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A
Question of Sovereignty
Mililani Trask doesn’t sugar-coat anything. The Native Hawaiian
Attorney and former Trustee of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs is calling
on Indigenous peoples the world over to work together to eliminate the
prevailing colonial mindset, and she's not taking a backwards step
I
am Kanaka Maoli, I am Indigenous of the Hawaiian archipelago, my mother¹s
bloodlines are to the island of Maui, and my father¹s bloodlines
to the island of Hawaii.
The Hawaiian peoples by 42 federal statutes are considered to be American.
If you read the Native American Freedom of Religion Act, the older American
Act and other such programs, we are included with other Americans.
However, the Hawaiian peoples have never been included in the US policy
of self-determination. The US policy relating to Indigenous peoples
has gone through many twists and turns from the time that the US Constitution
was drafted. When you read the US Constitution, article 1 section 8
states that the US Congress shall have the exclusive power to deal with
foreign nations and the Indian nations. And because of that quirk of
history, the American Indians nations have always asserted that they
should be recognised as nations.
And so there developed in American Western law the concept that there
could be native nations.
Of course this wasn’t always applied.
At a certain point in US history they changed their mind to have what
was called determination.
Then surprisingly, during the time of Richard Millhouse Nixon, there
was a renunciation of the policy. And that is now known as the Native
American policy for self-determination.
The US policy on self-determination provides that Native American nations,
who are Indian, Alaskan natives (only the Indigenous peoples of the
continent are included), have the right to autonomous eternal nations,
domestic nations.
They have the right to control lands to the extent that that’s
provided by the federal government. They have rights to their own educational
systems.
Some tribes also have their own courts systems, their own police forces
- these generally are the tribes that have the money. In recent times
they have been energy producing tribes, and those now have gaming casinos.
There are 550 American Indian nations that are recognised by the US.
There 163 Native nations that are not recognised by the US.
There are 200 Alaskan villages that were created at the time that America
and its transnational corporations moved to grab the oil in Alaska.
They are not recognised as native nations, but as counties. They are
organised as native villages, rather than native tribes. There are 200
of those in Alaska that are recognised.
And then there’s the Kanaka Maoli. We are about 200,000 population.
135,000 in the are archipelago and approximately 70,000 residing on
the continent.
We are many faceted. We have some sovereignty groups that wish complete
independence. We have others that are structuring governments that are
more traditional. They are based on the ruling blood-lines. There are
some who believe we should have a status similar to American Indians
and that they are democratic. They would have Hawaiians from each area
to elect their leaders and sit in one council.
We have some Hawaiians who believe that we should return to the time
of the overthrow by the US in 1893, when we were a constitutional monarchy.
We had the ruling Kumemea lines sitting on the throne. But we also had
a parliament made up of the ruling chiefs, similar to the Japanese.
So there are many voices on sovereignty in Hawaii. There is a great
diversity in what we are enunciating.
And like Indigenous peoples everywhere there is great disagreement.
And sometimes this is utilised by the colonisers and by the colonisers’
media to demonstrate our lack of unity. But diversity has many faces
and speaks with many voices.
Often times it has been my belief that the old plantation system is
what the coloniser and the US would want. They¹re used to cracking
the whip and having everybody bend their back the same way.
But true diversity honours difference of opinions. And that, in my estimation,
is really what is the basis of democracy. America has a hard time living
with the integrity of their own words, but we will teach them the way
to do that with grace. That is the power and the dignity of all Indigenous
cultures.
I wanted first, to talk about what racism really is. We have to clean
up the misinformation that was placed on the agenda by the Minister
for Aboriginal Affairs at the first day of the opening of the conference.
He came forward with the typical coloniser view of racism - that racism
is personal, it’s an individual bias, that racism is a matter of
personal prejudice.
This is of course something that you would expect to hear from a coloniser
government. Because they want to personalise it and make it be something
individual. That way they do not have to address issues pertaining to
racism in their own government policies.
Racism is not a matter of personal opinion. It is not. Racism is not
a matter of personal bias.
Frankly I really do not care about individual opinions. One of my neighbours
down the street is a red-neck cracker from Tennessee. He doesn’t
like anybody with dark skin, kinky hair and he is as American as apple-pie
- US-white.
His personal opinion and bias really makes no difference to me. I really
don¹t care, and I really don¹t have the time to try to convince
him to change his mind. It is his loss and if that¹s the way he
wants to live along with the rest of his family, that's the way it is.
I put my time and energy into working for my people, working for my
land, and addressing issues of racism.
Racism is the systemic application of racial and ethnic bias through
social mechanisms of power which oppress and subvert the culture and
the political systems of Indigenous peoples to the benefit of the race
which is the dominant society. That is what is racism.
Racism is systemic. When you have bias plus power, and a process to
put it through the social system so that some races are oppressed to
the benefit of the race of the dominant society - then you have racism.
We need to understand what the definition and the distinction is. Racism
is not a black and white issue, although people want to make it that
and sometimes it’s easy for us to fall into it because we’re
the ones that are black and brown and they’re the ones that are
white.
But we have to remove that kind of colonial thinking from our minds.
We have to realise that racism is afoot globally in areas where there¹s
no longer the white.
Where the white colonialist has left and been replaced by the black
and the brown neo-colonialist. What was happening in Rwanda with the
Hutu and the Tutsie is a very good example of racism that is not a black
and white issue.
So as we struggle with the colonial mindset, we always need to do the
second job which is decolonise our own mind.
Racism is systemic - it has many faces and many facets. It is not just
person to person. We now have to deal with concepts such as environmental
racism, institutionalised racism, racism in health care services, racism
in the administration of justice.
Closely associated to this are some concepts in international law which
I have put up and they are ethnocide, genocide and now we have an Indigenous
woman who has authored a book on ecocide.
Genocide is the use of military force to wipe and exterminate peoples.
You have many examples of it right here in your own history with Aboriginal
peoples. Also Native Americans, all of us have this. The US Cavalry
was not created to defend the US from outside forces, the US Cavalry
was created to exterminate the domestic native peoples of the US continent.
Even here in Australia up until the 1920s you could get a license to
hunt Aboriginal peoples. Use of force, use of weaponry is considered
generally to be genocide.
Ethnocide is distinguished from that in that ethnocide is a system of
social rules that kill your culture. Make it illegal to speak your language,
prevent the people from engaging in hunting, fishing, gathering practices
that are the basis of their way of life.
You take away the buffalo and kill the buffalo, and soon thereafter
those who are the buffalo nation will vanish with it. You take away
the fishing rights and the ability of the Indigenous peoples of the
Pacific basin to eat from the ocean, and they will starve.
And when we look at the statistics relating to native nutrition, we
can see in Hawaii that if we eat the native diet, we will be healthy.
If we eat McDonald’s and all the rest of it we will have diabetes,
heart and other problems. Right now the Hawaiian women have the dubious
distinction of having the highest mortality rate for breast cancer in
the world.
Ecocide is the practice of killing people and the environment through
toxicity, through mining, through damning practices. These things destroy
the earth and all of the children of the earth - those that fly, those
that walk on the land, our self included, and those of the ocean.
By killing the environment in which the indigenous peoples and the native
life forms of the earth survive, then you will extinguish those species.
And this is why we see so many losses. Hawaii is a state of the union
that has the largest number of extinct species and the largest number
of endangered species in the US. Our biodiversity - we lose it; just
as we lose our native health.
So understanding first the context of what racism is. In my talk I’m
also going to be using some other terms, because we’re not here
to talk about how we can make a better world. We’re here because
we are Indigenous peoples, we’re moving ahead with a sovereign
agenda and we are fighting here and in the international arena for self-determination
and for human rights.
This is political. And this is why the term sovereignty and self-determination
keep coming up in our workshops.
I want to go over what I mean by these terms so that there is not confusion
Sovereignty and self-determination are not the same thing. Sometimes
people make the mistake of using these two terms interchangeably but
they¹re not the same thing.
Sovereignty is an attribute of nationhood. When you hear that word,
you know that you are talking about nations.
Generally speaking you’re going to find that international law
and American and the Australian and European and British common law
will say that there are four elements to a sovereign nation.
In Hawaii we have added a fifth, but under international legal norms
in the West, a sovereign nation has four basic elements.
They have land. Initially it was a contiguous land mass and now we have
the US asserting that they own half of the world.
Second, you have a people, and generally it is a people with a common
history, culture and language.
Number three, you have government structure. This is why the coloniser
came into Hawaii and overthrew our queen and destroyed our ability to
govern ourselves.
A nation to stand on its own two feet has to have a way by which it
governs itself. It may be traditional protocols, it may be new evolving
forms of structure, but you cannot have nation if you don¹t have
a government system.
And number four, generally it is accepted that in order to be a sovereign
nation, you have to have some form of economic system. You have to have
some method which you will feed yourself trade, commerce, business -
the economic underpinnings of the national structure.
These are the big four in international law.
In Hawaii as we struggled to regain our sovereignty and rebuild our
national structure, we decided that the big four wasn’t going to
really work for us so we added the big five which is really number one
for us. And that is a strong and abiding faith in the creator.
If you don’t have spirituality in government you wind up with an
immoral government and that’s what you have in the Congress and
I dare to say that that is what you have here in Australia as well.
I’m not sure if Mr Howard leaves, that the new guys coming in are
going to be anymore spiritual, I have my doubts.
But when we look at it in our way of thinking, you have to put in your
spirituality, and following on from the spirituality would be our entire
cultural framework, that we will follow to the directions of the original
instructions of our creator.
The creator placed all Indigenous peoples on this earth, we know for
what purpose - that we are the guardians and we will adhere to the original
instructions as we proceed in this modern time with sovereignty.
So the number five we put there. I want to put this up to demonstrate
that when we deal as Indigenous people in the political arena we should
never be limited by Western law. I’m a native Hawaiian attorney,
I’m in the courts, at the UN and all of this stuff and all of us
here who are in this arena, would never buy the bottom line limitation
of Western law.
It’s our job to test it. It is our job to push it further so never
be afraid to pick up the chalk and say, well western law you’re
a little bit too narrow for my Indigenous peoples. Never be afraid to
put your own spirituality there.
If we don’t walk in the path of the spiritual foundations of our
culture, then there’s no reason for us to work on sovereignty.
First make strong the path to our creator, then sovereignty after.
There’s a lot of sovereign nations in the world, go to the UN,
you see all kinds of sovereign nations there, but most of them don’t
provide for self-determination for Indigenous peoples.
Self-determination is not sovereignty. Sovereignty has to do with nations
- self-determination does not. Self-determination is not a right of
nations states - self-determination is a human right.
The international human rights covenants - the ICCPR, the International
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the International Covenant
on Social and Economic rights - define self-determination.
Self-determination you will find in the UN charter.
But the definition is not there, the definition is in the International
human rights covenants. And the definition is simple, basically one
sentence - All peoples have the right to determine their political status
and by virtue of that right, their social, and economic, their cultural
development.
So when you understand the concept of self-determination, the first
thing is the people’s collective right to determine their political
status.
And when you have achieved that right and you have that political power
to use your structure of government through your sovereign entity and
form, then you have the additional right as peoples to say what economic
development is going to be, what your social and political development
is going to be.
So we distinguish between self-determination and sovereignty.
When you look at the nations sitting at the UN you can see that they’re
all sovereign, but nobody wants to give self-determination to Indigenous
peoples.
Why? Because with our history of colonisation, our peoples were placed
in a different political status from those of the dominant society.
And that old colonial format was maintained by social mechanisms of
power which exist to this very day.
What are the roots of racism? We make a mistake if we believe that racism
started when the coloniser sailed in. I really do not subscribe to this
belief. If we’re going to get to the roots of racism, we go beyond
the point of colonisation.
Before Cook sails to Hawaii, what brought him there? What brought Columbus
to America? What sent the Spaniards to Central and South America? How
did that happen?
Well it started back in the 1500s and it started in Rome. From edicts
that were enunciated through the Papal Bulls. These were statements
and pronouncements that came from the Vatican. And with these pronouncements,
the world was divided up for European, Christian colonisers.
What was actually happening at the time was that the monarchs of the
Christian nations - the Brits, the French, the Italians, the Dutch -
began to fight and war over land and natural resources. In seeking a
way to resolve this bloodshed in Europe, they went to the Holy Father.
This is at a period of time in Western history that predates the concept
of secularisation, there wasn¹t a division of the Church and the
state and the Pope was the head of the world.
And so we had, for a period of a couple of hundred years, these Papal
Bulls sought to prevent the fighting by dividing the world.
My favourite one is the Papal Bull of Pope Alexander the VI, it’s
called the Intercetera. When I read the translation of it, (it was written
in Latin), it just stunned me. The Pope is saying here that he will
sanctify the subjugation of the new world and its barbarous nations.
So the blessing of the Pope was given, and the coloniser sailed out.
It’s important that we understand this to be the root of racism,
because to this very day, the churches form a central part of the social
system of the nation states that are Christian. The Kansas states are
the states that were fighting - Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the
US - these are the bad boys that have teamed up and they¹re still
one team against us at the UN.
And this is why we, as the Indigenous peoples of the Kansas states,
also must make a strong team.
Even though we may not share the same culture, we may not look the same
- our common enemy call us to form a good team.
I am happy that in these many years that I have worked in the community
and at the UN, it¹s been my great honour to stand with the natives
that come there from Australia, from New Zealand, from the continent
of the US - we are the Indigenous peoples of the Kansas states.
And so the Pope divided up the world. When you look at the colonies,
especially in North, Central and South America, you can see this division
to this very day.
When we get together and try to do business, it’s tough. The Pacific
peoples that come from Chile are speaking Spanish, the French coming
in from Tahiti are speaking French, the Hawaiians are trying to regain
our language but generally we speak in the tongue of the colonisers.
Why? Because this is our common history. And so we have to go back and
seek accountability from the churches. And not only do we need to educate
them, but we need to make a place for them at the table of reconciliation.
They are called upon to acknowledge this past. To stand up and to walk
with us, shoulder to shoulder. So that we can overturn these racist
historical policies.
I’m glad to see in the effort here in Australia that I have worked
on myself, for reconciliation, strong voices come from the church. That
is appropriate.
As we approach a process of reconciliation, we need to have those who
are non-native walking with us. Some of them are responsible.
I want to diverge
for a little while and take a look at what I call the four arenas of
sovereignty. I’m doing this because when we address racism, and
as we move to strengthen our nations, we need to realise that sovereignty
and self-determination are not just concepts floating out there, that
we access at different times.
There is a great deal of confusion among Indigenous peoples on this
point. There’s no reason to blame ourselves about it. This is something
that is foreign, it’s not the Indigenous mindset.
But it’s a mistake to believe that sovereignty and self-determination
are only important at the UN level - that is false. There is not one
political arena in the world today - there are four distinct arenas.
The first arena is native to native. The second arena is native people
to the state - Aboriginal people to Australia.
That’s not where it stops, because there’s a third arena,
which is the native person in international law. Somehow we snuck in
there. International law is different from national law.
And then arena number four - what it means to have nation to nation
relationships.
When we deal in the first arena of sovereignty, we have the ability
to address issues for pure forms of self-determination. We go back to
our definition of self-determination, the right of all peoples to determine
political status.
The Hawaiian people - Kanaka Maoli - had our government destroyed by
the US and now we have to decide among ourselves what kind of a government
shall we structure?
Shall it be one which is modern, that is flexible? Shall we try to return
to traditional times? What type of a government structure today will
meet the needs of the people today?
Aboriginal Australians - how will you answer this question? How do you
define your right to self-government? How do you structure your government
in this day and age?
Arena number one is native to native, all others are welcome to stay
the hell out. It is inappropriate for non-natives to come into this
arena.
And after we address and resolve this, you know we¹re probably
going to be fighting for a long time, we do, that is our way.
When Hawaiians get together we don¹t go oh, we love you Aunty.
We go eh, what are you doing? We’re a nation of warriors, we believe
this way, what do you folks want?
And we have these great councils, and there’s great disagreement
and fighting about it. That is our way.
After you have determined political status then the next line is self-determination
and we have to look at how we¹re going to have social and cultural
and economic development.
How are we going to preserve our culture of Indigenous peoples? How
are we going to bring back our language? How are we going to put this
into a way to educate our children? What kind of economic policies will
we adopt and apply on our land base?
Will we be consumers apeing the coloniser? Cutting down all of our trees
taking all the fish? Or are we going to do something that is a little
bit more responsible? Are we going to learn about natural resource management?
Are we going to try to replenish that which has been taken from the
earth? Are we going to take a little bit more of an Indigenous approach?
So native to native is the business that we have to address ourselves.
And it’s not just Kanaka Maoli to Kanaka Maoli, that’s part
of it. But as has been pointed out, very importantly, by our visitors
from Assembly of First Nations, we have to also address Kanaka Maoli
to Assembly of First Nations.
We’re here to make a strong, unified front against the Kansas states.
So we have to work, Kanaka Maoli to Aboriginal people, Native American
Indians coming forward to work with the Indigenous peoples of Canada.
We have the ability not only to make political alliances but to come
together for economic development.
We’ve got 24,000 Hawaiians waiting on a list for housing. Anybody
got timber out there? I know you do you American and Canadian Indians,
I¹ve seen it myself. And also I went to Aetaeroa to see the great
standing forests of NZ.
Why should we give our money to a warehouser? Buy timber from them!
We can engage in Indigenous trade and strengthen our own peoples - in
modern time we have this capacity.
When we step out of arena number one and we go to arena number two -
native to state - you know what that means. We have to deal with the
limitations of state law.
“Hawaiians, you are not a nation. Your nation was overthrown. You’re
wards of the state - federal government does not recognise you”.
State policies on domestic self-governance - we have to address them.
We have to change them. We have to challenge them. No longer are we
going to be satisfied by having these types of racist policies imposed
on us.
But this is the reality of our life. This is why we get arrested, myself
included. Because we cannot put this and this together. Sometimes you
have to do civil disobedience and get arrested, but for myself I always
draw the line at violence. I try to not practice violence.
But when you’re in arena number two you have to contend with and
address state policies and challenge them and try to change them. So
racism is addressed over here but we also have to address racism through
state policies that oppress my people.
Arena number three is slightly different. International law is above
the domestic law of our individual states. In international law we do
have some things on our side.
We have human rights covenants. We have emerging standards, such as
the Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. We have to
get this thing passed. It will be a great legacy to leave our children.
Now we have to address the problem of globalisation - the new form of
economic colonisation. And there is racism here, there surely is.
We have to have warriors in this arena. Sometimes when we come home
and talk to our people and we’re using terms like globalisation,
intellectual property, there’s a tendency to leave our traditionals
behind. This is why we have to work together because we have warriors
in each one of the arenas.
And
sometimes because of our differences in education, who has lighter skin,
who has straighter hair, who has a job working for the government -
these things can create divisions and we need always to be aware of
them.
But in the international arena, there¹s racism too. Why? Because
the UN springs from the common law of Europe, common law that is coloniser,
same common law that is Australia, the US and all the rest of it.
If you go back to the history of the UN, how was it created? The idea
of the UN came about after WWI and it persisted and was really developed
at the close of WWII. Its predecessor was the League of Nations.
What happened was that there was global warfare, there was great loss
of life. And the winners of the war got together and said, “We
don’t want to repeat this. We need to have a forum where we can
dialogue on peace. Bring the leaders of the world together so that we
have some option, some venue, to explore peace”.
I do believe that initially the idea of the UN was something that was
for humanity, all of us together. I think that this is a fair point
to make. But initially when you look at the UN charter and other such
things, the UN began for human beings’ rights.
And this is why we rally now and we have a chance at the UN because
in the international arena, human rights covenants and human rights
law is important.
Then came the level of states’ rights. States’ rights were
viewed in two ways in international law. States’ obligation to
people - when you read the human rights covenants, it says states shall
not do this and that, states shall not abridge human rights, states
have an obligation in international law to address people.
But that’s not the only power they have in international law. They
also have powers to make treaties for economic development and benefit
(remember, states are sovereign - sovereigns have an economic system).
So when you understand how states’ power breaks out in international
law, yes they have jurisdiction and obligation to protect people. During
our lifetime we have seen alarming changes. No longer is the UN just
taking care of the people and regulating commerce - treaties between
states.
In the last 15 years we have seen a new body of rights created. A body
of rights that is higher than state law. A body of rights that came
from economic trade, broke away from people and developed a new body
of rights in the UN - rights of corporations, transnational corporations,
NAFTA - the North America Free Trade Agreement, GATT (the General Agreement
on Tariffs and Trade), the World International Property Rights Organisation
who are dealing with TRIPS - the Trade Related Intellectual Property
rights of our people - this is all us that they¹re stealing from.
The Human Genome Project,, patenting of life. These things are being
done by private enterprise in conjunction with science, with the blessing
of very loose state regulation.
In Hawaii it just killed me to understand this. I fought for twelve
years to get the US Congress to pass a law to protect the dolphin. Because
there’s genocide in the ocean. The long-liners, the trawlers go
out and they string great nets. And they¹re only after tuna, but
they kill everything, they kill everything.
They kill the turtle, they kill the dolphin. It’s just incomprehensible
when you see it.
Twelve years we fought, the people of the continent, the environmentalists,
we were successful, we passed a strong law to protect the dolphin. Year
after that we hear the GATT Commission over in Switzerland sends us
this one page document saying that the GATT Commission struck down the
US national law because it is a restraint against trade.
The Japanese fishing fleet came in and said: “Wait a minute, it’s
going to cost us over $100 million to change our nets, to lower them
sixty feet in the water so that the dolphins can jump over and live.
Who’s America to make a law to increase my cost to harvest in the
ocean by $100 million dollars? This is clearly a restraint on trade”.
They go to these white people sitting in a small-stone building down
off of the lake, in Geneva. And these crackers come out with a one-page
opinion saying you’re right, we’re striking down the US law.
Gee, what happened to the law of nations? The law of nations just got
subverted by the law of corporations.
That’s not where it’s stopping either. Now they are developing
new levels of rights in the international arena. Rights that are higher
than corporations. This is the MAI - the Multi-Lateral Agreement on
Investment.
And who’s behind the corporations? The banks - and the guys with
the money. They are known as the international financiers - the World
Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organisation.
So when we consider the environment of the UN we have to have a full
picture of where we are. Because if we are going to continue to defend
rights of people we can¹t just deal with our states in the native
to state arena, but we have to now go in the international arena.
Lastly, nation to nation relationships. Before the overthrow of the
kingdom, we had a nation to nation relationship with America that was
defined by treaties. We hope and we strive to achieve the goal that
we will some day be able to have nation to nation relationships.
But we don’t want it to be like the current nation to nation relationships.
When you look at the relationship of America to the Phillipines - all
of our Kansas states - look at their relationship to Asia, look at their
relationship to Africa, what do we see?
New colonisation - the foreign debt crisis. Real independence doesn’t
have anything to do with living under the US flag anymore. Real independence
is economic independence.
When you look at the foreign debt crisis, you know why when America
speaks at the UN all the countries of Asia and Africa bow their heads
in silence - because if they do not America will strangle them, America
will own them through the foreign debt crisis.
This is why we are fighting that. We’re saying that we have to
forgive the foreign debt crisis, so that these nations can put their
capital into the people and their land.
We are victims of racism, what does that really mean to us? It’s
easy for us as Indigenous peoples to always look to our history and
point the finger of blame at American and British colonisers.
The coloniser didn’t just come to Hawaii and steal our land, destroy
our government and take our resources. The coloniser took something
of our culture.
The coloniser stole something that was very important to us. And when
we lost our culture we lost the social mechanisms that we needed to
thrive and most important of those mechanisms are the protocols for
conflict resolution.
It’s hard to bring together the many divergent minds of our peoples.
Some are well educated, some are not.
Some are traditionals, who form the basis of our culture; we must care
for them and respect them.
Some have the ability to address and walk within the hallways of the
state system.
We need to raise our youth to develop these skills and some we need
to come to the international arena.
Because of colonisation these differences separate us and prevent us
from having the cohesion of the cultural unity that is our heritage.
If you come to Hawaii, you’ll find great disagreement among the
Hawaiian peoples.
This is something that we have, all of us who are Indigenous peoples,
we’re all suffering from this - the legacy of colonisation - and
we need to address this.
How will we create a strategy that we can implement? We must return
to the foundation of our culture. And to the extent that we need to
incorporate methods of conflict resolution from other cultures then
let us do that as well. Let us work with each other.
The Alaska Federation of Natives has a very good program utilising cultural
protocols to resolve the disagreement in their own house. So as we begin
to address the scribbling on the board, we have to begin first by addressing
the disunity in our own home. We only have to be honest. We don’t
have to be ashamed of it. The Alamihi crab syndrome, this is what Americans
say about Hawaiians - Alamihi crab syndrome.
You put ten Alamihi crabs in a bucket, one crawls out, the other nine
are going to pull him down.
In the late 50s early 60s this report came out talking about the Hawaiian
Alamihi crab syndrome. The Hawaiian people got it, read it. Pretty soon
you’ve got all Hawaiians running around saying, you know we’ve
got Alamihi crab syndrome.
The thing is to stop that colonised thinking. We know what Alamihi crabs
are, we know how to catch them and we know how to eat them. That¹s
where they belong, on our plate. Not taking somebody else¹s assessment
of our mental problems and adopting it, no. But going back to our cultural
practice.
In concluding let me say that we have all been victims of racism and
colonisation
The greatest myth that we need to debunk, is the myth that that we hear
every day. The myth that they¹re teaching our children in school.
We look at our own culture and sometimes we see more the loss than what
we have preserved.
We know well our histories. We are no longer the great nations we once
were. Those times are gone. But they would have us believe that they
have defeated, us?
That they have slain the greatest of our warriors on the field of battle?
What a ridiculous myth. We know the truth.
We are the children of mother nature. Mother nature has her way, generation
after generation she will select the sons and daughters that are the
strongest of the species. And it is the way of mother nature that those
who are the strongest will survive.
We who are here in this room, we, and our grandmothers, and their grandmothers
before them, we have survived the most inhumane of campaigns against
us.
Slavery of our people, murder, genocide, starvation. The colonisers
have thrown everything that they can at us. They have tried in every
way to render us extinct.
But we have not gone anywhere, those of us who are here. Because mother
nature selected the strongest of her children to survive to the next
generation.
Let us remember that that myth is false. We are great warriors, we have
battle to do.
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