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 We
Are Not Happy Natives
In Polynesian cultures, ancestry is paramount. Therefore, I greet
you with my genealogy. Hawaiians are the children of Papahanaumoku,
Earth Mother, and Wakea, Sky Father, who created the sacred lands
of Hawai'i Nei. From these lands came the taro, the Hawaiian people.
As in all Polynesia, so in Hawai'i: younger sibling must care for
and honor elder sibling who, in return, will protect and provide
for younger sibling. The land is our mother and we are her children.
This is the lesson of our genealogy.
Aloha to my Native hosts, the indigenous Aboriginal peoples of
Australia. I am honored to visit your country and to speak about
our common heritage as Native peoples under the colonial rule of
non-Natives. Let me acknowledge, as well, the other guests at this
conference, both those who live here and those who, like me, are
visiting.
In this respect, I want, first, to recognise the history of Aboriginal
peoples as extending between 25,000 and 60,000 years of occupation
of this continent. I know that the High Court of Australia has confirmed
this historical presence by rejecting the settler doctrine of terra
nullius in the Mabo vs. Queensland decision. However, the most recent
Wik case has apparently set back the progress of Aboriginal sovereignty.
Such a decision is consonant with the history of Australia as a
history of genocide perpetuated by white Australians against indigenous
Aboriginal peoples of this continent.
What is the official definition of genocide? Taken from Article
II of the United Nations Genocide Convention of the Prevention and
Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, genocide means any of the following:
"acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in
part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, such as:
- Killing members of the group;
- Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
- Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated
to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
- Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
- Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group."
In the words of Professor Colin Tatz, Director of the Centre for
Comparative Genocide Studies at Macquarie University,
"Australia is guilty of at least three, possibly four,
acts of genocide against Aboriginal peoples:
First ... the physical killing committed by settlers and rogue
police officers in the nineteenth century, while the state, in
the form of the colonial authorities, stood silently by;
Second ... the 20th century official state policy and practice
of forcibly transferring children from one group to another with
the express intention that they cease being Aboriginal;
Third, the twentieth century attempts to achieve the biological
disappearance of those deemed 'half-caste' Aborigines;
Fourth, a prima facie case that Australia's actions to protect
Aborigines in fact caused them serious bodily or mental harm."
Given these realities, it is clear that genocide is the only accurate
term to describe what happened to the Aboriginal people on this
continent. But genocide is a term that provokes instant denial.
Predictably, good intent is used as a first defence against the
charge of genocide. For example, we all know the argument that removing
Aboriginal children cannot be classed as genocide since removal
was, allegedly, for the children's benefit.
But in international law, intention does not have to be proven
by actions in "bad faith". As Professor Tatz has demonstrated,
destruction by benevolence, or good faith, is possible, indeed widespread.
In my country of Hawai'i, missionaries also acted in alleged "good
faith" with disastrous results for my Hawaiian people.
Let me turn now to the United States of America, the most powerful
imperialist country in the world, a violent country created out
of the bloody extermination of Native peoples, the enslavement of
forcibly transported peoples, and the continuing oppression of dark-skinned
peoples. Like Australia, the United States was created out of genocide
and colonialism.
In the case of my own people, indigenous Hawaiians, our Native
government was overthrown in 1893 by the American military in support
of white American sugar planters. In 1898, our islands were annexed
without even the trappings of a popular vote. Our political status
as independent citizens in our own independent country was made
impossible by the forced annexation to the United States.
American imperialism terminated Hawaiians as an independent people.
How do my people, the indigenous people of the land, understand
the violence of western imperialism, colonialism and genocide? We
look at the non-Native settlers and tourists - all 6.5 million of
them - and know we are subjugated in our own homeland, suffering
landlessness and poverty, consigned by the American government to
the periphery of our own country, to its prisons and shanties, to
its welfare rolls, hospital wards and graveyards.
Those of us involved in international indigenous work know that
Native people in all continents and archipelagoes of the world live
in a violent and violated condition, a state of existence characterized
by a kind of "peaceful violence", as Frantz Fanon so astutely
observed. This is the peaceful violence of historical dispossession,
of racial and economic subjugation, and of cultural and physical
stigmatization. Our psychological suffering and our physical impairments
are a direct result of this peaceful violence, of the ordered realities
of confinement, degradation, ill-health and early death.
Allow me to shock you with a profile of our Native people's health.
Below one year of age the Hawaiian death rate of more than double
the overall average in the state of Hawai'i. Between one and four
years of age it is triple the state figure, and so on through early
adulthood. In every age category up to age 30 the Hawaiian death
rate is never less than double, and is often triple the equivalent
mortality rate in our islands. With under just 20% of the state's
population, Hawaiians account for nearly 75% of the state's deaths
for persons less than 18 years of age. An while the mortality rate
for non-Hawaiians decreased significantly between 1980 and 1990,
for both full and part-Hawaiians, it actually increased.1
This state of ill-health is, of course, a form of violence, that
peaceful violence that kills without a sound, without a passing
notice. Indeed, most of the oppression and violence Native peoples
experience is hidden from view. In our case, more Hawaiians live
below that poverty level than any other ethnic group in Hawai'i.
More of our people are in prison, are homeless, are undereducated
statistics. Is this a violent situation? Obviously. Is this a result
of Western colonisation? Of course.
Colonialism began with conquest and is today maintained by a settler
administration created out of the doctrine of cultural hierarchy.
A hierarchy in which Euro-Americans and whiteness dominate non-Euro-Americans
and darkness. That is, a country where race prejudice, in the words
of Fanon, obeys a flawless logic. For after all, if inferior peoples
must be exterminated, their cultures and habits of life, their languages
and customs, their economies, indeed, every difference about them
must be assaulted, confined and obliterated. There must be a dominant
culture and therefore a dominant people, and therefore a dominant
religion, and therefore a dominant language, and therefore a dominant
legal system, and therefore a dominant education system, and so
on and so on. In other words, there must be dominance and subordination.
In colonial countries such as the United States and Australia,
white hegemony delineates the hierarchy. Thus, white people are
the dominant group, Christianity is the dominant religion, capitalism
is the dominant economy, imperialism is the dominant form of diplomacy
and the underlying force of international relations. Violence is
this normal, and race prejudice, like race violence, is as common
as television and jet planes.
In a racist society, there is no need to justify white racist
behaviour. The naturalness of segregation and hierarchy is the naturalness
of hearing English on the street, or seeing MacDonalds on every
other corner, or assuming that Australian dollar and Qantas Airlines
will get you a vacation in Hawai'i, my Native country. Indeed, the
natural, everyday presence of the "way things are" explains
the strength and resilience of racism. Racism envelops us, intoxicating
our thoughts, permeating our brains and skins, determining the shape
of our growth and the longevity of our lives.
It is normal that hierarchy by color exists, that mistreatment
by color exists, that income by color exists, that life expectancy
by color exists, that opportunity by color exists, and all the other
observable hierarchies documented by scholars over the years. The
sheer normalcy of white dominance underpins the racist assertion
that white people and culture are superior, for if they were not,
how else explain their overwhelming dominance in the western hemisphere,
in the Pacific Basin, in this country of Australia.
Dominance is the cause and engine of racism. Power over peoples
and land and economies. Power to take and consume. Power to define
and confine. Power to maintain power.
There is no escape from origins: colonial countries are racist
countries. The United States of America and this country called
Australia, exist only because extermination campaigns were waged
to rid these continents of millions of Native peoples, by some estimates,
100 millions.
 Let me tell you about my own country of Hawai'i. Like most Native
peoples, Hawaiians lived in our mother's keeping until the fateful
coming of the haole - Western foreigners - in 1778. The our world
collapsed from the violence of contact: disease, mass death, and
land dispossession; evangelical Christianity; plantation capitalism;
cultural destruction including languages banning; and finally, American
military invasion in 1893, and forced annexation in 1898. During
the course of little more than a century, the haole onslaught had
taken from us 95% of our Hawaiian people, 99% of our lands and waters,
and the entirety of our political sovereignty. As the 20th century
dawned, we were but a remnant of the great and ancient people we
had once been.
During the long suppression of our Territorial period (1900 -
1959), Hawaiians lived under martial law for seven years throughout
the Second World War. We suffered increased land confiscations for
military bases, and fearfully watched as the vicious process of
Americanization created racist political, educational and economic
institutions. By the time of my birth in 1949, being Hawaiian was
a racial and cultural disadvantage rather than a national definition.
The Federal American government had officially classified our people
by blood quantum in 1921: those of us with 50% Hawaiian blood quantum
were Native, those of us with less than 50%, were not Native. "Fifty-percenters",
as they were have come to be known today, have some small claims
to live on what amounts to reservation land; "less than fifties"
do not have such rights. In this way, our nation is divided by race,
a concept and reality foreign to our way of thinking.
This I was born into captivity, a Native person in a racist, anti-Native
world.
And so it was for Aboriginal people on this continent. We are
non-white in a white universe. We are different, and therefore inferior,
categorically. And we are marked by captivity; economic, political
and cultural captivity.
Indeed, "captivity" is the condition of all Native peoples
within the Pacific region. Covering half the earth's surface, the
Pacific is home to 32 countries and many nations. We are the largest
nuclearized region in the world. And we know one thing for certain.
Until the Pacific is decolonised, it cannot be demilitarized.
Let me frighten you with some statistics.
On O'ahu island, the capital of our state of Hawai'i and the most
densely populated of our eight major islands, the military controls
25% of the land area. Statewide, the combined armed forces have
21 installations, 26 housing complexes, 8 training areas, and 19
miscellaneous bases and operating sites. Beyond O'ahu, Hawai'i is
the linchpin of the American military strategy in the Asia-Pacific
region. Few tourists know that Hawai'i is home to the largest portage
of nuclear fueled ships and submarines in the world. These ships
are received, cleaned, and refashioned at Pearl Harbor, where workers
are called "sponges" because of their high absorption
of radiation during cleaning.2
Regionally, Hawai'i is the forward basing point for the American
military in the Pacific. The Seventh Fleet of the American Navy,
which patrols the world from the Pacific to the African coast, is
stationed at Pearl Harbor. Planes and ships which test nuclear weapons
in the Pacific leave from Pearl Harbor or other military installation
in Hawai'i.
This kind of "peaceful violence" results in land confiscations,
contamination of our plants and animals and our people, and the
transformation of our archipelago into a poisonous war zone. Many
of the lands used by the American military are legally reserved
lands for Hawaiians that were taken during America's imperialist
years.
In the southern and eastern Pacific, American military violence
has taken the form of nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands, nuclear
waste dumping on Christmas Island, siting of electronic facilities
vital to nuclear war, and construction of air bases with nuclear
capabilities including airborne delivery of weapons. To the east
of Hawai'i, in the Mariana Islands and Guam, there are airbases
with nuclear capabilities.
We must all remember that the world's first hydrogen bomb was
tested in Bikini Island. The force of this weapon of destruction
was 1000 times stronger than the Hiroshima bomb. Thus far, more
than 66 bombs have been detonated in the Marshalls. The islanders
there were used as guinea pigs to test the effects of contamination.
Never told of the bomb's effects nor removed before testing, the
Marshallese suffer one of the highest cancer rates in the world.
They also have one of the highest rates of severely deformed children,
including "jellyfish babies" who have no heads, arms,
legs or human shape. Native women from the islands have given birth
to babies they describe as "octopuses", "turtles"
and "apples". Such babies are born not only on islands
declared radioactive by the Americans, but on all atolls and five
major islands in the Marshalls archipelago.
Before such tests, Marshallese enjoyed incredible longevity, with
many of their people living over 100 years. Today, they have young
women with a life expectancy of 40 years of age. The United States
tested 23 bombs on Bikini Island and 43 on Enewetak. Now, the Marshallese
know their nation has been damaged forever as a result of the United
States of America.
In our part of the world, the color of violence has been the color
of white countries, the United States and France, testing nuclear
weapons, deploying nuclear ships, and basing military forces in
every part of the north and south Pacific.
Nuclearization is a unique kind of racism. The kind that produced
famous Nazi doctors and forced sterilization of Indian women in
America. The kind that produced centuries of genocidal campaigns
against the rest of the Third and Fourth Worlds. The kind that continues
to produce and reproduce a psychology of subjugation.
For racism is not only history and sociology, economics and politics.
Racism is also the psychology of subjugation. The inferior must
be made to feel inferior every day, to suffer their subjugation,
to be dehumanized in accordance with the colonizer's rules. Thus,
as Frantz Fanon so eloquently argued, colonized people, like colonized
cultures, are no longer open, dynamic and fertile. Once colonized
they become moribund, oppressed, segregated, closed, or apathetic.
They must negotiate a hostile world and a menacing daily reality
with great care lest they suffer increased injury. Is it any wonder
that white Americans, on the whole, live longer than Black people,
and Native people? For the colonized, the colonizer is a killer;
literally, a killer.
Like the physical attributes of killers, the culture of killers
becomes bloated, disfigured, and vulgar. Such cultures celebrate
their vulgarity, as American culture celebrates Christopher Columbus.
And these celebrations follow from the center to the periphery,
so that the whole is permeated with the thrill of cruelty.
Is it possible to rid the United States of racism? In light of
the history of Native people in this country, I would say no. In
light of the history of Black people, I would say no. In light of
the current fight in the United States regarding affirmative action,
I would say no. Racism has never ended in the United States. And
it never will end.
After the freeing of slaves, came the lynching campaigns, segregation,
ghettoization, discrimination and now police wars and vicious imprisonments.
After belated and half-hearted Federal attempts at ameliorative
programs in the sixties and seventies, Black people in this country
still die younger, make less money, suffer poor housing, inferior
community services, low educational attainments, tremendous police
brutality, and of course, the everyday injuries of race.
What better evidence do we need to illustrate that America is
a white country for white people. As Malcolm X repeatedly said,
America is irretrievably racist.
Given this, what can be done, what should be done? Fanon believed
that revolutionary action was the only answer in Algeria and in
Africa as a continent. Malcolm X believed that total separation
of Black people from white people was the only answer in the United
States. I believe that my own people need separation in Hawai'i.
A separate land base, economy, educational system, language base,
and on and on.
Sovereignty is what we call this in Hawai'i. And what the Maori
people call it in Aotearoa, otherwise known as New Zealand, and
what African people call it. And what Aboriginal people here on
this continent call it. Sovereignty on our land, with our rules,
in our language, for our people.
Who could dare deny that sovereignty is preferable to the white
racism all of us indigenous people now suffer? After all, we are
separated and segregated under white rules now. Why not acknowledge
the falsity of alleged western democracy, equality and liberty?
Why fight to get into white society when it so imprisons us now?
Why not create our own based of power rather than be ghettoized
according to white power?
How much more honest and historically accurate to acknowledge
that racism prevents us as Native nations from living together with
white people as equals. Under the current violent hierarchy, there
is only daily pain and fear. Fear because violence breeds hatred
which, in turn, breeds more violence. Not the revolutionary violence
that cleanses victims, as Fanon so honestly argued, but the violence
of white racism.
Can the United States and other white countries like Australia
afford violence, revolutionary or otherwise? For it is everywhere
now. The violence of a police state protecting itself, and its white
citizens. The violence of a political system dependent on mass exploitation.
Looking into the heard of whiteness, I do not see a willingness
to change, only a ferocious determination to keep the black masses
at bay.
So be it. If we must be kept at bay, then let it be in our own
place, on our own land, with our own people. And let white people
and their police and their tourists and their segregated schools,
stay away from us. Let us return to the political status of many
nations. Not one sovereignty, but many sovereignties. Not one path,
but many paths.
You may ask, but how can we do this? How can we be separate? Let
me answer that first, we are separate now, separate and unequal
and hostile. We are ghettoized by a hierarchy where people of color,
and particularly indigenous people, occupy the bottom strata and
where white people occupy the top.
Secondly, it is not separatism that white people oppose but the
dissolution of their intimate and raw power over our lives. To have
our own nations is what the white powers oppose simply because they
don't want to give up their dominance over us and our resources,
especially our labor and lands. Separate sovereignties is that
white people oppose, not separation per se.
As Native peoples all over the world know - as the Irish and the
Aborigines and the Palestinians and the Maori know - it is a never-ending
struggle to be both separate and sovereign. Because of millennia
of resistance, the Irish people remain, and the Aboriginal people
remain, and the Palestinian people remain, and the Maori people
remain. Resistance and the legacy of resistance to incorporation,
to disinheritance, to disappearance is what has kept these nations
alive.
So I leave you today with a message of remembrance and resistance,
we are not one people, and it is racist to believe that we are one
people.
For in the ugly and violent history of the white settler nations,
indeed, in the Americas and the Pacific, you will find that many
people and many nations occupy our lands, not under the Christian
God or European Constitutions, but in the diverse humanity of peoples,
in the many-colored family of nations.
Notes
- David E. Stannard, Cultural Survival, Spring 00, Special Issue,
"Problems in Paradise: Sovereignty in Hawai'i"
- Kyle Kajbird, ibid.
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