Haunani-Kay Trask : THEORY QUESTION 5 : Who are your allies-in-struggle? And what of allies who ask, “What about me?”

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Transcript

Well, allies are always important, but the people who generally ask that question are not allies. 

Allies are people who come to you in the middle of the sovereignty march and say, "I have a computer and I'd be perfectly willing to help you guys put out a newspaper." 

Or call me up on the phone and say, "I'd like to give you $2,000 for your students." 

People who really want to help you will do it. 

We had a man come to one of our talks here when our entitlements started to be endangered, and Mililani(1) and I gave this great forum. This man came up to me and said, "I can't believe your students paid to have all this information Xeroxed. I have a machine that I can give you." And I said, "Okay." I got my students over here and said, "Talk to this man." 

See, real allies just do it, or they send me money, or they call me and say, "I can babysit. I can give you food." Those are real allies. 

The other people are people who say, "What about me?" 

And I don't really talk to people like that. That's been the story of colonizers since they stepped foot on Hawaiʻi - "What about me?" 

First it was Cook(2) and his guys - and what happened to Cook's very instructive - I mean, we did kill him, so I think people should take that to heart. 

And then there are all the settlers(3) who came off the plantations(4) who think that they are Hawaiʻi. They have no sense of obligation or comrade-in-arms feeling. In fact, most of them feel you deserved it, you're hopeless as a people. It's a kind of combination of racism - that "you're inferior because you're not like us" - and, "it's too late; you already had your moment in history." "You had 2,000 years, and it's over." 

So those people I sort of don't have anything to do with, and I don't care what they think.

Notes

(1) Mililani Trask (b. 1951): Lawyer, nationalist, and political leader (founder and first elected Governor of Ka Lāhui Hawaiʻi) who has worked extensively in the area of human rights for indigenous peoples both in Hawaiʻi and internationally.  Mililani is Haunani-Kay’s younger sister.

(2) James Cook (1728-1779): Infamous English navigator and explorer of the Pacific, Captain James Cook first landed on Hawaiian shores in 1778. He knowingly brought fatal diseases and was killed by Hawaiians at Kealakekua Bay on the Big Island of Hawaiʻi when he tried to take Kalaniʻōpuʻu, paramount chief of Hawaiʻi island, as his hostage.

(3) Settlers: Within a settler colony, there are two classes of people: Natives and settlers. Natives are the colonized indigenous peoples of the land and settlers are foreign exploiters and profiteers of the colony. The number of generations that foreigners reside in a colony does not change their status as settlers and as oppressors. In the case of Hawaiʻi, haole and Asians continue to be settlers even though their first ancestors may have lived during the time of the Hawaiian Kingdom. Colonial systems, as Frantz Fanon has argued, are racist systems.

(4) Plantations: Within a century after Captain Cook’s arrival in Hawaiʻi, white settlers had seized large tracts of Native lands, creating a plantation economy. Native Hawaiians were the first laborers, followed by Asians, who migrated to Hawaiʻi by the tens of thousands. Soon these new settlers moved off the plantations and assimilated into American colonial society, with many ascending to positions of wealth and political power in the 20th century.

Excerpt from Coalitions Between Natives and Non-Natives.

For the last fifteen years, I have watched the coming together of community activists around land, including anti-nuclear issues, and the independence movements. Each time, the same conflicts arise and each time, Hawaiians tend to leave the group. Hawaiian organizations form with Hawaiian leadership and Hawaiian values. These groups expand or decline based on Hawaiian strategies. But the most significant reality is that our organizing is around our issues, like sovereignty, control of our trust lands, and legal rights as Natives. It is a rare non-Native who wants to help our struggles in the way we decide he or she should help.

My personal participation has been in both kinds of groups, that is, in mixed and all-Hawaiian groups. I participate in coalitions but I do it rarely and only for struggles that I perceive to be of short duration. Most of my time and thinking goes towards my own people and organizing with and for them.

This brings to some hard-won understanding. For Native peoples controlled by America, coalitions with non-Natives must be temporary and issue-oriented. We need to see such coalitions as immediate means to an immediate end, not as long-term answers to long term goals. For example, sovereignty has always been and will always be the long-term goal of Native nations. Most settlers in Hawaiʻi, including Asians and haole, fear Hawaiian sovereignty since they see it as taking land and revenues for exclusive Hawaiian use. Hand-wringing about Hawaiian conditions is always preferable to repairing historical damage through the return of nationhood.

(Haunani-Kay Trask, From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawaiʻi. Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1993. pages 255-256.)

Excerpt from White Racism and Hawaiian Sovereignty: The Case of Indigenous Human Rights.

Modern Hawaiʻi, like its colonial parent the United States, is a settler society; that is, Hawaiʻi is a society in which the indigenous culture and people have been disappeared, suppressed, or marginalized for the benefit of settlers who now dominate our islands. In settler societies, the issue of civil rights is primarily an issue about how to protect settlers against each other and against the state. Injustices done against Native people - e.g. genocide, land dispossession, language banning, family disintegration, cultural exploitation - are not part of this intra-settler discussion, and therefore not within the parameters of civil rights.

(speech by Haunani-Kay Trask given as testimony for the 1984 meeting of the United Nations’ International Working Group on Indigenous Populations)