Haunani-Kay Trask : THEORY QUESTION 3 : How is your role as a political leader related to your role as a teacher?

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Transcript

One of the things about being a leader is that by the time you become a leader, you pretty much don't care what other people think. Because if you did, you would never have become a leader.

I certainly don't care what tourists think. I mean, I'm after them all the time, telling them, "Don't come - we don't want you, we don't need you, we don't like you."

I said that in a talk at Victoria University on Vancouver Island, and all the Canadian papers around this big thing, they called the Hawaii Visitors Bureau,(1) and they said, "She doesn't represent Hawaiʻi. She's an angry, bitter person." And my thing was, there was a time when I was young when that would have really hurt my feelings, but now it just makes me laugh.

I wouldn't say you ever get used to being under assault, but you don't let it interfere in your determination to do what it is you want to do with your life. Because if you do, then you'll never accomplish anywhere near what your people need and what the historical moment allows. If you don't watch out… I'm a firm believer - because I'm a Marxist - I'm a firm believer that history moves in stages, and at a certain moment in time, "this" is possible, and then history changes, and it's no longer possible.

Well, it was 100 years until my generation came along, and I wasn't going to waste 30 seconds of it thinking about non-natives and how they feel. I couldn't give a rip how they feel.

And that historical moment is passing on, and we can tell by all of these assaults on our entitlements. So what would I say to people like my students is, "You have to go forward and represent your people, and never mind all this other stuff."

Notes

(1) Hawaiʻi Visitors and Convention Bureau: A private, non-profit corporation, HVCB is contracted by the State of Hawaiʻi to market the islands to American and international visitors. Although tourism is a private industry, the state gives HVCB millions of taxpayers' dollars every year to ensure healthy profit margins for the tourist industrial complex (multinational hotels, airlines, golf courses, tour guides, vendors, etc.). The tourist industry is based on the commodification and exploitation of Native Hawaiian land, culture, and people for the enjoyment and profiteering of settlers.

Excerpt from Women's Mana and Hawaiian Sovereignty.

While Hawaiian men have come to achieve their own place in the legislature and in the governor's office, Hawaiian female leadership has come to the fore in the sovereignty movement. Of course, this is not to say there are no male leaders in our movement. But they are not the most visible, the most articulate, nor the most creative. Nor are they the most recognized leaders by our own people. By any standard - public, personal, political - our sovereignty movement is led by women.

Part of the reason for this is simply colonialism: men are rewarded, including Native men, for collaboration. Women's role, if they are to be collaborators, is not to wield political power but to serve as an adjunct to men who do.

But I believe the main reason women lead the nationalist front today is simply that women have not lost sight of the lahui, that is, of the nation. Caring for the nation is, in Hawaiian belief, an extension of caring for the family, the large family that includes both our lands and our people. Our mother is our land, Papahanaumoku, she who births the islands. Hawaiian women leaders, then, are genealogically empowered to lead the nation.

(Haunani-Kay Trask, From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawaiʻi, revised edition. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1999. page 94.)