He Pukoʻa Kani ʻĀina

            Aloha mai kakou. Our Hawaiian lāhui continues to be in a state of oppression and we are denied the opportunities to become active citizens in their government. The missionaries that came to our islands came from a nation that was built on the principles of democracy where all people are allowed to participate in government. However, there is an immoral violation to this principle that has heavily affected our citizens. Our ʻāina has been desecrated and exploited for the sake of capitalistic ventures: a collapsed tourist and sugarcane industry, militaristic exploitations, and the conversions of our food industry for agricultural use to the production of mass agribusiness, that continues to leave devastating impacts that disrupt the balance between the health and the health of our nonhuman relatives. Though currently we have reached an agreement that allows us to gain the Western idea of sovereignty, we, as Kanaka ʻŌiwi have continued to hold ea, political independence to sustain the life of our peoples. Part of our kuleana is to adequately prepare ourselves for the future conditions of the state of food production, energy, education, and culture revitalization. We must protect the future of our lāhui and wean ourselves from the dominant capitalist economic systems and gain pono through creating self-sustainable communities that are consistent with promoting the values of our kūpuna.

The nineteenth century for the Kanaka ʻŌiwi included extreme population collapse and the introduction of land division. Our kūpuna began to give us their knowledge through the introduction of writing records of our cultural ʻike. They understood that their population collapse was just a beginning of the cultural diaspora that would attempt to oppress our legacy. ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi has been revitalized and we now understand that our ancestors understood sought a future that perpetuated and shared the envisioning of strong ʻohana who steadily preserve, perpetuate, and protect the tradition of mālama ʻāina; the development of communities that take pride in self-sufficiency and resiliency with a focus to protect our resources and hold control of our destiny; and a land abundant with natural and cultural resources where each individual looks at kuleana from a point of responsibility with one another, not just of rights. Our kūpuna’s ability to look into the future and act in preserving a vast legacy is the model that we seek to emulate.

            Education is the most important aspect of a community. Cultural revitalization must be the foundation of education that will allow students to not only learn about Hawaiian culture, but also to practice Hawaiian culture. Hawaiian education stresses hard work, commitment, and discipline. We must search for advance knowledge for production of agriculture and aquaculture and the cultivation of culture and language through recent strides and revitalization of ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi. The land will become an important educational center that allows for a strong indivdual identity and community. We promote that workshops that emower our community, such as in the areas of Hawaiian rights, land use laws, water rights, and community and political processes. We support place-based learning that provides educational activities for our farmers and youth, vocational training,  and enable students to be profficient in their pracicies. We would like to focus our education on creating community-controlled life long centers throughout the island nad opening resources to the greater community, develoop cultural and educational centers in language, healing, cultural arts, and traditional resource management, with this view of education as the primary component of the little tourism way have left in valuing indigenous ways of knowledge.

We face profound environemntal and economic changes in the current state of Ka Pae ʻĀina.  Our land is not a commodity, but the foundation of our cultural and spiritial identity. We have failed to take into account that we have past our peak of oil consumption, and in 2032, our demand is 50% more than it was thirty years ago. Petroleum is hard pressed to meet the expected future demand. Our existing capacities are drastically decreasing, with a current 20 milliions of oil produced today from 48 million barrels a day produced in the United States in 2010. We continue to act as if we continue to live in a period under the US empire where oil and gas were exploited to fuel wealth accumulation for the American nation, leading to the exploitation of our nation. In striving to create a “self-sufficient state”, we must supply our own energy needs that needs to be targeted through reducing utility costs. It is our kuleana to prepare for a clean and healthy environment, protected from damage, pollution, and over-exploitation.

Our campaign seeks to create programs that help to finance stand-along power systems for homes and business and develop a power grid that is less dependent on fossil fuels and more reliant on viable renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind sources, incorporated into new home and business construction. We seek to limit the delivery of imported diesel gasoline, and other petrol products, which have become prohibitely expensive and look to be ceasing altogether. Our community village living supports businesses that develop infrastructre to support research, maintainence, and production of energy vehicle and promote public transportation. We seek the restoration of watershed protection to safeguard our native forests, flora, and fauna, and prevent further erosion which has caused massive soil runoff into the oceans, fishponds, and streams. This soil could be used towards agriculture production and use. Kānaka Māoli continue to have the lowest income levels and home-onwership rates in the islands, making it difficult to initiate cost saving measures. The state has failed in its initiative to shift the proportion of Hawaiʻi energy sources from 95% to 70% reliance on fossil fuels. We must remove our talk of the “greater good” and move into creating collective solutions to this energy crisis that take into account the unique economies of each communities natural and susbsistence economies.

We must continue to make agriculture the most supported industry on the island that allow the promotion of family farms, tranditional food crops, diversified production, and the protection of our lands and water. There is a need for food security that is critical as 90-95% of our food is currently imported into the islands. Hawaiʻi has always been known for its ability to produce abundant quantities of food, so that the land was momona. Our isolated existence in the middle of the Pacific Ocean makes it imperative to protect our cultural values from outside intersts that may conflict with these values. We propose setting the objectives of achieving this goal for recognizing the limited availibility of water as a primary factor in prioritizing suitable agricultural food crops, promoting famly farms to protect resources from commercial exploitataion, encouraging production of the kalo, promoting diversity in food crop production, supporting agro-tourism endeavors, create competition for our family farms to become more efficient and competitive in producing food supplies and supporting their economic securities, supporting fuel crops that are byproducts of food crops, creating nursuries to protect our native plants, and supporting livestock-raising operations that use sustainable land and water management practices to minimize the risk of erosion to protect water resrouces.

Our islandʻs natural resources’ availability and protection is essential to perpetuate subsitence practices and the perpetuation of Hawaiian cultural knowledge. The implementation of HRS 7-1 before the eradication of our state structure allowed the protection of “all rights, customarily and traditionally exercised for subsitence possessed by ahupuaʻa tenants...but they shall not have a right to take such articles to sell for profit.” Among the plethora of reasons that the state has commonly failed, one is the promotion of the privitization of the food industry. An increasing amount of land is used for geneticallly modified seeds, which is exported to the US continent and other parts of the world. Of the 91, 500 acres in agriculture statewide, only 8% of that is used to grow food consumed locally in 2032. As Vandana Shiva suggests, without a sustenance economy, a market economy does not exist, as people work directly to create the conditions necessary to maintain their lives.

This has been a threat to the biodiversity of our native plants and animals and there are still health risks being investigated with this cause. Subsistence is the key to food sustainability and self-sufficiency. In developing skills that promote skills to perpetuate this type of economy based in cultural knowledge and rights, 38% of our food may be acquired through subsistence activities. It is essential to balance future economic development and growth on the island to assure its continuation. We also need to reivtalize our native fishponds, which strech over 14,000 acres of lands. These stone-walled fishponds continue to be highly valuable for intensive food production, with 15 acres yielding approximately 600 pounds of fish per acre annually, with an annual yield of 600,000 pounds of fish. Our campaign also promotes the creation of agriculture cooperatives to take over the privatized agribusinesses to eliminate GMO production in the islands and to create initiatives in agriculture that allow for environmental reclamation and the promotion of jobs.

 Shiva also suggests that instead of viewing our economy as synonymous with the market, we should see them as markets “places of exchanged based on direct relationships”. We must contrast our neoliberal policies with kapu (regulations) to balance “human use and ecological health” (Goodyear-Ka’ōpua and Baker) that allows power to be given back to the individual. By cutting off profits to transnational corporations and putting wealth as a secondary concern, these corporations lose their power and allow for Hawaiʻi to develop a greater sense of self-sustainability.

Governance can only come through the people of the lands. Private ownership needs to vested in community through community land trusts. Natural resoruces and land must have legal protection against offshore interests looking for opportunities to continue their pursuis in the destruction  of our land. We must take into the natural distribution of resources through our ahupua’a and revitalize the governance of ‘Aha Moku, plaed-based systems of governance. Expert practitioners and communities make decisions for the area. Through the priniciples of direct democracy, each ahupua’a could be governed by a council of representatives that allow individuals to live in harmony with the natural environment. Though we have not received complete sovereignty from the state of Hawaiʻi, we must offer to work with the state by supporting the cration of laws that have special conditions that have recognized the unique practices of our indigenous culture and enourage policy makers to embrace utilizing agricultural lands for food slef-sufficiency. By being ruled as a cultural district, our management is more effective in targeting our own peopleʻs wants and needs, instead of the needs for the “larger good”.

For Westerners to claim this land for their own use is not only highly illegal, but highly immoral. There is nothing in international or national law that can justify the United Statesʻ actions in the taking of these lands and controlling the governments of the indigenous peoples. Although these businessmen are so loyal to America, they “coincidentally” forget to enforce their country’s founding principles of democracy and equality in their governments. These principles put all peoples’ welfare before economic interests of a nation. In this case, white supremacy seems to supercede the societies of the Hawaiian kingdom. The theory of imperialism and greed that stemmed from the exploitation of indigenous cultures illustrates the lack of humanity. Ironically, there seem to be a violation of the theories of these businessmen on multiple levels. Machiavelli states that to be a good ruler, one should not mess with one’s women or property. Foucault also believes that power is exchanged within spaces and individuals, working with one another. However, these principles are violated by the violation of land and power. We cannot allow the Hegelian dialectic of repressing the slave (indigenous peoples) from getting educated for fear of an uprising. No one group has the power over another to displace them and cast power over them through the use of fear tactics, as was being used throughout the game from the oppositionʻs suggestion to keep outrageous land and property rights, only allowing themselves to participate in the government.

Kanaka Maoli on their own were making progress with developing their own treaties to recognize sovereignty, possessed innovative technologies, and was the most literate nation in the world. The power of women in Hawai’i even exceeded their power in many other nations. There is no alteration for the good of the citizens of the Hawaiian islands, as illustrated: only an attempted suprression and exploitation of Hawaiian people through labor, land, and language. Although some can understand the point that Hawai’i could be militarily protected being in a vulnerable location, there have been ulterior motives of selfishness behind these moves for occupation and destruction. There is no excuse for the trade sacred lands and endemic resources that help to create a sustainable economy for the illegal government’s military presence in Hawai’i. I question the presence of a single ‘market economy’ here in Hawai’i and how it has increased our vulnerability to military interests, destructive climate change, and alterations of our culture in the Hawaiian kingdom.

We seek to hold faith our political system that works with and for the people. The new adjustments proposed to the Constitution are created out of the necessity of surviving as a people, while holding on to our identity and simultaneously working politically with the forms of the colonizers. We protest the representations that the Kanaka Maoli are incapable of self-government and desire peace and political quiet. Man’s greed for power and spoils shall not be allowed to disturb the peace of the islands. A productive environemnt that nurtures a people and the land cannot exist if there are not ample opportunitties for a majority of the members in the kingdom to participate in government. Our kuleana is to organize and lead our people in this struggle is an immense one and we must resist together, in unity. We hope to open and begin futrther our conversations, seeing that our crisis leads to opportunity.