IN SEARCH OF ALOHA
BY
DAVID ARTHUR WALTERS
PREFACE
Hawaii is well known for its beauty and the multiracial, multicultural harmony of its population. Internal discord is well reported locally but is not dwelled upon by mainstream media on the American mainland. Visitors to the island do not want to hear about the politics of resentment and to experience so-called silent racism. The struggle in Hawaii is the same the world over, a struggle for economic parity and human dignity. They want to experience the famous Aloha Spirit, not hatred for foreigners, especially the white Americans.
The descendants of native Hawaiian as well as would-be Native Hawaiians rightly believe that the Hawaiian Islands were “stolen” from the Polynesian Hawaiians by Americans who nearly annihilated their culture. Still many natives love America and embrace its values while maintaining the vestiges of their native culture. They nevertheless desire recognition similar to that presumably enjoyed by descendants of the Original Americans on the continent.
That is, they would have their own nation within the greater nation, with the benefits of both worlds. That recognition would not only dignify them, but would hopefully lower their poverty rate to at least the national general average, which might be otherwise achieved by moving to the Mainland. The economic status, however, of Native Americans, given their benefits and reserved lands, is deplorable.
Another large and perhaps the largest contingent of Native Hawaiians would like to have sovereignty in the monarchical form of that “stolen” from their forebears, the Hawaiian Kingdom. Leading activists such as Leon Siu maintain that the Kingdom still exists, but is under illegal occupation by the United States despite the fact that 93% of a record turnout of voters approved of statehood in 1959; a true royalist might maintain that a popular referendum ignoring the rights of the sovereign king and the aristocracy would be illegal.
Any restoration of the old kingdom or constitution of a new kingdom that includes sovereignty over the land would require the State of Hawaii to break its pact with the federal government and secede from the United States. That is highly unlikely to happen anytime soon, but the real does nothing to abnegate the ideal, and those who keep the faith have considerable influence on attitudes and thus current political activities.
A study of the history of Hawaii in the context of the human history of the world indicates that it is a small albeit significant part of the progress to the political end of history, namely, liberal democracy, at least according to contemporary optimists. That is not to say that the positive end is fated or is the inevitable consequence of an invariable law of socialization. Sociology has its statistics, which are useful in predicting the outcomes of developing circumstances, but the study of society has yet to reveal any definitive law “natural” to social development so that in any given circumstance some certain outcome can be predicted.
Nevertheless, a student such as myself, who wanders randomly at length through great libraries instead of attending to particular courses in the university curriculum, may conclude from his indiscipline or interdisciplinary studies that the best of all possible states of Hawaii at present is the present state.
Not that the status quo shall not evolve improvingly according to the prevailing concept of progress. If the State of Hawaii were to secede to become by referendum, chaired by some pretender to the throne, a kingdom, that kingdom would be similar to that of England, where the Queen is more or less a figurehead or symbol of unity, and one that a minority would be rid of as an expensive appendix.
The English system did in fact have considerable influence on the constitutions of the Hawaiian Kingdom, but so did its derivative, the American constitutional system, thanks to the New England missionaries. And there were other European contributors to the old Hawaiian constitutions. In fine, the Hawaiian constitutions were hybrids.
Indeed, if Hawaii were to secede as a state under the protection of the United States and become a kingdom, its people would still prefer to be under the protection of the United States as a kingdom, for the United States is the most powerful nation in the world and is firmly established in Hawaii. The paramount chiefs in the good old days realized their power depended on protection by the highest power, which on the high seas happened to be England at the time, wherefore they wanted Hawaii to be annexed for that protection, not fully understanding what annexation meant in terms of taxes and regulation. In the end the Unites States got the strategic pearl and the sugar along with it.
Hawaii, after restating the terms of its statehood in terms of an “independent” monarchy, would look pretty much the same today but for the names. So the arguments over sovereignty in Hawaii are nominalist arguments, arguments about names and not substance but for the pride of the people as Hawaiians, which can be otherwise bolstered along the lines of the programs already constitutionalized and established by the state out of colonial guilt, the so-called White Man’s Burden. That burden does not appertain only to descendants of the Original Hawaiians, but to descendents of the servants imported into the Hawaiian Kingdom by masters to work the cane fields under arduous, exploitative conditions that many natives and even former slaves on the continent were not disposed to contract for.
Other than the ideal dignity of the people, the substance of the native issue, one that is native to all countries, is economic. The basis of all material wealth is the land, the ground that everyone needs to stand upon to hold his head up high once he has gotten onto his hind legs. Everyone knows that the land really belongs to no one in particular despite the notion of private property, which the anarchist Kropotkin was wont to call “theft.” Inherited wealth, especially in the form of land, can wind up in the hands of incompetent or far less skilled heirs, and so can kingdoms passed down according to royal and aristocratic lineage.
We are all too human. The ancient Hawaiian chiefs were well aware that they, although they were lords of the land until they were overthrown by another chief, really held the land in trust.
I asked a Samoan student of political science at the University of Hawaii, after he effused on the sacredness of chiefs, what then could be done if a chief was too tyrannical: “Kill him.” Another chief would arise to the purpose.
Activist Leon Siu seeks, in Gandhi-like fashion, international recognition for the Hawaiian Kingdom now “illegally” occupied by the United States. The community may gain much by his spread of Aloha, but as Heraclitus said, justice is strife, meaning that war is the father of justice, and one cannot image a civil war over the secession of Hawaii.
A nativist lawyer, Mahealani Wendt, supports the government-to-government or tribal-nation approach to protected sovereignty; she too emphasizes material issues, such as land titles, and she assisted her husband Ed, a traditional kalo (taro) farmer, in spearheading the decades-long struggle for water diverted from the watershed for sugarcane agriculture.
Another native activist by the name of Kelii Akina, who at this writing is a trustee-at-large for the Office of Hawaii Affairs, a state agency committed to the improvement of conditions for native Hawaiians, is a staunch supporter of American values; he is focused on investing the funds available on material improvements rather than expending them on interminable squabbles over nominal status of the OHA wards. OHA has become an ATM machine for lawyers.
Now the only reason I write anything down is because I want to escape from my own pathetic reality and learn something just for the sake of learning. The brief study I present below, which will naturally be ignored by most Hawaiians and hated by the factions because I am an outsider of no use to them. It will be perused by perhaps no more than a hundred people worldwide because of a lack of interest in the subject.
My study led me to the conclusion that the beef of the common natives and the would-be natives should be with the leadership, and that leadership includes their own leaders as well as haole or “foreign” leaders who conspired to enrich themselves at their expense.
Kings and queens are no longer sacred after government is rationalized and subjects are disciplined, for the monarch soon becomes subject to that discipline instead of a charismatic individual. The Hawaiian kings did as kings everywhere have done; they conveniently curried popular favor to protect their throne from jealous members of the aristocracy, and remain supreme over everyone.
Today the complainants might want to restore or form a new kingdom, yet their own kings, under the influence of whites, sold them out, and the descendants of those whites own vast estates in Hawaii today because their ancestors established themselves first and stayed.
Yet no particular race is to blame, not the white race for having superior technology backed by unitary faith nor the other races for being behind the curve at the moment. And it must be ensured that the private estates and the public trusts established for the benefit of native descendants are managed for the benefit of the people; if private, the profits must be justified.
I asked several leading Native Hawaiians what in particular Native Hawaiians have to offer to the world, as if to be recognized they would have to provide something in return. Not one responded, perhaps because I seem to be a person of no consequence or too impartial hence of no use to their particular causes.
Could not a unique gift without expectation of return be the famous spirit of Aloha? The generic brand of love has a price in a transactional society. Fear and love are related from the beginning. Loved ones who are not useful are dumped by the thousands every day of the week, and Free Love is denounced as perversion. Aloha may be priceless, but that remains to be seen, wherefore this retracing of the constitutional history of Hawaii in search of Aloha.
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COMMENT:
“You asked what native Hawaiians have to offer. Aloha is uniquely Hawaiian, and it means love, hello and goodbye. There is a state statute defining the term. Hawaiians also invented the offshore fishponds of many varieties of which there are or were hundreds throughout the islands. They are a lovely people, who can teach the rest of us a great deal about tolerance, love and life.” Michael Lilly
Michael Lilly, commented on this article just after it was published. I first met him in the 70s when he opposed me as a deputy attorney general in a case I brought before the Hawaii Supreme Court. He eventually became attorney general. His great-great father J.S. Walker was an attorney general for the Kingdom of Hawaii, held important ministerial and legislative positions, and was friend and adviser to Queen Liliuokalani. Michael Lilly, born in Hawaii and a Hawaiian by experience, was a perfect enemy, that is, a friend, who exemplified the meaning of aloha.
to be continued elsewhere
Therefore, Hawaii is no different than many other places where the struggle continues. Will Québec secede from Canada? Will California secede from the United States? Probably not. But it is very important that these ethnic cultures not completely disappear from the face of the earth, but be preserved and enhanced, primarily through bloodlines, language, religions and other artifacts.
You are right in your analysis that is so thorough and easily understood. The primary thing that native Hawaiians leave us with is the Spirit of Aloha. Something that I hope, never dies.
Ron