Advertisement - Click to support our sponsors.
Maui protest LAHAINA, Maui -- About 500 Hawaiians and their supporters marched through the commercial district of Lahaina Town and Kaanapali yesterday, protesting a lawsuit that seeks to eliminate state programs benefiting Hawaiians.
over lawsuit draws
500 supporters
The federal lawsuit challenges
programs that benefit HawaiiansBy Gary Kubota
Maui correspondentThe federal lawsuit, brought by Patrick Barrett and John Carroll, also challenges state measures recognizing traditional Hawaiian gathering and religious rights allowing natives to have special access to the mountains and ocean.
The protest was the second to be held on Maui, the first taking place Feb. 2-4 at Kahului Airport, and one of the largest protest marches on the Valley Isle in decades.
It drew a wide range of supporters, from the homeless to Maui County Mayor James "Kimo" Apana.
"I look at this funding as a inheritance to the Hawaiian children," said Apana, a native Hawaiian and a member of the Royal Order of Kamehameha. "I think people are trying to take away the wills."
Na Kupuna O Maui, the group organizing the march, said the demonstration was to build public support against the suit and to educate visitors about the legal problems native Hawaiians face. The suit challenges the constitutionality of programs benefiting Hawaiians under the equal protection law.
A Na Kupuna spokesman, Kapali Keahi, said government funding for the programs -- such as housing for Hawaiian homesteaders -- was intended to make up for the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893.
"We're faced with a lot of problems, a lot of disenfranchisement," Keahi said. "We make up 80 percent of the prison population and only 20 percent of the population of Hawaii. What we're facing is a lot of racism, economically."
The march began at the site of Mokuula Island, the former home of Maui chiefs and King Kamehameha, and ended at Black Rock in Kaanapali, a place Hawaiians say is a leaping-off point to the spiritual world.
Supporters handed out brochures to hundreds of visitors who stood along Front Street in Lahaina. Some visitors said they supported the Hawaiians' march.
Before the march, Hawaiians held a ceremony at Mokuula, where families chanted in Hawaiian and made offerings to ancestors.
Lahaina was the capital of Hawaii before the mid-1800s, and many of the descendants of royalty are buried in west Maui.
Akoni Akana, executive director of Friends of Mokuula, said the demonstration was also an opportunity for many Hawaiian adults and children to re-establish their spirituality with sacred places in native culture.
"The spiritual place of who we are is as important as the political and social," Akana said.
After the ceremony, Keeaumoku Kapu used a copy of the Barrett lawsuit to light the torch of pono, or righteousness, for the demonstration and invited people to march with them.
A number of demonstrators, unable to march, rode in golf carts and were pushed in wheelchairs.
A Maui family pushed a wheelchair with the photograph of their mother, Sara Camacho, who died Feb. 17.
Pali Camacho said his mother hoped that before she died she would be living on Hawaiian homestead land. She applied in 1976 and was given a Hawaiian homestead in Kula in 1986.
Camacho said his mother never moved onto the land because there was no water and no roads provided for it.
"They're still developing the area," he said.