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hawaiian issues jonathan kay kamakawiwo‘ole osorio In her 1989 book From a Native Daughter, Haunani-Kay Trask said that the modern Hawaiian movement began when some fifty families living in Kalama Valley protested the eviction notices served by the Bishop Estate in 1967. Their resistance to a new suburban development, and the loss of one more productive working community, has grown over forty years later into a dynamic political, cultural, and social movement that has come to be a large part of the way that Hawai‘i defines itself to the world. It is difficult to identify any aspect of life in Hawai‘i that does not reflect some part of the Hawaiian movement today: The resurgence of Hawaiian language has produced an outpouring of cultural productivity, from political demonstrations to State-supported Hawaiian language immersion schools. Consider contemporary fashions—even if they are mostly t-shirts—that articulate Hawaiian words that would have been unintelligible to the greater public a few decades ago. The word aloha will no longer suffice to represent an island identity. The history of the American takeover in Hawai‘i, once a story repressed in Hawaiian families and ignored in public institutions, has spawned dozens of books, plays, video documentaries, lawsuits, music, and lately, slam poetry that have all brought this history into sharp relief in the public mind. The physical landscape of Hawai‘i has quite definitely been affected. Windward valleys on O‘ahu are still agricultural communities because of the leadership of young Hawaiian activists in the early ’70s, and there are areas in urban Honolulu where taro grows again, and students of the ‘äina learn again how to protect water and land resources using technologies and values that we learn from a curriculum that is many centuries old. In fact, certain words and phrases like ahupua‘a and mälama ‘äina have crept into the popular lexicon, and may already be indispensable to anyone or any business that is practicing some sustainable activity. And cultural heroes—outside of a few exceptions in the sports world— are Känaka Maoli activists, cultural practitioners, and musicians who were also activists, or people who have identified themselves with Hawaiian causes. 16 The Value of Hawai‘i I doubt that more than a few hundred people could name the boards of directors of any of the largest corporations in Hawai‘i, while tens of thousands of people know Nainoa Thompson, George Helm and Kimo Mitchell, and Israel Kamakawiwo‘ole. But by and large, the Hawaiian sovereignty movement has been forwarded by thousands of people, faceless and unnamed, who have protested freeway and hotel construction over sacred heiau, grieved over the desecrated graves of ancestors, ended the military abuse of Kaho‘olawe, demonstrated for prison reform and lobbied for health and education reform, proved that a Hawaiian diet prolongs life, translated nineteenth century Hawaiian language newspapers, and joined the rolls of Ka Lähui Hawai‘i. None of this was predictable forty years ago, when it seemed that the story of modern Hawai‘i was principally the story of the rise of Asian wage laborers and their descendants, and how they wrested fairer conditions, better lives, and opportunities from a society dominated by the plantation. Oddly enough, the values and principles that moved the labor unions and the Democratic Party to destroy the old haole race preferences in Hawai‘i seem to have evaporated, as the Democrats and the tourism-driven economy have brought fantastical new riches to the Islands, and given unions and big landowners something to protect. When one turns to listen for the sounds of protests, or looks for the idealists who dream of a fairer and compassionate society, less destructive of nature, one sees Hawaiians. This is something not lost on the old guard haole and malihini predisposed to think of rights and money as being indistinguishable from one another . For more than fifteen years a fairly small group of neoconservative activists have attempted to scuttle the Hawaiian movement, challenging government agencies that lay claim to revenues and land for Native Hawaiians, challenging the Hawaiian preference policy of a private school established by the will of a Hawaiian chiefess under Kingdom law, and insulting Hawaiian attempts to research and write their histories, reassert older spiritual values, and claim the right to live on as a people. That these objectors are unable to cultivate the same aloha for themselves as an almost homeless Hawaiian musician can with one recorded song is mostly a...

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