Writings & Leftings

In a handful of hours, the US House will vote on the Akaka Bill, without a hearing in Hawaii on the current version of the bill. In spite of the recalcitrance of powerful politicians, the taroroots continue to speak out.

In that spirit, here’s testimony I wrote for last month’s Civil Rights Commission hearings.

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Aloha kakou, members of the committee, and comrades in the struggle for Hawaiian justice. Thank you for the opportunity to testify in person on this important legislation.

We are gathered here in the wake of great civil rights leaders such as Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., to mourn the death of his dream. Under our watch, we have allowed his words to be contorted and disfigured, with meanings swapped for their antonyms, and the historical trajectory of an expanding of rights replaced by an attempt to foreclose on us.

I say this because we are confronted with a profound contradiction. The long-standing opponents of Kanaka Maoli human rights, including the fundamental right to self-determination, have ascended to a committee which has the ostensible mission to protect our basic civil rights. This is a tragedy for all peoples, particularly citizens of the United States who cherish social justice and who believe in the rights of man. The selection of these individuals should be met with the strongest denunciation and condemnation as an affront to the legacy and life on Rev. Martin Luther King Jr, and all those who fought for human and civil rights.

When men and women such as Dr. King and Rosa Parks walked with us, they enunciated a dream that always one step beyond, pushing us forward to ever-widening visions of justice and humanity. Those ideas, first proposed by a group of nobles confronting King John, were expanded by the prisoners freed from the Bastille. The vision of a just society has expanded with each generation, from Runnymeade to the March on Washington, from the abolitionists to the suffragettes, from the trade unionists to the the the freedom riders, to Queer pride, and from Wounded Knee in 1890 to Wounded Knee in 1973. Rights – both human and civil, is about opening up the conditions and possibilities of being human.

I stand in solidarity with all peoples who support our fundamental right to self-determination. We may disagree about the ultimate expression of that right, but we concur that such a right exists. And we also agree that the legal and political attacks on the Hawaiian people must end, and we stand here today in unity to make that statement.

The United States is perched on a narrow precipice, between its own revolutionary rhetoric, and the actual violences that it has inflicted on millions of people. In Hawaii, we cannot consider the question of racial justice, without confronting the question of imperialism and occuption.

And parenthetically, for those who say that civil rights should be limited to the narrow domain of racial equality and segregation, I must remind you that Dr. King himself opposed imperialism and militarism in Southeast Asia, in his historic address at the Riverside Church in 1968. Remember that Dr. King’s own community of faith urged him to cool off, to go slow, because he was stepping out of the comfortable conversation about race, and was beginning to talk about race and imperialism. He may as well have been talking about Hawaii, which is today governed by those same giant triplets of racism, militarism, and extreme materialism.

Members of the committee, I oppose the Akaka Bill. I oppose it because the Hawaiian people, as well as the indigenous peoples of North America, deserve better than to be mistreated at the hands of the Department of the Interior and the fickle proceedings of congressional plenary power. I oppose the bill because it contains specific language to exempt the US military from its responsibility as Hawaii’s largest and most toxic polluter, and as a voracious machine which is turning our sacred land into a single vehicle for militarism and war. That is not our calling – we are people of aloha, which demands of us an orientation towards justice and peace.

I also oppose the Akaka Bill because it will not protect our institutions against the people who attack us; they will find other avenues to do so. If we want to understand their strategy, we should give the microphone to them today, for they are in the seats of honor right now. And to the contrary, the Akaka Bill will be used to sweep one hundred and fourteen years of illegal actions and deeds under the rug, hidden under the first paragraph of the bill which says that “Native Hawaiians are indigenous peoples of the United States.”

Reconciliation

Members of the committee, the people of Hawaii do not need this bill. We do need to resume the conversation that began with the passage of the Apology Bill in 1993. We need to discuss what a real process for reconciliation would entail. At a minimum, the United States must stop any further actions to increase the militarization of our homeland, which is a corporeal threat to our legitimate quest for self-determination. The US should institute a commission to return lands and resources which were stolen from individuals and families in the previous century, taken to make plantations and military bases. The US must also not stand in the way of a UN decolonization process here.

This body must stand in solidarity with the indigneous peoples of our land, who are fighting against tremendous odds to defend our birthright from the vociferous attacks of a small, but potent, political minority. This body is investigating the wrong topic. The problem is not the Akaka Bill: the problem is the men and women, motivated by a misplaced sense of white victimhood, who are lashing out at the Hawaiian people, and at peoples of color throughout the United States. They are the intellectual descendents of Jim Crow and the colorline, and they must be stopped. If the civil rights commission cannot muster the spiritual fortitude to confront these foes, then the dream has truly died.

Mahalo.