Earlier this month, Haunani-Kay Trask, a Hawaiian sovereignty activist and a Hawaiian Studies professor, has died at the age of 71.
Her passionate speeches have inspired many Native Hawaiians and other indigenous people to stand up for the culture and against imperialism.
Her most famous quote, spoken at the 100th anniversary of the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy, stated "We Are Not Americans, We are Hawaiians", the most legendary statement of defiance against American imperialism in Hawaii.
Since her death, many of the younger generation of Hawaiian activists noted her as an inspiration.
But what if Trask could've been more effective?
The younger generation of activists were too young to remember when Trask was speaking to the public in real time and she was in the front page of the papers and the top story in TV news.
So they don't realize that the real reason Trask was controversial was
- NOT because she said "We are Not Americans"
- NOT because she wanted Hawaii to be independent from the US
The problem with the Hawaiian independence movement is that too much attention has been given to those who vent recklessly. The prime example is Haunani-Kay Trask, a Hawaiian Studies instructor who is notorious for her anti-haole rants and calling non-natives "uninvited guests".
Does anyone really think you can gain support from non-natives by calling them "uninvited guests" and saying "Hawaii can benefit from one less haole"?
Remember, about 75% of Hawaii's population are of non-native ancestry! That's the majority! Native Hawaiians are outnumbered by European-Americans, Japanese and Filipinos.
That means in order to gain support for Hawaiian independence, you have to convince enough Europeans, Japanese, Filipinos, and other non-natives to support the cause!
I noted that back in 2000 when I was an opinions writer at the University of Hawaii at Mānoa's student newspaper Ka Leo O Hawaii (usually referred to its shortened name Ka Leo).
The article I wrote was an Open-Letter to Haunani-Kay Trask in response to her book "From a Native Daughter".
While the Ka Leo O Hawaii's website doesn't currently archive anything from the year 2000 or before
(note: on the blog post, I put a link to a geocities site that reposted my open letter, but the site is no longer active)
However, here is a scanned copy of the article as printed in the Ka Leo on 09/14/2000
(note: you may want to click on the scanned images to read it better. I apologize if it's still hard to read. If you want my retype the editorial in a format that is easier to read, let me know, but it will take time before I send it to you)
and
Trask herself didn't respond (this was around the same time Trask had a public dispute with then-governor Ben Cayetano, a Filipino descendant who said he was "Hawaiian at heart". Trask responded by holding a sign saying "f*** Ben").
However, her cronies posted angry letters to Ka Leo, claiming I "didn't know Hawaii history" and calling me "racist" (ironically for questioning Trask's racism). Luckily, I wasn't physically confronted by anyone. (also lucky that my photo didn't appear in the Ka Leo. Also lucky that this was before the age of social media, where people can find out what I look like.).
The following year, Trask got controversy again when she commented that the 9/11 attacks were "chicken coming home to roost" which was interpreted as "Americans got what they deserved".
Since then, Trask has been out of the public spotlight! Either she decided her rants were poison for the movement, or the local media stopped giving her attention.
(note: I didn't know at the time that Trask was suffering from Alzheimer's in the last years of her life. That surely has more to do with why she wasn't in the public eye in the last decade of her life)
As for the article itself, if I was to rewrite it now, I most likely would tone down the aggression of the questioning a bit. In others, a little more self-tone-policing. But I still stand by most of what I wrote.
But there was one interesting point made in one of the criticisms about that article. It was in reference about my mentions of the Nene goose in the editorial. This from Lance Collins, who later became my editor at Ka Leo
https://www.manoanow.org/trask-media-clash-again/article_c7a47924-6eff-5bd9-a79a-6c079fd7e168.html
Then, he argued that the claims for social justice of the Kanaka Maoli are the same as claims made by animals. Equating human beings with animals is a very classic example of racism in language
It was never my intention to "equate human beings to animals", but Collins is correct that I should never had used the example of the Nene Goose (and other indigenous species) in that article.
About a year after Collins' critique, he did become the editor of the opinion section, but we never had a discussion of his critique of my editorial. Maybe both of us were trying to avoid an awkward moment. We did have a good working relations, though I did object to how one of my editorials got titled.
However, another person did respond to Collin's article. It was Grant Crowell, a former comic artist at Ka Leo. He was there before I was at UH, but I did meet him in person years later. We are still connected on social media. Here's what he wrote about his encounter with Trask
Lance is right to say that there were no "witch-hunts" of Trask then, but that is because it was Trask herself who was leading the witch-hunt. Several Ka Leo editors and I were at a Board of Publications meeting (the organization that oversees the Ka Leo newspaper) back in 1994, when Trask brought her tiny mob demanding my firing from Ka Leo for the cartoon I drew.
She screamed to the Board that I was "vermin," that I was responsible for bomb threats in her building, and that I should suffer the same fate as an unknown cartoonist who was executed and dismembered during the Nuremburg Trials.
Infuriated that my editor-in-chief, a Filipino woman, defended me, Trask called her to her face a "fucking stupid bitch!" What Lance would call "refusing to engage in colonial morality" — for a professor to yell the word "fuck" over and over again at another — others would call it running out of intelligent things to say (and if Trask and Lance really believed that line, then why don't they use another term besides the Western word, "fuck?").
and also this
Lance and Trask say "demand accountability." Yet they accept no accountability for their attacks on others. This is evident in how they single out people for their race (including other Hawaiians, who they label "Uncle Toms") and then hide behind the ideas of "an attack on me is an attack on all Hawaiians!," or the much-maligned "I can't be a racist because I'm not in power!"
Shibai! Saying one ethnic group has less perceived power than another doesn't mean they have no power at all, and it certainly doesn't mean that individuals such as Trask don't carry a wealth of power themselves.
How silly would it be to say that former Hawaiian governor John Waihee had no power, even when being governor? How incredulous would it be to say that Trask had no power when she was director of the Hawaiian Studies department, being able to hire and fire whomever she pleased? And how despicable to say somebody has no power while they're punching you in the face?
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Now back to me!
before anyone start accusing me of "settler colonialism" (I'm not a settler, I'm a descendant of settlers), let me post a few facts about myself
- I may not be of Native Hawaiian ancestry, but some members of my extended family are
- I always had friendly relations with Native Hawaiian peers in school and in work
- I was once in support of Hawaii being part of the US but that has changed as noted in
https://pablowegesend.blogspot.com/2018/05/personal-evolution-on-my-thoughts-on-us.html
- I am now in support of Hawaii being an Independent Nation as noted in
https://pablowegesend.blogspot.com/2019/08/6-decades-of-statehood.html
https://pablowegesend.blogspot.com/2016/12/my-letter-to-newspaper-hawaii.html
https://pablowegesend.blogspot.com/2016/11/its-time-for-hawaii-to-declare.html
- I strongly supporting renaming my high school alma mater from its current name "McKinley High School" to its former name "Honolulu High School"
https://pablowegesend.blogspot.com/2018/05/put-tiger-statue-on-oval.html
- I have lost MULTIPLE friendships from my fellow alumni over my support of the name change of my high school
