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8 Ku‘e and Ku‘oko‘a History, Law, and Other Faiths
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On February 23, 2000, the United States Supreme Court issued a decision that has had a significant effect on Native Hawaiians and their seventeen-year-old movement to reclaim self-government. Chief Justice Kennedy articulated the opinion of the Court finding that Hawai‘i’s denial of petitioner Harold Rice’s right to vote in the trustee elections for the Office of Hawaiian Affairs violates the Fifteenth Amendment of the US Constitution. However, Justice Breyer’s concurring opinion that Hawaiian people have neither political nor cultural claims to distinct treatment by American law promises to transform Hawaiian civil society and provides powerful motivation for Hawaiians to seek independence from the United States. As a result of this decision, a handful of Hawai‘i residents are seeking to dismember more than eighty years of federal and state legislation that has set aside land and created two major state agencies for the benefit of legally defined Native Hawaiians. Several historic cases (Bartlett v. Department of Hawaiian Homelands and Arakaki v. Office of Hawaiian Affairs) filed in federal courts argue that entitlements to Native Hawaiians, set up under federal and state legislation, are violations of the equal rights protections of the US Constitution. In 213 8 Ku\‘e\ and Ku\‘oko‘a History, Law, and Other Faiths Jonathan Kamakawiwo‘ole Osorio 213 response, the state and Kanaka Maoli (people of Hawaiian ancestry) individuals and agencies have been working to secure federal legislation that recognizes Hawaiians as Native Americans. Another sovereignty initiative, the Council of Regency (COR) of the Kingdom of Hawai‘i, managed to obtain a hearing before the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) at The Hague, Netherlands. This group solicits international recognition that the nation-state status of the Kingdom has not been extinguished despite a century of US occupation. The history of sovereignty movements in Hawai‘i provides a framework for understanding the discursive trends that sustain and alter cultural identity. Ultimately, the confrontation between cultural identity and social-political frameworks such as law provides the clearest understanding of how institutions, especially colonial institutions, are translated and adopted. To discuss how American law and international law address political questions of ethnic and national identity, I will compare two distinct legal avenues through which the aboriginal people of Hawai‘i are seeking self-government—Ka La\hui Hawai‘i (KLH) and the Council of Regency. I will describe how these two strategies are employing distinct and mutually exclusive interpretations of nationhood. While Ka La\hui has struggled to secure recognition as a Native nation within the larger American nation, the Council of Regency has pursued the reestablishment of the independent Hawaiian Kingdom. The differences between these two initiatives, I contend, contribute to the confusion over definitions of nationality, race, and self-determination, which cannot be solved by juridical decision at either the national or international level. Indeed, they can barely be addressed at the level of local politics because of certain important and historic ideological differences that separate Hawaiians. A BRIEF AND CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL HISTORY The liberal franchise extended by the 1900 Organic Act in Hawai‘i defined Hawaiians as American citizens, despite their widespread opposition to the American takeover (Coffman 1998; Silva and Minton 1998). Yet, from 1902 until the decade before the Statehood Act, political control was maintained by the Republican Party, which successfully recruited thousands of Native Hawaiian voters, in part, through a careJonathan Kamakawiwo‘ole Osorio 214 [3.236.111.234] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 10:04 GMT) fully managed system of patronage. Territorial and county government positions were routinely dispensed to loyal Republicans. Labor unionism , associated with the Democratic Party, was stigmatized as antithetical to Hawaiian interests because it would primarily benefit the largely Asian plantation workforce.1 Under Republican control, a few powerful haole (Caucasian) corporations and families were able to manipulate all the important sectors of the economy, including finance, shipping, wholesale distribution , and, most importantly, cheap access to the Crown and Government Lands of the Kingdom, which made up nearly one-half the total land area of the archipelago. The labor movement grew stronger, and on the eve of statehood the Republicans surrendered political supremacy to the Democratic Party without, however, surrendering their control over land and wealth (Kent 1983). The first fifteen years of statehood under Democratic Party control did not favor the economic or political aspirations of Hawaiians in general . Considered by many to be a failed minority in American society, Hawaiians demonstrated...