After a decade of futility in seeking congressional recognition of a Native Hawaiian government, a forceful effort is under way to obtain sovereignty in the eyes of the state.
The first step, approved by last year’s Legislature, is to identify and count indigenous Hawaiians not only in the islands but across the mainland, and it will be no small task, said Clyde W. Namuo, who retired last month after 10 years as chief executive officer of the state Office of Hawaiian Affairs and now holds the same position at the Native Hawaiian Roll Commission.
Originally planned to start counting heads next year, the timeline has been accelerated at the urging of some OHA trustees and state legislators, Namuo said.
"I hope we can complete the job in two to four years — the shorter the better," said former Gov. John Waihee, chairman of the five-member commission, with funding that Namuo estimated will range from $3 million to $5 million.
The commission expects to gather information about at least 500,000 Native Hawaiians, 280,000 who live in Hawaii and 220,000 on the continent, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. However, the federal agency cannot provide the specific names or households.
The push for recognition surfaced in 2000, when the U.S. Supreme Court rejected the limitation of Native Hawaiians to vote for OHA board trustees because indigenous Hawaiians lacked the sovereignty Congress had given to American Indians and Alaska natives. U.S. Sen. Daniel Akaka proposed Hawaiian sovereignty, but it ran into opposition in Congress time and again, especially among Republicans.
Optimism crested several years ago, though, when Hawaii’s Republican Gov. Linda Lingle publicly supported the Akaka Bill; newly elected President Barack Obama, Hawaii’s native son, entered the White House; and Democrats took control of both the Senate and House in 2009.
However, when changes to the bill were made, the Lingle administration balked. By the time further changes were made to regain the support of Lingle and her attorney general, Mark Bennett, time ran out, and Republicans gained a majority in the House two years ago.
"I know in the past when OHA has lobbied Congress to pass the Akaka Bill, it’s been difficult for several reasons," Namuo said. "One is that you really don’t have a Native Hawaiian government entity that represented Native Hawaiians, that spoke for Native Hawaiians. So when you went to lobby Congress, you had OHA but OHA is not an entity that was formed by that Native Hawaiian community; it’s a government agency."
When an Indian tribe goes to Congress for recognition, it has tribal leaders that represent the tribe.
"That is absent in the Hawaiian community," he said. "That’s something that the enrollment will begin — that process of creating the government entity."
Creating that roll will require an extensive sweep of the country to put together a record of people who are at least 18 years old and can provide evidence that their ancestors resided in Hawaii in 1778, when Capt. James Cook discovered the islands. That could include birth certificates, baptismal records or marriage or death certificates.
Included in the survey will be contact with "kamaaina witnesses," those who will attest that someone is Hawaiian because they know the family and can attest to the person’s validity.
Namuo said the Roll Commission, with offices connected to OHA, will ask the state agency for $3 million to $5 million to conduct the search. In some areas, that will require purchasing newspaper, radio and television advertisements urging Native Hawaiians on the mainland to provide information about themselves.
"There are census tracts that tell you roughly in a particular location how many Hawaiians live there," Namuo said.
For example, he said, a large pocket of Native Hawaiians is known to exist in Hayward, Calif., a San Francisco suburb. "That might be an area that might be worth looking at and running a newspaper ad."
However, he said, Texas, for example, may have 8,000 Native Hawaiians out of a population of several million. Taking out ads there would be wasteful, and other methods would be more efficient.
"There is a civic club (of Hawaiians) in Dallas, Texas," he said, "so you’re probably better off working with Hawaiian clubs and organizations in those communities to determine where people gather.
"For example, if you go to Torrance, Calif., there’ll be an L&L Drive-Inn, and L&L Drive-Inns are a gathering place for not only Native Hawaiians but also people who have lived in Hawaii," Namuo said.
L&L, originally confined to Hawaii, expanded to the mainland in 1999. Now, he said, "They’re all over the place."
Some of the information, such as birth certificates, are confidential, but the birth certificate numbers will be noted on the roll form, which will be made public.
"If people believe that someone is not Native Hawaiian and ends up on the roll," Namuo said, "there’s a potential challenge."
Last year’s legislation is limited to creating the roll, but envisions that it will be followed by delegates being elected for a constitutional convention, the creation of "organic documents" and election of the entity’s initial officers, Namuo said.
"Once you have the officers in place," he said, "then you are ready to seek recognition of the state of Hawaii for the Native Hawaiian government entity. That may take several years to do that," joining "various tribes" that have received state recognition.
At that point, all the assets of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs could be transferred to the new entity, including 25 acres of state land at Kakaako that is proposed to be given to OHA. (That $200 million proposal to settle ceded-lands back claims is expected to be debated during this legislative session.) Even then, that would be the subject of negotiations between the state and the new entity, since OHA is a state agency.
If the Kakaako deal is sealed, it could be turned into a "land base," as critics have pointed out that the Native Hawaiian people are without a reservation; for most Native American tribes, reservations are where they reside.
"It could be," Namuo said about the land base concept. "Probably not, though. When people talk about land base, they’re more interested in where people live. Kakaako would probably become much more a basis of wealth for the nation."
Some of the native tribes on the continent have gone on to negotiate recognition through a "federal acknowledgement process," not by Congress but by the U.S. interior secretary. However, that rule is restricted to the lower 48 states and Alaska. Congressional action would be needed to include Hawaii, but Republican opposition could surface for the same reason that the Akaka Bill was controversial. Also, that process has taken 10 to 20 years for other entities, Namuo said, because every member would be subject to a genealogical survey, tracing ancestry back to the original roll.
Outside that process, the interior secretary has recognized indigenous groups in "a few instances," he said, but that has been rare.
"The Akaka Bill would be the preferred act," Namuo said.
That bill is still lingering before Congress, but its chances for passage are considered longer than ever in a hyper-partisan Congress, split between a Republican House and a Democratic Senate.
In the meantime, Namuo said the priority is to spread the word that Native Hawaiians register in the roll.
"Everybody should know that it’s going on," he said. "If they choose not to participate, that’s their choice, but everyone should at least have the opportunity of knowing that it’s going on. And then they can choose."
