When a commission was created to identify and count indigenous Native Hawaiians as a starting pool toward some form of sovereignty, the goal was ambitious. A year into the effort, the result has been disappointing.

The commission faces both a short-term climb and a long-term hard truth: First, as a January registration deadline looms, it must redouble outreach to emphasize that signing up is a key step toward sovereignty for Hawaiians; but second, that the means and goals of Hawaiian sovereignty are muddled and need much more clarity for participants before progress can be made.

The Native Hawaiian Roll Commission’s initiative, called Kana‘iolowalu, was launched in July 2012 to register Hawaiians in the islands and across the mainland to form their own government; it came after the 2011 Legislature created a state law recognizing Native Hawaiian as the indigenous people. The expectation was to gather information and hear from many of — according to the 2010 Census — about 527,000 Native Hawaiians in the United States, 290,000 of whom live in Hawaii.

Since its 2012 launch, the commission’s staff and volunteers have attended 200 events, addressed civic clubs and homestead associations and sent messages through social media and regular mail. They have been trying to record people who are at least 18 years old with evidence that their ancestors resided in Hawaii in 1778, when Capt. James Cook arrived in the islands.

Unfortunately, the commission has signed up only 18,527 Native Hawaiians — a fourth of whom live on the mainland — in an effort that cost $2.8 million of the $3.38 million funded thus far by the Office of Hawaiian Affairs. That roster pales in comparison with names gathered by older registries: 110,000 by the Kau Inoa nation-building effort that began in 2004, 29,000 in the earlier Operation Ohana and 28,000 by the Hawaiian Registry, which issues identification cards. Talk about list fatigue, even for the most hardy of indigenous-rights activists.

A big plus to Kana‘iolowalu’s and other registry efforts, though, is that all those lists stand to be combined in the near future after certification. That should create a more comprehensive pool of interested participants than just the Kana‘iolowalu effort alone and, hopefully, end for now the confusing litany of lists.

The much murkier road ahead, though, is the goal of Native Hawaiian sovereignty and the means toward such self-determination. And on these issues, divergent views abound. Further, there is no longer any clear vehicle in Congress to rally behind, with the demise of the so-called Akaka Bill.

One key opposition in Hawaii to the Akaka Bill was "that you really don’t have a Native Hawaiian government entity that represented Native Hawaiians, that spoke for Native Hawaiians," Clyde W. Namuo, executive officer of the commission, said at the outset of the effort. "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."

OHA’s newsletter this month warned that those declining to sign up with the commission "risk waiving their right and the right of their children and descendants, to be legally and politically acknowledged as Native Hawaiians and to participate in a future convention to reorganize the Hawaiian nation."

Some Hawaiians resent such a message. Melissa Leina‘ala Moniz, who signed up on the Kau Inoa registry, expressed annoyance that the commission, by seeking tribal status of the Hawaiian community, is "going to take away our identity as Native Hawaiians and throw us into a bucket, into the Indian nation. It’s going to lead to us losing a lot of our rights and our lands."

Of course, "tribe" is a key legal term that surfaced in 2000, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that indigenous Hawaiians lacked the sovereignty that Congress had given to American Indians and Alaska natives. That is the reality that the commission’s staff and volunteers must explain to Native Hawaiians, as they continue to lay the groundwork in Hawaii for some approach toward sovereignty that just might be bolstered by the Obama administration, or even Congress.