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Hawaii’s World
THE Hawaiian status bill now before Congress has Sen. Daniel Akaka, who is Hawaiian, as its lead introducer, but all four Congress members from Hawaii will make it their main focus in the remaining time before Congress adjourns in October. Inouye will push
Hawaiian rights billFirst | Second | Third of three articles
No one has the potential for more effective arm-twisting and persuasion than Hawaii's powerful, fourth-most-senior member of the Senate, Daniel K. Inouye.
He told me in a recent extended interview that he will work harder for this than for any other legislation in his 37-plus years in the Senate.
He is requesting Hawaiians to accept one important change. It is to authorize the writing of a Hawaiian governing "document" rather than a "constitution."
The more general word could still embrace a constitution, but also a "charter" or "statute." It might be less off-putting to some of those whose votes he hopes to win.
He will work the Senate, naturally, along with Senator Akaka, and will contact House members who might be recommended to him by Reps. Patsy Mink and Neil Abercrombie.
This, he adds, is a situation where one-on-one contacts will be more important than hearings to pass a bill before the 106th Congress adjourns, probably for good, in early October.
He will strive to protect the state of Hawaii's interest in our third-biggest industry, the military, along with meeting the concerns of Hawaiians.
Inouye long has served on the Armed Services Committee. He encouraged the Navy to send the battleship Missouri here for display, and the Defense Department to start a $90 million new Pacific Command headquarters on Halawa Heights above Pearl Harbor.
He showed his concern for Hawaiian interests by pushing to make Kahoolawe a historical site instead of a target island, and interceding personally with the former Marine commandant to end practice amphibious landings on Leeward Oahu.
"I have to work both ends," he said. This, I add, is the reality of effective politics.
INOUYE says he has the natural concern of just about all Hawaii residents for finding a way to right historical wrongs against Hawaiians.
He has a further drive imparted from his mother, who told him: "I owe something to Hawaiians and you should do your part to pay that debt." She was orphaned at a very young age and taken in by a Hawaiian family for some 18 months before a Methodist minister offered her a permanent home.
The Democratic political sweep in Hawaii in 1954 put Inouye into the territorial House of Representatives. The former throne room in Iolani Palace was its meeting place.
He refused to join presiding officers in operating from the raised replicas of the thrones. It was a desecration, he says, as was the Aug.12, 1898, act of cutting into memento pieces the Hawaiian flag that was lowered from the palace at the U.S. annexation ceremonies. It should have been preserved for a museum, he says.
The 1893 revolutionaries also tried to suppress the Hawaiian language and hula. Inouye has helped win tens of millions of dollars from Congress to fund programs for Hawaiian education and health and restoration of the Hawaiian language.
He sees it now within reach to have Congress reclassify Hawaiians as native Americans with the same special rights and subsidies as Indians. He speaks as the senior Democrat on the Senate's Indian Affairs Committee.
A.A. Smyser is the contributing editor
and former editor of the the Star-Bulletin
His column runs Tuesday and Thursday.