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Honolulu Lite
FOR the record, this is one haole who is not interested in voting for trustees of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs. I'm interested in being APPOINTED as an OHA trustee. Hawaiians should
unite, not fightJust kidding. I can think of few jobs as thankless as being an OHA trustee. It doesn't pay that well. No matter what you do, you get criticized. A typical board meeting makes "The Jerry Springer Show" look like monks in meditation. Extreme personalities? Let's just say there are no shrinking plumerias in this group. And what makes it all the more painful to watch is that everyone on the board truly wants the best for Hawaiians; they just have wildly divergent ideas on how to proceed.
Now the highest court in the nation -- the American nation, that is -- has ruled that eight of the trustees were illegally elected because only Hawaiians were allowed to vote. Gov. Ben Cayetano plans to remove those trustees. Ironically, just a short time ago, the governor had to appoint the ninth trustee because the board was so functionally impaired it couldn't get its act together long enough to fill the vacancy itself.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruling was narrow, addressing only race-based voting rights in OHA elections. But it left many in the Hawaiian community reeling. Trustee Rowena Akana said it was "tantamount to the suicide of the Hawaiian people." How the action of an outside party can be construed as suicide, I don't know. I think the word she was going for is "homicide," as in, "this ruling kills us."
TRUSTEE Mililani Trask stopped just short of calling for armed rebellion. But she did call for civil disobedience. Her cry sounded even more Che Guevera-ish coming from Geneva, where she was attending an international conference on indigenous people.
One wonders whether the OHA board would have been more effective if trustees concentrated exclusively on the needs of Hawaii's indigenous people instead of those of the world at large.
Nation of Hawaii leader Bumpy Kanahele has been down that civil disobedience road. It led to federal prison. Bumpy's power and influence increased faster than the NASDAQ market after he turned to negotiation instead of confrontation. And instead of a prison cell, he's hunkered down on several lush acres of prime Waimanalo land that he got the State of Hawaii to hand over to his group. So, if you're keeping score in the sovereignty game, Bumpy's ahead.
Not surprisingly, Bumpy was one of the cooler heads to prevail in the post-court-ruling discussion. Instead of a fatal blow to the movement, Bumpy sees the court decision as a wake-up call for the fragmented sovereignty process.
You can hardly even call it a process. It's more like a crazy quilt of conflicting ideas and efforts. Bumpy knows that this ruling is merely a shot across the bow. Those lawyers in Washington, D.C., who handpicked Freddy Rice to pursue this case play big ball. They are planning an all-out assault on any race-based Hawaiian program that is fueled by public funds. These legal guns know that when it comes to taking on Hawaiians, they don't have to divide and conquer. The Hawaiians already have taken care of the dividing part.
I was joking about being appointed to the OHA board of trustees. But you don't have to go very far to extrapolate from last week's ruling that if race-based voting is illegal, a race-based board of trustees also is susceptible to attack.
Charles Memminger, winner of
National Society of Newspaper Columnists
awards in 1994 and 1992, writes "Honolulu Lite"
Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Write to him at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin,
P.O. Box 3080, Honolulu, 96802
or send E-mail to charley@nomayo.com or
71224.113@compuserve.com.
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