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PART is presenting the following symposium on the just struggle for Hawaiian sovereignty, the decolonization of the Kanaka Maoli, the indigenous people of the Hawaiian Islands. January of this year [1993] marked the 100th anniversary of the illegal overthrow of the independent government of Hawai'i by a group of U.S. missionaries and plantation owners, with the backing and military involvement of the U.S. government. This included the deployment of an invading force of U.S. Marines who, under the pretext of "protecting American lives," trained their guns on the palace of Queen Lili'uokalani, who was forced to surrender to the illegal "Provisional Government."
This led to annexation by the U.S., and the eventual imposition of statehood, which was the culmination of a process of settler colonialism begun in the 1780's, motivated by profit, cultural imperialism, and military strategic considerations. The U.S. used statehood to get the Kanaka Maoli dropped from the U.N. list of non-self- governing people, just as it tried with the Puerto Ricans after imposing U.S. citizenship on them.
When Euro-Americans arrived in Hawai'i, they found a peaceful, self-sufficient and thriving nation of a million people; less than 50 years later, a missionary census showed a population of less than 150,000. The indigenous population today, 150 years later, is no larger, as the Kanaka Maoli people continue to be decimated by poverty, imprisonment and other evils resulting from their colonized status. The U.S. system includes the definition of Hawaiians on a "blood quantum" basis, akin to the racist and archaic system of defining Black people -- as mullatos, quadroons and octaroons -- that held sway in the U.S. south under the American apartheid system of Jim Crow, or the South Africans' division of the population into Blacks, "coloreds," and whites. It is an offense to humanity, and an exposure of the racism still at the roots of American society as a whole.
This is not a question of sympathy for poor, exploited natives. The Kanaka Maoli are waging a struggle to exercise the sovereignty the U.S. has illegally stripped from them, to recover the land and water rights that have been criminally expropriated from them. In the face of oppression, they have reclaimed and revived their language, their religion, their cultural practices, the education of their youth and transmission of their way of life to future generations. They have lessons to share with the rest of humanity.
But the Hawaiian struggle is especially important for people in the U.S. as a whole, because it gives the lie to the whole system that governs us. Hawai'i is not now and never was "America," and so of course the Kanaka Maoli are not "Native Americans." Hawa'i is a Pacific Island nation. The extension of the U.S.A. into the Pacific makes clear the nature of the U.S.A. on the mainland as well -- the so- called "federal system" is in fact an empire. Decolonization is essential not only in Hawai'i and for the Kanaka Maoli, it is essential within the continental borders as well. The process by which the government of THE U.S.A. swallowed Hawai'i is not after all so different from the way in which the lands and people of the continent were conquered as well.
Here in California, forces associated with the "State Sovereignty" movement have attempted to gain legitimacy for themselves by associating themselves with the sovereignty struggle of the Kanaka Maoli. This is a false association. In the U.S., the states' sovereignty and state citizenship movement is and always has been a racist, white supremacist movement, going back to the days prior to the U.S. Civil War, when "nullification" was a technique to defend slavery; through the Confederate secession, and into the "state's rights" and White Citizens Council movements to resist the civil rights struggle.
Today in the U.S., the State Sovereignty movement proclaims the "natural" citizenship of white people, which precedes the Constitution or the "14th Amendment Citizenship" of Blacks. Rather than defining the federal state as a European-dominated empire, they see it as the "zionist occupation government" that restricts the powers of "Aryan" white people. They uphold the "citizenship" of settler colonists, of the slave-owners and slave sympathizers who declared the Texas and California Republics on Mexican territory before annexing them to the U.S. The "state sovereignty" forces in the U.S. have the same ideology as the plantation owners and missionaries who established the "Republic of Hawaii" in order to incorporate it into the U.S.A. as the "State of Hawaii."
PART urges everyone to learn more about the legitimate sovereignty struggle of the Kanaka Maoli, the indigenous Hawaiian people who are moving for decolonization. In that spirit, we present two documents from, and several viewpoints on that struggle in this issue. We invite input and responses from all our readers about the variety of viewpoints that these pieces represent.
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