[IPSM] Interview with Indigenous Leader Haunani-Kay Trask on Hawaiian Sovereignity

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http://mypage.direct.ca/e/epang/InterviewHaunani.html

Interview with Haunani-Kay Trask

Haunani-Kay Trask is descended from the Pi'ilani line of Maui and the
Kahakumakaliua line of Kaua'i. She is a powerful writer and poet. Her books
include, Light in the crevice Never Seen (Calyx Books, 1994) and From a
Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignity in Hawai'i (Common Courage
Press, 1993). Trask is an active member of the Ka Lahui Hawai'i, a native
Hawaiian initiative for self-government. She is also currently a professor
and the Director of the Centre for Hawiian Studies at the University of
Hawai'i.

Trask came to Vancouver to read at the Writers Festival in November 1996.

ManChui Leung: Very few people, especially in Canada, know about the
Hawaiian soverienty movement. Could you tell me about the history of Hawai'i
and the context that the movement finds itself now.?

Haunani-Kay Trask: Well all Polynesians begin anything formally or
informally with their genealogy and that means your line of descent. So I am
descended from the Pi'ilani line of Maui and the Kahakumakaliua line of
Kaua'i and first through my mother, the second through my father. Those two
lines carry with them obligations which is to carry forward the protection
of the people and the land, those are traditional obligations. And in terms
of the country, which is the land base, in our genealogy the land is one of
the people Papahanaumoku (Earth Mother) and she made the Sky Father, Wakea,
and they produced the islands and from the islands came the taro plant and
from the taro plant came the people.- first the chiefs then the people. So
the lessons of the genealogy are that we come from the land. I like to say
to white people, well you say you come from monkeys and that's your problem,
but we don't. We come from the land. We know where it is. We know who we
are. We know what our obligations consist of. Because we come from the land
we have to take care of the land, and because the taro plant is the first
thing that came from the land and not the people we must take care of the
taro, the taro is like corn or squash for the Native peoples on the North
American continent, its the same obligation. We came from, what they call
Corn Mother, we came Earth Mother, and the taro means we have to take care
of the land by producing food not hotels or airports or military bases.

Then from the taro come the chiefs and since I come from a chiefly line the
obligation are that we are to remind the people of the gods and the
ceremonies and the obligations to be a spiritually correct person in your
life and a set of obligations to take care of the people so that the
leadership that is required of people like myself is to take care of the
people, not to take care of business, not to take care of the political
system, but to take care of the nation. And the question today in the
sovereignty movement is, "what does that mean?" How do we take care of the
nation? Do we represent the economic interests? Do we represent the
educational interests, which is in my case because I'm an educator. How do
we frame an approach that will accomplish all of things genealogical we are
require to accomplish and also accomplish that need to be accomplished
because we live in a capitalist, imperialist society. That's a big problem
for us.

Then there is the history of Hawai'i which a history of a small country
swallowed up by a bigger imperialist country and that means we have to
address the presence the twin economic bases [US and Japan] on the threshold
of the 21st century. We have to address militarism in Oahu has five major
tourist destinations, seven major military bases and about 850,000 people.
The island is 600 square miles, its so small, it so without resource, we're
running out of water, we're running out of space, it's unbelievably
expensive, crowding in some areas is like Hong Kong, so are people because
they are proletariatized have been driven to the city so more Hawaiians live
in the cities than on the land which is where they belong, and out from
Ou'wahu now are mediating more and more efforts to commercialize and to make
into tourist enclaves, the big island of Hawai'i and the island of Maui.

When the US downsized its military, we only lost one base. So we didn't
really get back much land, actually we got back practically nothing. Pearl
Harbour is kind of a nuclearized mausoleum. All the tourist go there to see
where all the ships were bombed by the Japanese in the Second World War, and
at the same time we have the largest portage of nuclear ships in the world.
So that the Pacific is a hot spot and the ships are deployed from Hawai'i
like the troops are. Any time there is a war in Asia, the US departs from
Hawai'i, the seventh fleet of the United States which is their largest
fleet, is ported in Honolulu at Pearl Harbour and they control the world to
the coast of Africa. It's very difficult given that context to mount an
opposition to militarism, its very difficult to sustain any kind of
resistance because the ideology is so overwhelmingly pro-American,
pro-military, and pro-tourist.

We have over 7 million tourists a year now and we have a million and a
quarter residents of which only 20 percent are Native Hawaiian. So that
means there are 30 tourists for every Native. People who don't have a sense
of what that means in terms of your every day life really are spared one of
the worst experiences because we are walking artifacts. As if tourist stores
got up and walked around, that's what we are. Waikiki is the hotbed of
cultural prostitution and there, the people are subjected and subjugated by
stupid tourists who want you to dance and sing, so there is a kind of
prostitution of your culture if you actually participate in it as a waiter,
as dancer. Most Hawaiians in the tourist industry are either wait help, they
are waiting on tables or they're dancers, the tourists come to see our
culture. No one comes to Hawai'i to see American folk dance, they came here
to see us, which means we have to perform and since jobs are at a premium,
anyone who can dance winds up dancing for the tourists. The wages are very
low, the jobs have very few perks in terms of medical care and leave of
absence. So here's our situation economically and in the midst of all that
we still have a sovereignty movement that's getting bigger and bigger and
bigger.

Man Chui: Can you tell me about Ka Lahui nation?

Haunani: Our organization in great part was formed as a response to
militarization and touristfication of Hawai'i. We were formed in 1987,
although the protest movement regarding lands had been going on for ten
years. It took that long, say between 1975 and 1985 for people to realize
that defensive, what I call defensive anti-eviction struggles were the last
straw and that it would be easier if we would be offensive and take the lead
and say, 'no, these were all the lands that were taken from the Hawaiian
government in 1893 transferred illegally to the US and we want them back.'
And this is the way in which we want them returned. We want to be a
recognized nation on the same order as several American Indian tribes, we
want to have definable territorial boundries, we want to be able to tax
people on the land base. We want a democratic government. So we formulated a
democratic government, and at the first convention we elected my sister as
the governor of the nation. She has power to appoint her executive staff of
which I am a member, I'm her press secretary.

The base of the nation is drawn from a traditional land division called a
Moku and the Moku are divided into sub-districts and each sub-districts
elects their own through a caucus process their own representatives who then
elect the head of each island who then go to the annual legislative sessions
where they pass laws and convene to discuss strategies. And this legislative
session which is coming up in November [1996] which will be held at the
Centre for Hawaiian Studies of which I am a director on the University of
Hawai'i Campus will be their twentieth legislative session. I feel very good
about that, we've had more legislative sessions than the legislature of the
state of Hawai'i.

We believe in a more democratic process than they do. We are totally poor,
we don't have dues or anything so there are no taxes levied on the people
because we don't feel they are able to pay so that means everything is done
by volunteer. But nevertheless we are the lead sovereignty organization. A
poll was done by one of the local newspapers, a missionary owned paper, to
find out who the Hawaiian people think are their leaders, and both my sister
and I ranked higher than anyone, except a young man who does voyaging. He's
revived the art of voyaging - he doesn't do politics. And when he was
interviewed about his stature in the Hawaiian community, his first answer
was, I'm thought of as a leader but I'm really not, I'm a cultural leader,
I'm not a political leaders. As long as I stay out of politics, I will be
looked at faithfully, but soon as I get into politics I will be in the thick
of what the political struggle is all about. We all felt very good about
that, because the newspapers continue to harass, attack and defame us and
despite all their efforts, the Hawaiian people know who their leaders are
and know who are the trusted carriers of the spirit. My sister, though, is
nearing the end of her last term she does not want to run again, she's been
very very ill throughout her last term like most leaders of that level of
struggle and she needs to rest and give the leadership to a younger person.
I say that although neither she nor I are even fifty years old, but to us
twenty five years of struggle is enough to make you feel like you're a
hundred and five.

We belong internationally to many organizations, one of which is the
Unrepresented Nations of Peoples Organization funded by the Dalai Lama, my
sister is the second vice president. We belong to the indigenous women's
network, which is now hemispheric throughout the Americas, and my sister was
a delegate to the Beijing conference. We belong to South Pacific
organizations so our international linkages are very strong. We've done a
lot of work with the Native peoples in america because it's easier in one
sense because we're controlled by the United States. We've done less work in
Central and Latin America, and that's mainly the problem of language, not
intent. We've done a lot of work with the Maori, in New Zealand, Aretetoa.
There very much like us in many ways but they're much better off because
their country is not the world's leading imperialist power. And they have a
much larger land base and they and the white people are the two major
forces, they don't have the same immigrant problem that we do.

Man Chui Leung:You and your sister are very prominent in the movement, how
has your involvement influenced other women and feminist groups, lesbians,
younger women and students, etc.

Haunani: I hope enormously, but I really don't know how much influence there
is relative to other kinds influence. I know that the leadership is
unquestioned, because I know it was questioned for a while. And some of the
male leaders who oppose us from other sovereignty organizations have tried
to disparage us because we're women. It's very common, it happens in every
political system and they failed miserably because they're not intelligent
enough to argue on a acceptable political level. Some of the examples of
that are very constructed, one would be, one of the groups that supports
succession, independence from the United States which we do not, we support
a nation within a nation.

All Hawaiians in their hearts would like to be separate from the United
States but there are some realities that need to be addressed like the
militarization of Hawai'i. But in any case, one of these leaders had said,
that he didn't understand why my sister and I were such angry people and our
answer to him was that we don't participate in petty criminal behavior like
you do, he goes around threatening people with weapons. It's that kind of
macho behavior thinking that by being macho he's providing a model of
leadership that Hawaiians should be like this. When in fact we cannot afford
that - our prisons are already filled with Hawaiian youth and Hawaiian men
in particular. Our men already suffer the highest suicide rate for young
people in between the ages of 18 - 24. We already have a tremendous drug
problem so we don't need to add to those images - this image of a strong
armed person. That attitude of his lasted about a year, a year and a half,
and then he got in trouble with the federal government and the state
government - threatening people with guns . Then he apologized one day, made
a big apology to the press to my sister and I. So my sister responded by
saying, it's not to the Trask sisters that the apologies should be made,
it's to the Hawaiian people for posing as a leader when what you really are
is a petty thief - that's why you should make the apology. And of course the
reason he made the apology was that he came up for a request for probation
and he wanted to demonstrate a change of heart to the administration.

There's tremendous resentment toward my sister and I but it's at a very low
level. I think what's happened it that, first of all there's a fear of
attacking my sister and I which is good because it's based in fact which is
that we're incredibly articulate. And both of us have studied all kinds of
political movements and political theory, in fact that's what my PhD is in.
So if you come up against us, you better be ready for a good long public
fight and be ready to defend yourself. So therefore, the attacks have almost
always been personal and not political because people, whether their
legislators, or democratic party politicians or other sovereignty groups,
cannot address our argument so they attack us as women. I'm know as a very
angry, unhappy vicious person and my students like to say to people, do you
know her? Have you met her? Do you know anything about her? It's character
assassination, the same thing that goes on in regular dominant culture
society. Neither my sister and I are married and neither of us have children
so of course your sexual life is open for attack and assault and
vilification. But really after 10 - 15 years we've been out there, it's very
hard for people to, when pushed, come up with an answer. There's no question
that the Hawaiian people consider us leaders.

Hawaiian men are grudgingly are coming to understand that. The larger system
hates us and attacks us, especially the press. The press attacks me all the
time. A month ago we were assaulted in a small newspaper in Hawai'i called
the Honolulu Weekly, which comes out once a week. They had a huge front page
picture of me at a demonstration supporting the university attack in tuition
increases. All the pictures were outrageous, they were terrible, it was
written by a white man for a white owned newspaper. All the newspapers in
Hawai'i that are major are white owned, they did the same thing to me as
they did to the Queen. The problem is that they won't give me space to
answer, the space that they gave me was 900 words but the attack was 3000
words. And that's been going on for years, I'll been so vilified by the
press. So whether or not you survive that as a women depends on what your
obligation is. If you think your obligation is personal you're not going to
survive it. If you think that people are going to be unfair, you're not
going to survive. You have to begin with the understanding that everything
is unfair, that people are racist especially white people. That the system
is vicious. If you were waging a war of national liberation you would never
expect the opposition not to kill you, so this is the same thing except it
works on another plane.

They all have their AK47s directed at you, its just that it happens to be
newspaper, or it happens to be the university, in my case. The university
has tried to fire me three times. I hope they've given up becuase it
consumes enourmous amounts of time to struggle against being fired. If you
want to be a leader you just have to accept that, it's very hard to accept
that because its so unfair and when you want to reply, you don't have a
chance to apply because you don't control the media. All the media in
Hawai'i is rigged, even when people come to Hawaii from other cities, they
can't believe, the Hawaiian press is still at the token stage of
broadcasters who are people of colour, despite the fact that white people
are only 20% of the population they control 100% of the media including the
newspapers, the television stations and the radio stations. So the
sovereignty movement really has done a great deal in terms of fronting women
leaders and of course those women leaders have taken incredible media
beatings because we are women.

The media is very viciously anti-female. You can be anyone. Men are
attacked, for example for their private lives. The previous governor of
Hawai'i had a wife, he had a lover, he had a former lover, nobody said
anything about that. His wife actually left him and when he came back to be
the governor, she came back to go through the whole ceremony with him. The
current governor got a divorce from his wife, at least it was more upfront
and public and he said we don't get along and so we haven't been living
together so we're getting a divorce and I thought thank god a little
admission. It's a nasty world for women leaders but for some reason I don't
know whether we have tough skins, you can't are as much as any normal person
because you won't function.

I like to look at the students and see how much they love me. In many ways,
it's sad because Hawaiians love love, that's 99% of our life is based in
aloha, now its such an overused word but so much of our culture is based on
love. So it's very hard to not think about aloha before you do anything. I
am one of the people in Hawai'i that is known as somebody who does not have
any aloha, and of course, I don't for tourists, and for industrialists and
for the military. There is this gloss from the tourist industry that we
should give aloha to any person. And the attack on me in particular, and
much less so of my sister, from opposing sovereignty groups is that I don't
have any aloha. And my answer is that we need to get to the serious issues,
what we don't have is land, never mind about aloha. We don't have land,
resources, we don't have an educational system. We don't have language
schools - that's what we don't have.

So the state now has moved to co-opt the sovereignty movement by creating a
Sovereignty Advisory Committee which then became the Native Hawaiian
Sovereignty Elections Council which held a demonstration election asking
Hawaiians should Hawaiian delegates to form a government. Of course it was a
Hawaiian governor on the centenary of the overthrow of the our government in
1993, who created this all government appointed council. They preceded
inbetween 1993 and 1996 to get a million and a half dollars worth of glossy
advertising to convince the Hawaiian people to vote. Now the record of
Hawaiian voting in American type elections has been a boycott from beginning
to end. In 1894 when Hawaiians were asked to vote on the Republic of Hawai'i
constitution. There were 17,000 eligible voters and only 300 voted. Their
position then as our position was recently was boycott. In 1959, in
statehood, the majority of Hawaiians in Hawaiian communities, the communites
that are almost entirely Hawaiian, boycotted the statehood vote. In 1996,
the vote came in for the Constitutional Convention, should Hawaiians elect
delegates and 62,000 people were eligible to vote and only 22,000 voted.

We held a press conference, we claimed victory, the newspapers of course did
not cover the press but the television stations did. The Hawaiians are not
stupid, when a people have no power at all, the last power they have is to
say no and they did. So we took that as a sign of our leadership, that the
Hawaiian people refused to participate. They did not want to legitimize the
state process. Despite all the pain and suffering I felt victorious the day
the vote was released. The sovereignty elections council released the vote
and said that they won and never the gave the press the exact vote total. So
there were more yes votes than no votes but there were more no participation
votes than anything. To me this shows how we are leaders. To me that shows
how we are leaders. I don't even let the press interview me anymore becuase
they're so vicious and they're always white. So there's a conflict right
away becuase they don't like white people. My thig is that I make my friends
one by one, we chose our alliances one by one, are you a good white person,
why should I trust you, given your history. They're vicious, the press is
really vicious, that's true everywhere, they hate people of colour.

Man Chui Leung: In connection with the mobilization in 1993, which is the
100 years anniversary of the overthrow of the Hawaiian government, and now
in 1998, five years later, it will be 100 years since the forced annexation
into the United States. How has the movement built up in the five years?
What do you have planned? And what are your suggestions for people to
mobilize in solidarity?

Haunani: Well one of the things we know pretty clearly is how we're going to
proceed in this constitutional convention. There are a lot of open areas in
terms of questions, are we going to have funding? Are we going to be able to
meet? Are the Native communities going to be in control? It's struggling
with a strategy that is almost entirely dictated by the existing reality.
Nevertheless we did pretty good on the plebiscite, the boycott. Probably
what we'll do is make some sort of shape of resistance to the control of the
convention and depending on how that turns out, our organization or course
still exists, we're still in a position of leadership. Is to decide after
that whether we will do an alternative convention, an alternative
celebration.

In 1993, that celebration began with Ka Lahui. We were in the front line of
the march and now that pictures been reproduced all over the world which is
picture of us standing sort of at attention just before we walked into the
gates of the palace. Not a person in that picture is a member of the group
other than Ka Lahui. Our security is there, our banner is there, our leaders
are there right in the front. Because the other groups were late as they
always are. Part of leadership, it's so interesting, I want to write
something about this, part of leadership is about being out there first.
Never mind all this elected stuff, it's to speak the truth first, to
organize based on the truth first, that's what leadership is. Whether you
get the credit for it, is probably never going to happen, you're not going
to get the credit for it. And if you want the credit for it then you need to
revise why you're in the movement because it's your own achievement that is
the comment.

So if in 10-15 years we have raised the consciousness of Hawaiians regarding
the overthrow, regarding injustice, regarding land loss, regarding the loss
of self government, that is its reward. If the Hawaiian people say to the
two white missionary owned newspapers, those are our leaders. No matter what
the newspapers says about elected officials that's your reward. I think the
problem for a lot of people is the struggle is so hard and it takes so much
out of you, and it changes your life. You know people lose their familes,
they get divorced, they don't come home anymore, their kids don't get fed
and we go down in all the attack and assault and depression. And what we
need to do sometime is just to stand away and look back at what we've done
and that's your reward. Because you're never going to get paid, you're never
going to get sympathetic television or newspaper coverage, you're never
going to get anything. The reward is when Hawaiians come up to me and say,
"Thank you so much for explaining what happened to us." That's it, that's
why I'm an educator, really. I'm lucky because I have a job and most
Hawaiians who are in the movement don't have a job, and I'm tenured and even
though they trying to fire me I think they've given up, and I have a
beautiful building.

Now that I have space and the Maoris have taught me space is sovereignty,
its impossible [to fire me and get rid of us]. Now they have to deal with
us, especially on the campus of the University of Hawai'i, very carefully
because we are not going to go away. All the time we were jammed into three
offices in a little building and they thought they could fire me, they were
dismissive and vicious. But the president that tried to fire me, lost his
job. To me if you go to war with someone, you win or lose that's all, there
isn't any peace that comes out of some kind of stalemate, that's not peace,
that's a loss. He came after me, he tried to fire me, we came after him and
he lost, he's gone. So the present president of the University of Hawai'i is
very careful and he knows that he comes from outside and we don't, which is
an incredible advantage. As long as you stand on your genealogy, as our
elders tell us, that's fine. You just keep reminding people that you are
Native. With that identification comes all these understandings, and one of
them is that you are not going to fire us, you are not going to get rid of
us, we are here to stay.

So I think the present president, like the current political system, is very
careful about what they say about us and what they do. They almost always
front Hawaiian collaborators to attacks us. They don't attack us directly
anymore because they don't want to go the way of the previous president of
the University of Hawai'i. So that's good, to me that's a victory, I'm
there, I have a building, I have five acres of land, I have 120 majors with
four faculty members and this guy's gone. That's the kind of victory you're
not going to get love and money . You're just going to get political
advancement, if you're lucky and that's what you're in there for.

Man Chui Leung: Do you have any suggestions on how people can show
solidarity and campaign for Hawaiian sovereignty?

Haunani: Well it thinks like what we doing right now, interviews, public
contributions so that people understand just on a pure information basis
what's going on. We urge people to boycott Hawai'i as tourists, don't come
because there is no way you can come in solidarity if you're staying at a
hotel, if you're using tourist transportation. It's a very harsh position,
not one that all of us support, but I support it, I actually started a
boycott for it. I said it at [the University of] Victoria, I said it in
California. I say it wherever I go - don't come. There's nothing wrong with
people taking vacations but they shouldn't take them in the Third World. The
Third World suffers from tourism, it doesn't matter that are people are
employed because the wages are poor, the benefits are non-existent. So its a
very concrete thing that people can do, they don't even have to organize,
they just need to make another choice. And I would say don't go to any place
in the Third World, unless you go with those people's blessings to organize
with them, to contribute to them, don't come. The less occupancy in the
hotels, the better. As soon as the American economy took a downturn, the
hotels were only forty percent occupied. As soon as Hurricane Eva came and
smashed all the hotels in the island of Kahaui, zero. The Sheraton didn't
open for a year and a half - good, wonderful. I know that people are
sympathetic in great part, because most people have a sense of other
people's suffering even if they themselves don't endure it. And so,
therefore, they do need concrete suggestions of how to help, and that's one
of them.

Man Chui Leung:Let's say for example in January 1998, you rather have us
mobilize and organize here or going to Hawai'i to mobilize with you?

Haunani: We ask people to send a delegate. We don't what we're going to do
just yet, we may have another march, we don't know what we're going to do.
The Maori send delegates, the American Indians send delegates. The delegates
that come to whatever it is that we choose to mark the event are formal
political alliances. In terms of what people can do, I would definitely say
boycott because one of the things that was very effective in South Africa,
and in other places, was the boycott, and it took years and years and years.
We organized at the University of Hawai'i to get the university to withdraw
its investments. And again the same president who tried to remove me, went
up against his own board which said, no we're withdrawing those investments.
Period. This is all we can and so we're going to do it. And the president
spoke out against it, it was ridiculous. I mean his own board was telling
him, listen, save yourself the public embarrassment. But he refused.

So I think I that's something people can do. Organizationally, certainly,
when we get a clearer vision of what we're going to do, then people can send
delegates and organize around that and do press, etc.. At the moment Canada
commits 750,000 tourists in Hawai'i, and I think the Commonwealth, I am
told, is a million and a quarter. So any anti-tourism activity is really
wonderful. The Times Colonists over in Victoria did a huge colour article on
me speaking, saying "Don't come," about two years ago. Of course they called
Hawai'i and tour agencies to get a response, and tell said, "she's crazy and
she doesn't speak for the people". But the whole article was essentially on
that and it was wonderful and it was a great organizing experience because I
was getting ready to speak the next day and I asked them, "Did you do a
press release?", and they said, "Yes" and I said, "Well, let me see it." so
we went in there, the students and I, and sat there for several hours typing
the new press release, emphasizing the anti-tourist part of it. Because I
said, you need a hook, for the news people. They're not just going to cover
another visiting person. We sent it out and they showed up the next day. It
was wonderful

Just managing the press is just an incredible job for left organizations.
They, the organizations, have to have some sense of how venile and petty the
press is in terms of their approach. 'What it is that the press likes?' That
is what you have to go after because so many of us do a straight sort of
line that we give to the press but they're not interested in that. What you
need to do is get them in there and then reproduce what it is you're gonna
say. Another thing I've learned about the press is when the system makes a
press relaease they come immediatley to you for a response. Sometimes I
respond but most times I say, 'No, we will call our own press conference
tomorrow.' And the press gets very upset because they don't have a news
story they just have one sided story, but all their stories are one sided.
So that's what we did when the plebiscite vote was done, we said, you come
back tomorrow, we're holding a press conference and they came. The editors
refused to print the story but all the television stations covered it. It
was great. Some day I want to teach a class, probably outside of the campus,
on how to do press, how to write a press release, how to call the press, how
not to be badgered and bullied by them because their so vicious persons,
they're all not Hawaiian and the way they talk to me as if we're crazies. My
thing is that we demand the same respect that you give to the government
that' s the difference between us, we're not going to talk to you just
because you're here, leave. They came to our building for a comment, I have
to comment, I have to see the press release and then I'll write my own press
release and my sister will do the press conference, I don't have a comment
now


---------------------
Prospero, you are the master of illusion.
Lying is your trademark.
And you have lied so much to me
(lied about the world, lied about me)
that you have ended by imposing on me
an image of myself.
underdeveloped, you brand me, inferior,
That ís the way you have forced me to see myself
I detest that image!  What's more, it's a lie!
But now I know you, you old cancer,
and I know myself as well.
- Caliban, in Aime Cesaire's "The Tempest"
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