Author Archives: Jere

A personal and complete disdain for abject racism engenders a real fear of the Akaka bill that attempts to fashion an Indian tribe of native-Hawai’ians and the additional harm to equality for us all it is to cause if passed by Congress and not vetoed by President Bush. It will be years before its constitutional problems collapse the Office of Hawaiian Affairs in its present form along with all of the additional racial harm it has brought to the American State of Hawaii. During this intermediate appellate period, the unrealistic phenomenon will continue without hope of success, and a greater injustice will occur to those who choose to continue this grand delusion.

We in Hawai’i love Hawai’ian citizens, but reality would suggest that time be better spent thinking about and constructing constitutional ways to repair the continuing damage to their race and culture. The future of the Akaka bill and secession are but false hopes that perpetuate continuing harm to all of us including Hawaiian-Americans.

Hawai’ians tragically lag behind other races in many areas, but we sometimes fail to realize that in America, the law and the values it is intended to preserve requires that all who need help from the government be treated equally. There is recognition by the law of the unfair consequences that befall some because of race, and the law and society provides for them often by affirmative action programs and in other ways; but certainly not to the extent urged by the school’s incredible theory in Doe v. Kamehameha that excluding all persons not of the Hawai’ian race is an affirmative action program.

Hawai’ian-Americans enjoy these permissible programs, but attempting to distinguish themselves above the rest simply because they are of the Hawai’ian race is legally wrong, and to me, immoral. Remember that the ancestors of most of us living in the Kingdom of Hawaii at the time of the revolution in 1893 were not American and many, not even white.

Most of our non-Hawaiian ancestors had nothing to do with the revolution but we and our progency are not included in Senator Akaka’s plan. My ancestors were Portuguese and my two grandmothers were born in the Kingdom, probably making them citizens of a constitutional monarchy like others who were allowed to be naturalized. Remember also that they came to Hawaii not only upon invitation of the sugar planters, but of the government of the Kingdom and the royalty.

Although not to the satisfaction of white plantation owners, King Kalakaua, through John M. Kapena, whom he appointed to be “envoy extraordinary and minister plenipotentiary,” romanced the Japanese: “The theme of Japanese-Hawaiian affinity was further emphasized in a speech by Kapena at a dinner which he gave in Tokyo honoring three imperial princes and the heads of departments of the Japanese government. ‘His Majesty (Kalakaua) believes that the Japanrese and Hawaiians spring from one cognate race and this enchances his love for you. He hopes that our people will more and more be brought closer together in a common brotherhood. Hawaii holds out her loving hand and heart to Japan and desires that Your People may come and cast in their lots with ours and repeople our Island Home — with a race which is sent to us by His Imperial Majesty, Your government and people may blend with ours and produce a new and vigorous nation making our land the garden spot of the Eastern Pacific, as your beautiful and glorious county is of the Western.'” (Kuykendall)

It is a broken promise and now Hawai’ian-Americans are allowed an unachievable hope that taking Senator Akaka’s magic pill will cure injustice to them, or that perhaps somehow America will allow them to secede. It becomes more certain that they have been deceived because of the patent improbability that Congress can create rather than recognize an Indian tribe.