Another was the late Daniel Akaka, one of Hawai‘i’s longest-serving U.S. senators— a Hawaiian himself. Akaka was raised in a home where he was not permitted to speak Hawaiian. He once told me about hearing a roar from above on the morning of December 7, 1941, and looking up to see a gray wave of Japanese bombers with bright-red dots on the wings. He grabbed his rifle and ran into the hills. He was 17 then, and would later deploy to Saipan with the Army Corps of Engineers.

In 1993, Akaka, a Democrat, sponsored a joint congressional resolution that formally apologized to the Hawaiian people for the overthrow of their kingdom 100 years earlier and for “the deprivation of the rights of Native Hawaiians to self-determination.” I’d always seen the apology bill, which was signed into law by President Bill Clinton, as an example of the least the United States could possibly do, mere lip service. But the more people I talked with as I reported this story, the more I heard that it mattered—not just symbolically but legally.

Recently, I went to see Esther Kia‘āina, who was one of the key architects of the apology as an aide to Akaka in Washington, D.C., in the early 1990s. Today, Kia‘āina is a city-council member in Honolulu. People forget, she told me, just how hard it was to get to an apology in the first place.

“Prior to 1993, it was abysmal,” Kia‘āina said. There had been a federal inquiry into the overthrow, producing a dueling pair of reports in the 1980s, one of which concluded that the U.S. bore no responsibility for what had happened to Hawai‘i, and that Hawaiians should not receive reparations as a result. Without the United States first admitting wrongdoing, Kia‘āina said, nothing else could follow. As she saw it, the apology was the first in a series of steps. The next would be to obtain official tribal status for Hawaiians from the Department of the Interior, similar to the way the United States recognizes hundreds of American Indian and Alaska Native tribes. Then full-on independence.

In the early 2000s, Akaka began pushing legislation that would create a path to federal recognition for Hawaiians as a tribe, a move that Kia‘āina enthusiastically supported. “I was Miss Fed Rec,” she said. It wasn’t a compliment—lots of people hated the idea.

The federal-recognition legislation would have made Native Hawaiians one of the largest tribes in America overnight—but many Hawaiians didn’t want recognition from the United States at all. The debate created strange bedfellows. Many people argued against it on the grounds that it didn’t go far enough; they wanted their country back, not tribal status. Meanwhile, some conservatives in Hawai‘i, who tended to be least moved by calls for Hawaiian rights, fought against the bill, arguing that it was a reductionist and maybe even unconstitutional attempt to codify preferential treatment on the basis of race. That’s how a coalition briefly formed that included Hawaiian nationalists and their anti-affirmative-action neighbors.

Akaka’s legislation never passed, and the senator died in 2018. Today, some people say the debate over federal recognition was a distraction, but Kia‘āina still believes that it’s the only way to bring about self-determination for Hawaiians. She told me that she sometimes despairs at what the movement has become: She sees people rage against the overthrow, and against the continued presence of the U.S. military in Hawai‘i, but do little else to promote justice for Hawaiians. And within government, she sees similar complacency.

“It’s almost like ‘Are you kidding me? We give you the baton and this is what you do?’ ” Kia‘āina said. Instead of effecting change, she told me, people playact Hawaiianness and think it will be enough. They “slap on a Hawaiian logo,” and “that’s your contribution to helping the Hawaiian community.” And in the end, nobody outside Hawai‘i is marching in the street, protesting at the State Department, or occupying campus quads for Native Hawaiians.

There is no question that awareness of Hawaiian history and culture has improved since the 1970s, a period that’s come to be known as the Hawaiian Renaissance, when activists took steps to restore the Hawaiian language in public places, to teach hula more widely, and to protect and restore other cultural practices. But Kia‘āina told me that although the cultural and language revival is lovely, and essential, it can lull people into thinking that the work is done when plainly it is not. Especially when Hawaiians are running out of time.

Sometime around 2020, the Hawaiian people crossed a terrible threshold. For the first time ever, more Hawaiians lived outside Hawai‘i than in the Islands. Roughly 680,000 Hawaiians live in the United States, according to the most recent census data; some 300,000 of them live in Hawai’i.

Hawaiians now make up about 20 percent of the state population, a proportion that for many inspires existential fear. Meanwhile, outsiders are getting rich in Hawai‘i, and rich outsiders are buying up Hawaiian land. Larry Ellison, a co-founder of Oracle, owns most of the island of Lāna‘i. Facebook’s co-founder Mark Zuckerberg owns a property on Kaua‘i estimated to be worth about $300 million. Salesforce’s CEO, Marc Benioff, has reportedly purchased nearly $100 million worth of land on the Big Island. Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, reportedly paid some $80 million for his estate on Maui. As one longtime Hawai‘i resident put it to me: The sugar days may be over, but Hawai‘i is still a plantation town.

At the same time, many Hawaiians are faring poorly. Few have the means to live in Hawai‘i’s wealthy neighborhoods. On O‘ahu, a commute to Waikīkī for those with hotel or construction jobs there can take hours in island traffic. Hawaiians have among the highest rates of heart disease, hypertension, asthma, diabetes, and some types of cancer compared with other ethnic groups. They smoke and binge drink at higher rates. A quarter of Hawaiian households can’t adequately feed themselves. More than half of Hawaiians report worrying about having enough money to keep a roof over their head; the average per capita income is less than $28,000. Only 13 percent of Hawaiians have a college degree. The poverty rate among Hawaiians is 12 percent, the highest of the five largest ethnic groups in Hawai‘i. Although Hawaiians make up only a small percentage of the population in Hawai‘i, the share of homeless people on O‘ahu who identify as Hawaiian or Pacific Islander has hovered at about 50 percent in recent years.

Kūhiō Lewis was “very much the statistic Hawaiian” growing up in the 1990s, he told me—a high-school dropout raised by his grandmother. He’d struggled with drugs and alcohol, and became a single father with two babies by the time he was 19. Back then, Lewis was consumed with anger over what had happened to the Hawaiian people and believed that the only way to get what his people deserved was to fight, and to protest. But he lost patience with a movement that he didn’t think was getting anything done. Today, as the CEO of the nonprofit Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement, he has a different view.

He still believes that Hawai‘i should not be part of America, but he also believes that Hawai‘i would need a leader with “balls of steel” to make independence happen. “That’s a big ask,” he added. “That’s a lot of personal sacrifice.” Until that person steps up, Lewis chooses to work within the system, even if it means some Hawaiians see him as a sellout.

“There is a wrong that was done. And there’s no way we’ll ever let that go,” Lewis told me. “But I also believe, and I’ve come to believe, that the best way to win this battle is going through America rather than trying to go around America.”

When I spoke with Brian Schatz, Hawai‘i’s senior senator, in Washington, he said he is most focused on addressing the moment-to-moment crisis for the Hawaiian people. Lots of Native Hawaiians, he said, “are motivated by the same set of issues that non-Native Hawaiians are motivated by. They don’t wake up every morning thinking about sovereignty and self-determination. They wake up every morning thinking about the price of gasoline, and traffic, and health care.” He went on: “They are deeply, deeply uninterested in a bunch of abstractions. They would rather have a few hundred million dollars for housing than some new statute that purports to change the interaction between America and Hawaiians.”

Ian Lind, a former investigative reporter who is himself Hawaiian, is also critical of sovereignty discussions that rely too much on fashionable ideologies at the expense of reality. I’ve known Lind since my own days as a city-hall reporter in Honolulu, in the early 2000s, and I wanted to get his thoughts on how the sovereignty conversation had changed in the intervening years. He told me that, in his view, an “incredibly robust environment for charlatans and con artists” has metastasized within Hawaiian-sovereignty circles. There are those who invent royal lineage or government titles for themselves, as well as ordinary scammers.

Even those who are merely trying to understand—or in some cases teach—the history have become too willing to gloss over some subtleties, Lind told me. It’s not so simple to say that Hawaiians were dispossessed at the time of the overthrow, that they suddenly lost everything, he said. Many people gave up farmlands that had been allotted to them after the Great Māhele land distribution in 1848. “They were a burden, not an asset,” Lind said. “People thought, I could just go get a job downtown and get away from this.”

But people bristle at the introduction of nuance in the telling of this history, partly because they remain understandably focused on the immensity of what Hawaiians have lost. “There’s a faction of Hawaiians who say that absolutely nothing short of restoring a kingdom like we had before, encompassing all of Hawai‘i, is going to suffice,” Lind said. “It’s like an impasse that no one wants to talk about.”

The whole thing reminds Lind of a fringe militia or a group of secessionists you’d find elsewhere. “It’s so much like watching the Confederacy,” he said. “You’re watching something, a historical fact, you didn’t like. It wasn’t your side that won. But governments changed. And when our government changed here, it was recognized by all the countries in the world very quickly. So whatever you want to think about 130 years ago, how you feel about that change, I just think there are so many more things to deal with that could be dealt with now realistically that people aren’t doing, because they’re hung up waving the Confederate flag or having a new, reinstated Hawaiian Kingdom.”

When you talk with people in Hawai‘i about the question of sovereignty, skeptics will say shocking things behind closed doors, or off the record, that they’d never say in public—I’ve encountered eye-rolling, a general sentiment of get over it, even disparaging Queen Lili‘uokalani as an “opium dealer”—but invoking the Lost Cause this way was a new one for me. I asked Lind if his opinions have been well received by his fellow Hawaiians. “No,” he said with a chuckle. “I’m totally out of step.”

Brian Schatz, a Democrat, grew up on O‘ahu before making a rapid ascent in local, then national, politics. I first met him more than 15 years ago, when he was coming off a stint as a state representative. In 2021, he became the chair of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, meaning he thinks about matters related to Indigenous self-determination a lot. He’s also on the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, which makes sense for a person representing a region of profound strategic importance to the United States.

Because Schatz is extremely online—he is a bit of a puppy dog on X, not exactly restrained—I wanted to know his views on an observation I’ve had in recent years. As young activists in Hawai‘i have focused their passion on justice for Hawaiians, I’ve sometimes wondered if they are simply shouting into the pixelated abyss. On the one hand, more awareness of historical wrongs is objectively necessary and good. On the other, as Schatz put it to me, “the internet is not a particularly constructive place to figure out how to redress historical wrongs.”

Two recent moments in Hawaiian activism sparked international attention, but haven’t necessarily advanced the cause of self-determination. In 2014, opposition to the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope on the Big Island led to huge protests, and energized the sovereignty movement. The catastrophic fires on Maui in 2023 prompted a similar burst of attention to Hawai‘i and the degree to which Hawaiians have been alienated from their own land. But many activists complained to me that in both cases, sustained momentum has been spotty. Instagrammed expressions of solidarity may feel righteous when you’re scrolling, but they accomplish little (if anything) offline, even when more people than ever before seem to be paying attention to ideas that animate those fighting for Hawaiian independence.

“There’s a newly energized cohort of leftists on the continent who are waking up to this injustice,” Schatz said. “But, I mean, the truth is that there’s not a place on the continental United States where that story wasn’t also told.” The story he’s talking about is the separation of people from their language, their land, their culture, and their water sources, in order to steal that land and to make money. Yet “nobody’s talking about giving Los Angeles back,” he said.

One of the challenges in contemplating Hawaiian independence is the question of historical precedent. Clearly there are blueprints for decolonization—India’s independence following British rule may be the most famous—but few involve places like Hawai‘i. The world does not have many examples of what “successful” secession or decolonization from the United States looks like in practice. There is one example from elsewhere in the Pacific: In 1898, fresh off its annexation of Hawai‘i, the United States moved to annex the Philippines, too. People there fought back, in a war that led to the deaths of an estimated 775,000 people, most of them civilians. The United States promised in 1916 that it would grant the Philippines independence, but that didn’t happen until 1946.

Hawai‘i is particularly complex, too, because of its diverse population. Roughly a quarter of Hawai‘i residents are multiracial, and there is no single racial majority. So while some activists are eager to apply a settler-colonialism frame to what happened in Hawai‘i, huge populations of people here do not slot neatly into the categories of “settler” or “native.” How, for example, do you deal with the non-Hawaiian descendants of laborers on plantations, who immigrated to the Islands from China, Japan, Portugal, the Philippines? Or the Pacific Islanders who came to Hawai‘i more recently, as part of U.S. compensation to three tiny island nations affected by nuclear-weapons testing? Or the people who count both overthrowers and Hawaiians among their ancestors? Schatz said that when it comes to visions of Hawaiian self-determination, “I completely defer to the community.”

But he cautioned that without consensus about what this should look like, “the danger is that we spend all of our time counting the number of angels on the head of a pin, and ignore the fact that the injustice imposed by the United States government on Native Hawaiians is manifesting itself on a daily basis with bad economic outcomes, not enough housing, not enough health care.” He went on, “So while Native Hawaiian leaders and scholars sort out what comes next as it relates to Native Hawaiians and their relationship to the state and federal government, my job is to—bit by bit, program by program, day by day—try to reverse that injustice with, frankly, money.

“Because you can’t live in an apology,” he added. “You have to live in a home.”

The question of how the ancient Hawaiians survived—how they managed to feed a complex civilization that bloomed on the most isolated archipelago on the planet—has long been a source of fascination and historic inquiry. They fished; they hunted; they grew taro in irrigated wetlands.

Hawai‘i is now terrifyingly dependent on the global supply chain for its residents’ survival. By the 1960s, it was importing roughly half of its food supply. Today, that figure is closer to 90 percent. It can be easy to forget how remote Hawai‘i truly is. But all it takes is one hurricane, war, or pandemic to upset this fragile balance.

To understand what Hawai‘i would need in order to become self-reliant again, I went to see Walter Ritte, one of the godfathers of modern Hawaiian activism, and someone most people know simply as “Uncle Walter.” Ritte made a name for himself in the 1970s, when he and others occupied the uninhabited island of Kaho‘olawe, protesting the U.S. military’s use of the land for bombing practice. Ian Lind was part of this protest too; the group came to be known as the Kaho‘olawe Nine.

Ritte lives on Moloka‘i, among the least populated of the Hawaiian Islands. Major airlines don’t fly to Moloka‘i, and people there like it that way. I arrived on a turboprop Cessna 208, a snug little nine-seater, alongside a few guys from O‘ahu heading there to do construction work for a day or two.

Moloka‘i has no stoplights and spotty cell service. Its population hovers around 7,000 people. Many of its roads are still unpaved and require an off-road vehicle—long orange-red ribbons of dirt crisscross the island. On one particularly rough road, I felt my rented Jeep keel so far to one side that I was certain it would tip over. I considered turning back but eventually arrived at the Mo‘omomi Preserve, in the northwestern corner of Moloka‘i, where you can stand on a bluff of black lava rock and look out at the Pacific.

All over Moloka‘i, the knowledge that you are standing somewhere that long predates you and will long outlast you is inescapable. If you drive all the way east, to Hālawa Valley, you find the overgrown ruins of sacred places—an abandoned 19th-century church, plus remnants of heiau, or places of worship, dating back to the 600s. The desire to protect the island’s way of life is fierce. Nobody wants it to turn into O‘ahu or Maui—commodified and overrun by tourists, caricatured by outsiders who know nothing of this place. For locals across Hawai‘i, especially the large number who work in the hospitality industry, this reality is an ongoing source of fury. As the historian Daniel Immerwahr put it to me: “It is psychologically hard to have your livelihood be a performance of your own subordination.”

The directions Ritte had given me were, in essence: Fly to Moloka‘i, drive east for 12 miles, and look for my fishpond. So I did. Eventually, I stopped at a place that I thought could be his, a sprawling, grassy property with some kukui-nut trees, a couple of sheds, and a freshwater spring. No sign of Ritte. But I met a man who introduced himself as Ua and said he could take me to him. I asked Ua how long he’d been working with Uncle Walter, and he grinned. “My whole life,” he said. Walter is his father.

Ua drove us east in his four-wheeler through a misty rain. This particular vehicle had a windshield but no wipers, so I assumed the role of leaning all the way out of the passenger side to squeegee water off the glass.

We found Ritte standing in a field wearing dirty jeans and a black T-shirt that said Kill Em’ With Aloha. Ritte is lean and muscular—at almost 80 years old, he has the look of someone who has worked outside his whole life, which he has. We decided to head makai, back toward the ocean, so Ritte could show me his obsession.

When we got there, he led me down a short, rocky pier to a thatched-roof hut and pointed out toward the water. What we were looking at was the rebuilt structure of a massive fishpond, first constructed by ancient Hawaiians some 700 years ago. Ritte has been working on it forever, attempting to prove that the people of Hawai‘i can again feed themselves.

The mechanics of the pond are evidence of Native Hawaiian genius. A stone wall serves as an enclosure for the muliwai, or brackish, area where fresh and salt water meet. A gate in the wall, when opened, allows small fish to swim into the muliwai but blocks big fish from getting out. And when seawater starts to pour into the pond, fish already in the pond swim over to it, making it easy to scoop them out. “Those gates are the magic,” Ritte tells me.

Back when Hawai‘i was totally self-sustaining, feeding the population required several fishponds across the Islands. Ritte’s fishpond couldn’t provide for all of Moloka‘i, let alone all of Hawai‘i, but he does feed his family with the fish he farms. And when something goes wrong—a recent mudslide resulted in a baby-fish apocalypse— it teaches Ritte what his ancestors would have known but he has had to learn.

That’s how his vision went from restoring the fishpond to restoring the ahupua‘a, which in ancient Hawai‘i referred to a slice of land extending from the mountains down to the ocean. If the land above the pond had been properly irrigated, it could have prevented the mudslide that killed all those fish. And if everyone on Moloka‘i tended to their ahupua‘a the way their ancestors did, the island might in fact be able to dramatically reduce its reliance on imported food.

But over the years, Ritte said, the people of Hawai‘i got complacent. Too many forgot how to work hard, how to sweat and get dirty. Too few questioned what their changing way of life was doing to them. This is how they became “sitting ducks,” he told me, too willing to acclimate to a country that is not truly their own. “I am not an American. I want my family to survive. And we’re not going to survive with continental values,” he said. “Look at the government. Look at the guy who was president. And he’s going to be president again. He’s an asshole. So America has nothing that impresses me. I mean, why would I want to be an American?”

Ritte said he may not live to see it, but he believes Hawai‘i will one day become an independent nation again. “There’s a whole bunch of people who are not happy,” he said. “There’s going to be some violence. You got guys who are really pissed. But that’s not going to make the changes that we need.”

Still, change does not always come the way you expect. Ritte believes that part of what he’s doing on Moloka‘i is preparing Hawai‘i for a period of tremendous unrest that may come sooner rather than later, as stability in the world falters and as Hawaiians are roused to the cause of independence. “All the years people said, ‘You can control the Hawaiians, don’t worry; you can control them.’ But now they’re nervous you cannot control them.”

During my visit to Pu‘uhonua O Waimānalo, the compound that Dennis Kanahele and Brandon Maka‘awa‘awa have designated as the headquarters for the Nation of Hawai‘i, Maka‘awa‘awa invited me to the main office, a house that they use as a government building to hatch plans and discuss foreign relations. Recently, Kanahele and their foreign minister traveled to China on a diplomatic visit. And they’ve established peace treaties with Native American tribes in the contiguous United States—the same kind of treaty that the United States initially forged with the Kingdom of Hawai‘i, they pointed out to me.

These days, they are not interested in American affairs. They see anyone who works with the Americans, including Kūhiō Lewis and Brian Schatz, as sellouts or worse. To them, the best president the United States ever had was Clinton, because he was the one who signed the apology bill. Barack Obama may get points for being local—he was born and raised on O‘ahu—but they’re still waiting for him to do something, anything, for the Hawaiian people. As it happens, Obama has a house about five miles down the road. “I still believe that he’s here for a reason in Waimānalo,” Kanahele said, referring to this area of the island. “I believe the reason is what we’re doing.”

Outside, light rains occasionally swept over the house, and chickens and cats wandered freely. Inside was cozy, more bunker than Oval Office, with a rusted door swung open and walls covered in papers and plans. At one end of the room was a fireplace, and over the mantel was a large map of the world with Hawai‘i at the center, alongside portraits of Queen Lili‘uokalani and her brother King Kalākaua. Below that was a large humpback whale carved from wood, and wooden blocks bearing the names and titles of members of the executive branch. Another wall displayed a copy of the Kū‘ē Petitions, documents that members of the Hawaiian Patriotic League hand-carried to Washington, D.C., in 1897 to oppose annexation.

Kanahele is tall, with broad shoulders and a splatter of freckles on one cheek. He is thoughtful and serious, the kind of person who quiets a room the instant he speaks. But he’s also funny and warm. I’ve heard people describe Kanahele as Kamehameha-like in his looks, and I can see why. Kanahele told me that he is in fact descended from a relative of Kamehameha’s, “like, nine generations back.” Today, most people know him by his nickname, Bumpy.

The most animated I saw him was when I asked if he’d ever sat down with a descendant of the overthrowers. After all, it often feels like everyone knows everyone here, and in many cases they do, and have for generations. Kanahele told me the story of how, years ago, he’d had a conversation with Thurston Twigg-Smith, a grandson of Lorrin A. Thurston, who was an architect of the overthrow. Twigg-Smith was the publisher of the daily newspaper the Honolulu Advertiser, and Kanahele still remembers the room they sat in—fancy, filled with books. “I was excited because it was this guy, right? He was involved,” Kanahele said.

The experience left him with “ugly feelings,” he told me. “He called us cavemen.” And Twigg-Smith defended the overthrowers. I mentioned to Kanahele that I’d read Twigg-Smith’s account of the coup, in which he refers to it admiringly as “the Hawaiian Revolution.”

Twigg-Smith told Kanahele that his grandfather “did the best thing he thought was right at the time,” Kanahele said. When Kanahele asked, “Do you think that was right?,” Twigg-Smith didn’t hesitate. Yes, the overthrow was right, he said. Kanahele’s eyes widened as he recounted the exchange. “He thinks his grandfather did the right thing.” (Twigg-Smith died in 2016.)

Kanahele and Maka‘awa‘awa aren’t trying to bring back the monarchy. They aren’t even trying to build a democracy. Their way of government, outlined in a constitution that Kanahele drafted in 1994, is based on a family structure, including a council of Hawaiian elders and kānaka (Hawaiian) and non-kānaka (non-Hawaiian) legislative branches. “It’s a Hawaiian way of thinking of government,” Maka‘awa‘awa said. “It’s not democracy or communism or socialism or any of that. It’s our own form of government.”

Kanahele’s vision for the future entails reclaiming all of Hawai‘i from the United States and reducing its economic dependence on tourism and defense. He and Maka‘awa‘awa are unpaid volunteers, Maka‘awa‘awa told me. “Luckily for me and Uncle, we have very supportive wives who have helped support us for years.” Maka‘awa‘awa said that they used to pay a “ridiculous amount” in property taxes, but thought better of it when contemplating the 65-year lease awarded in 1964 to the U.S. military for $1 at Pōhakuloa, a military training area covering thousands of acres on the Big Island. So about eight years ago, they decided to pay $1 a year. The state is “pissed,” he told me, but he doesn’t care. “Plus,” he added, “it’s our land.”

I had to ask: Doesn’t an independent nation need its own military? Other than the one that was already all around them, that is. Some 50,000 active-duty U.S. service members are stationed throughout the Islands. Many of the military’s 65-year leases in Hawai‘i are up for renewal within the next five years, and debate over what to do with them has already begun. I thought about our proximity to Bellows Air Force Station, just a mile or two down the hill from where we were sitting. Yes, Kanahele told me. “You need one standing army,” he said. “You got to protect your natural resources—your lands and your natural resources.” Otherwise, he warned, people are “going to be taking them away.”

I asked them how they think about the Hawai‘i residents—some of whom have been here for generations, descendants of plantation laborers or missionaries—who are not Hawaiian. There are plenty of non-kānaka people who say they are pro–Hawaiian rights, until the conversation turns to whether all the non-kānaka should leave. “We think about that,” Kanahele said, because of the “innocents involved. The damage goes back to America and the state of Hawai‘i. That’s who everybody should be pointing the finger at.”

And it’s not like they want to take back all 4 million acres of Hawai‘i’s land, Maka‘awa‘awa said. “Really, right now, when we talk about the 1.8 million acres of ceded lands”—that is, the crown and government lands that were seized in the overthrow and subsequently turned over to the United States in exchange for annexation—“we’re not talking about private lands here. We’re talking strictly state lands.”

Kanahele calmly corrected him: “And then we will claim all 4 million acres. We claim everything.”

As I was reporting this story, I kept asking people: What does America owe Hawai‘i, and the Hawaiian people? A better question might be: When does a nation cease to exist? When its leader is deposed? When the last of its currency is melted down? When the only remaining person who can speak its language dies? For years I thought of the annexation-day ceremony in 1898 as the moment when the nation of Hawai‘i ceased to be. One account describes the final playing of Hawai‘i’s national anthem, by the Royal Hawaiian Band, whose leader began to weep as they played. After that came a 21-gun salute, the final national salute to the Hawaiian flag. Then the band played taps. Eventually all kingdoms die. Empires, too.

The overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom set in motion a series of events that disenfranchised Hawaiians, separated them from their land and their culture, and forever altered the course of history in Hawai‘i. It was also a moment of enormous and lasting consequence for the United States. It solidified a worldview, famously put forth in the pages of this magazine by the retired naval officer Alfred Thayer Mahan in 1890, that America must turn its eyes and its borders ever outward, in defense of the American idea.

But there were others who fought against the expansionists’ notion of America, arguing that the true American system of government depended on the consent of the governed. Many of the people arguing this were the abolitionists who led and wrote for this magazine, including Mark Twain and The Atlantic’s former editor in chief William Dean Howells, both members of the Anti-Imperialist League. (Other anti-imperialists argued against expansion on racist grounds—that is, that the U.S. should not invite into the country more nonwhite or non-Christian people, of which there were many in Hawai‘i.)

This was the debate Americans were having about their country’s role in the world when, in March 1893, Grover Cleveland was inaugurated as president for the second time. Cleveland, the 24th president of the United States, had also been the 22nd; Benjamin Harrison’s single term had been sandwiched in between. Once he was back in the White House, Cleveland immediately set to work undoing the things that, in his view, Harrison had made a mess of. Primary among those messes was what people had begun to refer to as “the question of Hawaii.”

After writing to Harrison in January 1893, Queen Lili‘uokalani had sent a letter to her “great and good friend” Cleveland in his capacity as the president-elect. “I beg that you will consider this matter, in which there is so much involved for my people,” she wrote, “and that you will give us your friendly assistance in granting redress for a wrong which we claim has been done to us, under color of the assistance of the naval forces of the United States in a friendly port.”

Whereas Harrison, in the twilight of his presidency, had sent a treaty to the Senate to advance the annexation of Hawai‘i, Cleveland’s first act as president was to withdraw that treaty and order an investigation of the overthrow. Members of the Committee of Safety and their supporters, Cleveland learned, had seized ‘Iolani Palace as their new headquarters—they would later imprison Queen Lili‘uokalani there, in one of the bedrooms upstairs, for nearly eight months—and raised the American flag over the main government building in the palace square. Cleveland now mandated that the American flag be pulled down and replaced with the Hawaiian flag.

This set off a firestorm in Congress, where Cleveland’s critics eventually compared him to a Civil War secessionist. One senator accused him of choosing “ignorant, savage, alien royalty, over American people.”

By then, the inquiry that Cleveland ordered had come back. As he explained when he sent the report on to Congress, the investigation had found that the overthrow had been an “act of war,” and that the queen had surrendered “not absolutely and permanently, but temporarily and conditionally.”

Cleveland had dispatched his foreign minister to Hawai‘i, former Representative Albert S. Willis of Kentucky, to restore the queen to power. Willis’s mission in Honolulu was to issue an ultimatum to the insurrectionists to dissolve their fledgling government, and secure a promise from Queen Lili‘uokalani that she would pardon the usurpers. But the Provisional Government argued that the United States had no right to tell it what to do.

“We do not recognize the right of the President of the United States to interfere in our domestic affairs,” wrote Sanford Dole, the self-appointed president of Hawai‘i’s new executive branch. “The Provisional Government of the Hawaiian Islands respectfully and unhesitatingly declines to entertain the proposition of the President of the United States that it should surrender its authority to the ex-Queen.”

This was, quite obviously, outrageous. Here Dole and his co-conspirators were claiming to be a sovereign nation—and using this claim to rebuff Cleveland’s attempts to return power to the sovereign nation they’d just overthrown—all while having pulled off their coup with the backing of American military forces and having flown an American flag atop the government building they now occupied.

In January 1894, the American sugar baron and longtime Hawai‘i resident Zephaniah Spalding testified before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations about the situation in Honolulu. “We have now as near an approach to autocratic government as anywhere,” Spalding said. “We have a council of 15, perhaps, composed of the businessmen of Honolulu” who “examine into the business of the country, just the same as is done in a large factory or on a farm.”

The insurrectionists had, with support from the highest levels of the U.S. government, successfully overthrown a nation. They’d installed an autocracy in its place, with Dole as president.

Americans argued about Hawai‘i for five long years after the overthrow. And once the United States officially annexed Hawai‘i in 1898 under President William McKinley, Dole became the first governor of the United States territory. Most Americans today know his name only because of the pineapple empire one of his cousins started.

All along, the debate over Hawai‘i was not merely about the fate of an archipelago some 5,000 miles away from Washington. Nor is the debate over Hawai‘i’s independence today some fringe argument about long-ago history. America answered the “question of Hawaii” by deciding that its sphere of influence would not end at California, but would expand ever outward. Harrison took the aggressive, expansionist view. Cleveland took the anti-imperialist, isolationist one. This ideological battle, which Harrison ultimately won (and later regretted, after he joined the Anti-Imperialist League himself), is perhaps the most consequential chapter in all of U.S. foreign relations. You can draw a clear, straight line from the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom to the attack on Pearl Harbor to America’s foreign policy today, including the idea that liberal democracy is worth protecting, at home and abroad.

It’s easy to feel grateful for this ethos when contemplating the alternative. In the past century, America’s global dominance has, despite episodes of galling overreach, been an extraordinary force for good around the world. The country’s strategic position in the Pacific allowed the United States to win World War II (and was a big reason the U.S. entered the war in the first place). The U.S. has continued to serve as a force for stability and security in the Pacific in a perilous new chapter. How might the world change without the United States to stand up to Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin?

But to treat the U.S. presence in Hawai‘i as inevitable, or even as a shameful but justified means to an end, is to disregard the values for which Americans have fought since the country’s founding. It was the United States’ expansion into the Pacific that established America as a world superpower. And it all began with the coup in Honolulu, an autocratic uprising of the sort that the United States fights against today.

Perhaps the true lesson of history is that what seems destined in retrospect—whether the election of a president or the overthrow of a kingdom—is often much messier and more uncertain as it unfolds. John Waihe‘e, the former governor, told me that he no longer thinks about how to gain sovereignty, but rather how Hawai‘i should begin planning for a different future—one that may arrive unexpectedly, and on terms we may not now be considering.

Waihe‘e is part of a group of local leaders that has been working to map out various possible futures for Hawai‘i. The idea is to take into account the most pronounced challenges Hawai‘i faces: the outside wealth reshaping the Islands, the economic overreliance on tourism, the likelihood of more frequent climate disasters, the potential dissolution of democracy in the United States. One of the options is to do nothing at all, to accept the status quo, which Waihe‘e feels certain would be disastrous.

Jon Kamakawiwo‘ole Osorio, another member of the group, agrees. Osorio is the dean of the Hawai‘inuiākea School of Hawaiian Knowledge at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Undoing a historic wrong may be impossible, he told me, but you have a moral obligation to try. “If things don’t change, things are going to be really fucked up here,” Osorio said. “They will continue to deteriorate.” (As for how things are going in the United States generally, he put it this way: “I wouldn’t wish Trump on anyone, not even the Americans.”)

Osorio’s view is that Hawaiians should take more of a Trojan-horse approach—“a state government that essentially gets taken over by successive cadres of people who want to see an end to military occupation, who want to see an end to complete reliance on tourism, who see other kinds of possibilities in terms of year-round agriculture,” he told me. “Basically, being culturally and socially more and more distinct from the United States.” That doesn’t mean giving up on independence; it just means taking action now, thinking less about history and more about the future.

But history is still everywhere in Hawai‘i. On the east side of Moloka‘i, I drove by a house that had a sign out front that just said 1893 with a splotch of red, like blood. If you head southwest on Kaua‘i past Hanapēpē, and then on to Waimea, you can walk out onto the old whaling pier and see the exact spot where Captain James Cook first landed, in 1778. Not far from there is the old smokestack from a rusted-out sugar plantation. All around, you can see the remnants of more than two centuries of comings and goings. A place that was once completely apart from the world is now forever altered by outsiders. And yet the trees still spill mangoes onto the ground, and the moon still rises over the Pacific. Hawaiians are still here. As long as they are, Hawai‘i belongs to them.

Over the course of my reporting, several Hawaiians speculated that Hawai‘i’s independence may ultimately come not because it is granted by the United States, but because the United States collapses under the second Trump presidency, or some other world-altering course of events. People often dismiss questions of Hawaiian independence by arguing, fairly, that if the United States hadn’t seized the kingdom, Britain, Japan, or Russia almost certainly would have. Now people in Hawai‘i want to plan for how to regain—and sustain—independence if the United States loses power.

Things change; Hawai‘i certainly has. All these years, I’ve been trying to understand what Hawai‘i lost, what was stolen, and how to get it back. What I failed to realize, until now, is that the story of the overthrow is not really the story of Hawai‘i. It is the story of America. It is the story of how dangerous it is to assume that anything is permanent. History teaches us that nothing lasts forever. Hawaiians have learned that lesson. Americans would do well to remember it.

=================

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Ken_Conklin@yahoo.com

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