VONA was awesome, as you might expect any gathering of writers of color (who rarely get a few free days to write, and even more rarely get to be immersed in a serious and encouraging community). It was like a summer camp: we fell in love with our alter egos and each others’ stories, taking our own characters and others’ to task and defending some to the death. We shared more freely than I would have expected from any other writing course: about our families’ fears and losses, our hopes and arguments over cross-community alliances, our feelings of both protection and frustration at our own communities. There was some crying. There were a lot of jokes. And in the end: satisfaction, exhaustion, and an injunction to start doing all the work that we still want and need to do.

It was lovely and surreal to be back in the Bay Area. USF was in a part of town I had never visited much, but I could still walk from there to the Mission and the Castro. Dolores Park was shone in all its glory at the Dyke March, full of friends and outfits, everyone happy if shivering in the cold. The Pride Parade was also fun, if tiring: I lined up with my dear old office around 9:30, reunited with folks and walked down Market Street with them waving these pretty pink, orange and purple flags.

I’m posting one of the poems I wrote and performed at VONA on the poems page (itʻs a lot more slam style than I’m used to, but I like it), and hope to keep writing more this summer. I hope to be posting more on here this summer in general too.

As someone who’s never known anything but semesters, the quarter system (employed by most University of California schools, except Berkeley because it’s special) is pretty mean. Three rounds of finals, and a schedule that keeps you in school from January to June with only a week break. Particularly at this point, a few days from June and still two weeks to complete freedom, it’s pretty rough. Just let us out already!

So, I’ve got approximately three final papers, and in the battle to start (much less finish) them, I thought I’d share some of what they’re about. One’s the prospectus for my Master’s thesis, which I don’t want to share too much about yet. One’s on Critical Race Theory and gay marriage, which seemed appropriate enough in the wake of the recent CA Supreme Court decision.

The last is on the 1993 International People’s Tribunal on the Rights of Indigenous Hawaiians. I had known very little about this until the discovery of this South End Press book Islands in Captivity, edited by Sharon Venne and (a pre-infamous) Ward Churchill. The volume is a weighty tome of essays on colonialism in Hawaii as well as a rich compilation of the charges, testimonies, and findings of the 1993 Tribunal. International People’s Tribunals have no legal-juridical authority, but attempt to use principles of law (in the spirit of the Nuremberg Trials) to expose injustices perpetuated by governments, build a public record, and educate. The founding tribunal in 1966-67 (the Russell Tribunal, many of the documents of which are available here) was created by philosopher Bertrand Russell, hosted by Jean-Paul Sartre and tried the U.S. government for war crimes in Vietnam.

In Hawai’i, the 1993 Tribunal was convened by Ka Lahui Hawai’i, a Kanaka Maoli sovereignty group that at that time included big names (Kekuni Blaisdell, Haunani-Kay Trask, Mililani Trask, Lilikala Kame’eleihiwa, and Jonathan Osorio) and over 8,000 enrolled members. To a panel of 9 international human rights activists, the Kanaka Maoli Tribunal Komike brought 9 charges against the U.S. government, who declined participation but nonetheless was designated an empty chair throughout the hearings with a sign: “United States Representative.” Testimonies were taken on O’ahu, Maui, Moloka’i, Kaua’i, and Hawai’i island, by professors, various experts, and lay persons alike.

Two of the most striking charges to me are:

Ka ‘Olelo Ho’ahewa ‘Eono (Charge 6):

Ka Hana ‘Ino o ka Waiwai a ka Lahui Kanaka Maoli (Economic colonization and dispossession of the Kanaka Maoli)

and

Ka ‘Olelo Ho’ahewa ‘Ehiku (Charge 7):

Ka Pepehi a Ke Ku’e i Na Mea Pono Kanaka Maoli (Acts of genocide and ethnocide against the Kanaka Maoli)

There is just too much to touch on here, but for this charge ‘ehiku, it is noted that the Kanaka Maoli nation numbered an estimated 800,000 people at the time of arrival of the first U.S. citizens in 1789. By 1893, the population was approximately 40,000, and in 1993, less than 5,000 full-blooded Kanaka remained. Those are the familiar dismal statistics. Yet the tribunal addresses genocide and ethnocide from a more comprehensive stance than just these numbers. Along with many aspects of cultural, political and economic dispossession, Mililani Trask, for instance raises the issue of blood quantum, as used in Hawaiian Home Lands and Office of Hawaiian Affairs, as an integral part of ethnocide. As Ward Churchill puts it, “the government can create a situation in which you definitionally go out of existence, at its convenience.”

In short, this is an amazing 15 year old record that I can’t believe I didn’t know about until recently, and I am excited to read more of it. In some ways, it saddens me that the momentum of this tribunal and the early 1990s sovereignty organizations have not carried us farther (though Ka Lahui Hawai’i is undeniably very important in so many ways), or at least that I wasn’t there, sitting in that tribunal room. But as that work flourished in 1993, on the 100th anniversary of the 1893 overthrow, I wonder if we aren’t in store for more as the State of Hawai’i nears its 50th anniversary in 2009. Possibly the recent occupation of ‘Iolani Palace grounds by the Hawaiian Kingdom Government (who are apparently still there, though newspapers seem tired of the story) is only a preview of what’s to come. I’m hopeful for the possibilities.

Hawaiian Kingdom Government at ‘Iolani Palace, picture from Honolulu Star-Bulletin

This week marks the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the Israeli state in 1948. That means it is also the 60th anniversary of the Nakba, the destruction of over 500 Palestinian villages and subsequent displacement of over 800,000 Palestinians outside of, but also within, Israel. I have been reminded of this by students on Library Walk, but also by my friend Harris, who is involved in a group called ‘No Time to Celebrate! Jews Remember the Nakba.’

At our conference in March, ‘Post-colonial Futures in a Not Yet Post-Colonial World,‘ we were lucky enough to have in attendance, among many others from far away, a Palestinian scholar from Israel. I was her host for part of the week, and it was from her that I first heard the term Nakba, Arabic for ‘catastrophe’ or ‘disaster.’ Her scholarship aimed to firmly place Palestinians within an international indigenous framework, something that seems an obvious fit in many ways, yet is not quick to resonate within dominant support for Israel within the U.S. and elsewhere. For me then, this year has not been about remembering the Nakba so much as simply learning of its existence, how it happened, how it continues, and how it is not unrelated from some of my own work.

After my own presentation at our conference, where I referenced the doctrine of terra nullius, literally ‘empty land’ and the legal justification used by British settlers of Australia even though they knew Aborigines inhabited the country (see earlier discussion here), someone suggested I read Steven Salaita (The Holy Land in Transit, 2006). Salaita uses comparative literary analysis to link Native American and Palestinian political positions. He makes it clear that the comparison is literal in many ways: for instance, Zionist leaders studied American approaches to the removal of Native Americans from their land. Yet it is also a crucial moral-political comparison that he thinks has too often gone overlooked, arguing that it is both counter-productive and hypocritical that Arab Americans lobby the American government to change its policies in Israel without at least acknowledging the situation of Native Americans, and vice versa.

While I have not finished reading Salaita, I think his provocation is an important one to consider. Yes, we have to pick the projects we devote our precious time to, and often those projects that are most meaningful will place you within communities you feel at home in. But, obviously too, there are ways to recognize similar struggles and build awareness of their similarities. I was thinking, before Harris’ gentle hint, that I would like to write something here but that I did not have a genuine enough place/commitment (not Jewish, not Palestinian) to remembering the Nakba. But those kinds of worries, while helpful in knowing where you’re overstepping your bounds, can very quickly become complacent excuses for doing nothing.

Blogging is not a very big something, but it is an easy enough start. My point is very simply: please visit No Time to Celebrate!, learn more and spread the word where you can too. I am grateful to be reminded that though the colonizer may not be going anywhere anytime soon in Hawai’i either, social movements are not to be judged only by their most formal outcomes. It is the process of acting together (maybe in Harris’ case, even getting arrested with his fellow organizers) that is sometimes most freeing.

I got great news this week (after a few rejections too), on the (so estranged these past 2.5 quarters) writing front. I’ve been accepted to the Political Content workshop, taught by Elmaz Abinader, at VONA, or Voices, being held a week in June at University of San Francisco. I can’t even tell you how exciting that is, for all these different reasons. A return to writing! The writers of color community! San Francisco, and all the people and places and food I love there!

I have to turn in a manuscript to be workshopped by May 15th, and though I have old-ish stuff I was thinking of returning to and working out, I would really like to push myself to create the beginnings of a new poetry collection by then. I want to put together a really tight set of poems and essays or such by the end of this year, so I can make a chapbook or zine. I also want to finish the postcard poems I didn’t complete in January (how is it May now?)

It is taking some time to ease back into the writing mode, but some ideas I am trying to do something with include: this week’s occupation of ‘Iolani Palace by Kanaka Maolis (which I just can’t give a real academic response, cause every time I have tried, I’m not satisfied with myself), what (and who) we (or I) mean when we say violence and rights, on apologies that don’t care about your forgiveness, and the everyday fears of a life turning into history. How I gotta learn Hawaiian, too.

I’ve been getting inspiration from YouTube, so far: Junot Diaz at Google, and as many Suheir Hammad clips as I can find (both are associated with VONA, along with a crazy impressive list of others). Though I know a lot of you must have seen this, I love this one of hers so much:

We Spent the Fourth of July in Bed:

One of my assignments this week involved the 1980 Harvard Encyclopedia of American Ethnic Groups which lists 106 entries of “ethnic groups” from stuff like “American Indians” and “Indochinese” (apparently their term for Vietnamese) to “Pennsylvania Germans” and “Southerners” (apparently used for the white ones who caused slavery).

Some choice bits from the “Hawaiians” entry, which in no sentence of 3.5 pages mentions the word “native”:

The ethnic designation “Hawaiian” is generally reserved for the descendants of the original Polynesian inhabitants of the Hawaiian Islands. A combination of circumstances has rendered the term ambiguous and variable in current usage, however, and it is far from clear precisely who is a Hawaiian in the contemporary world…. within Hawaii’s multiethnic community, people of mixed ancestry tend to change their ethnicity according to circumstances.

Yet despite their questionable, close to vanishing, quality:

Demographic data compiled according to ethnic designation in Hawaii for 1970 show the Hawaiians to have an exceptionally high fertility rate, more than double the state average.

The author, Alan Howard, a sociologist who wrote a book in 1974 called Ain’t No Big Thing: Coping Strategies in a Hawaiian-American Community, concludes:

From the very beginning… group boundaries were not clearly marked- by race, by language, or by culture…. The critical problem for Hawaiians today appears to be the need to define what is central to their ethnic identity, so that they can mobilize effectively to pursue their common goals.

I’d like to say that this discourse is pitifully dated (it is), but it also sounds so much like contemporary public discourse on Native Hawaiians by non-kanakas. Do they still exist? How can we really tell? Our presence is minimized, while at the same time the danger is: we exist in excess. Hawaiians have too many kids (are too lazy, are too *insert other disparagement here*). The solution for policymakers and pundits is always to enforce rigid boundaries (defined usually by race, more popularly by culture) in ways that don’t correspond to how kanakas define themselves, so others are always surprised that we haven’t seemed to vanish yet.

What people don’t seem to understand is precisely this lack of vanishing. Nor that this is actually our most powerful resistance: we aren’t going to.

So a partial or initial report back from NAIS, as I prepare my presentation for tomorrow, and also get ready to leave (almost immediately after). For me, participation in this conference (as with our own conference at UCSD) has largely been an experience in professionalization. By that I mean, I am learning what an academic career entails on some of the most practical levels: networking, presenting, publishing, being a member of a professional association, and leading or mentoring others through this matrix. And in the fields of indigenous and ethnic studies, even when you have the professional record created by excelling at all these things, from many of the more anecdotal stories I heard here (as Andrea Smith is in attendance, though she is not the only example), it often takes even more of a fight to be recognized as a person of color in the academy.

In terms of mentoring, I feel extremely lucky: not only for my community at UCSD, and especially Miget and Angie who encouraged me to come here, but also in many of the scholars I have met or heard here who are paving the way for us. Vince Diaz chaired an awesome panel of female activists and scholars on indigeneity and resistance to militarism today. Kehaulani Kauanui, besides serving as the only Pacific Islander on the steering committee of this conference, spoke eloquently on the pitfalls of federal recognition in the Akaka bill and its relationship to other federal recognition cases for Native American tribes as raised by other panel members. There is a real sense of community among Pacific Islander scholars especially, who do not have another association or conference to gather at, in which I enjoyed meeting other students at U of Michigan and elsewhere, and professors from U of Hawai’i and beyond, including the welcoming (and generally amazing) Noenoe Silva.

This made it all the more disappointing and vexing that at a business meeting in voting on the association’s official name and bylaws, the main point of contention was whether this association was actually meant for Native Americans primarily or indigenous people internationally. It’s possible that Pacific Islanders and/or global indigenous peoples need their own association, but the strength and solidarity that we would potentially lose by not connecting to other indigenous movements and scholarship is sad. I hope NAIS works hard to keep its doors open, and also openly confront the dissimilarities between various indigenous cases, because I believe this can be done without disrespect or devaluing the base of Native American studies that, as many of us are scholars working in America, we all want to honor.

Newly posted on The Nation’s website is Elinor Langer’s “Famous are the Flowers: Hawaiian Resistance Then- and Now.” It’s a very good crash course in political history of Hawai’i, and I’m excited to see it in a national market. It’s quite thoroughly researched, especially in its treatment of the years around the overthrow, and she also links to some sources here.

Thanks to Paul for the link.

I’m in Athens, Georgia this week to attend the Native American and Indigenous Studies conference, being held at the University of Georgia. I’m tired out, more by the 2 hour shuttle drive (overfull with irritated people) from the Atlanta airport than the flight itself. I hope to share a little more of what’s going on here than I was able to with our own conference over the next few days. I get to hear some academic idols speak: Jace Weaver, Kehaulani Kauanui, Ines Hernandez-Avila, Robert Warrior, Vince Diaz and more. Noenoe Silva is also here, but tragically her panel is concurrent with mine. More soon.

Honolulu Weekly cover, February 27, 2008

In the flurry of winter quarter, I am just now catching up on all the coverage of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs (OHA) thwarted settlement, which began to make news back in January. I found this well-researched article, “The Final Coup,” with this (sort of?) cool Marie Antoinette-esque cover art, in the Honolulu Weekly. The issue is over the OHA-controlled “ceded” lands, which the U.S. seized at the time of the 1893 overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom, and how best to manage them now. These lands were part of the illegal actions that Clinton and the U.S. Congress apologized for in 1993. An excerpt:

At the crux of the matter is the rightful ownership of some 1.8 million acres of the Hawaiian Kingdom public lands— comprising an estimated 40 percent of Hawai‘i’s total land mass and 95 percent of all acreage under state control — and who should determine how they are used. The agreement, originally called a settlement and now incorporated into House Bill 266, would give OHA $200 million in land and cash as back-due payment from ceded lands income and a to-be-determined share of future revenues.

The state/OHA deal was followed two weeks later by a Hawai‘i Supreme Court ruling that bars the state from selling any of the “ceded lands” until the question of their ownership is resolved.

Whether the Hawaiian nation and its territory will be determined through international law, independence or the Akaka Bill, which would establish a nation-within-a-nation under federal jurisdiction on the Native Americans model, is a hot topic. The Akaka Bill has been endorsed by Gov. Linda Lingle, Attorney General Mark Bennett, presidential hopefuls Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. Hillary Clinton, and OHA, itself a state agency.

The latest on the settlement seems to be that it is stalled in the state legislature, after many Native Hawaiian leaders (outside of OHA) have called for a more open and transparent process in handling the ceded lands. (This stalling was the advent of Shapiro’s call for Native Hawaiian leaders with accepted agendas that I mentioned in my last post.) This has also sparked the state legislature to begin an audit of all OHA expenditures, which seems especially aimed at investigating the salaries of OHA trustees. This recalls the late 1990s scandals over Kamehameha Schools/Bishop Estate trustees, who in 1997 were making an average of $900,000 per year, and were subsequently ordered removed in 1999 after investigations by the state and IRS. (See Broken Trust, the article that broke the news in the Star-Bulletin, here.)

More up-to-date news and commentary available at: Hawaiian Independence Blog, Free Hawaiʻi, Kauaʻi Eclectic and Hawaiʻi Standard.