Weather report - ecoculture in Hawaii - Column

ArtForum, March, 1994 by Andrew Ross

We have now heard hacks on all sides proclaiming that we increasingly live in cyberspace and that physical location on the ground is an old-school redundancy--have PC, will travel the info superhighway. Route Whatever. Try telling that to anyone without a roof over their heads, or without a nation tha will grant them asylum, let alone a minimum-wage job. Landed property empires and rentier fiefdoms may not be the unchallenged sources of power they were, bu land speculation and land-use contests are hardly becoming ghosts in the RAM machine of cybernetic real estate.

Ditto for struggles over the environment. You don't need to mystify organic village life to recognize that physical habitats and environments. even the high-density built environments of the city, are intrinsic components of people's identity. Their deterioration, and our dislocation from them, can have catastrophic effects. Urban modernity may have shortened the average community' memory of its environment, but even the most concrete-bound urbanites are more than rootless, abstract ciphers, blips on the map of SimCity. And as for indigenous peoples, their "cultural survival" often depends directly upon certain environmental rights enjoyed through traditional inhabitation of a region.

Last November, President Clinton issued a formal apology to Native Hawaiians fo the United States' overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy in 1893, and for the annexation of the islands five years later. This small gesture came at the end of the United Nations' Year of Indigenous Peoples, which had been ushered in by a similar apology to Australia's aborigines from Prime Minister Paul Keating in December of 1992. No skin off the Clinton nose (his favorite kind of politics), the apology came as a late acknowledgment (for some, a century too late) of Hawaiians' sovereignty claims, pursued for over 20 years now by a movement that reached its symbolic apogee in the centenary year with a series of spectacularl planned events and demonstrations. These scarcely warranted a mention in mainland media, and were barely noticed by the 6 million or so tourists who visited Hawaii in 1993, but they had a crucial impact on popular sentiment in the islands.

By August, Ka Ho okolokolonui Kanaka Maoli, a "people's international tribunal, had convened to adjudicate the record of U.S. crimes--political, economic, ethnocidal, ecocidal--in Hawaii. (In November, the U.S. Congress' Defense Appropriation Act was to set aside $400 million for the Navy to restore the flora and fauna of Kaho olawe Island after forty years of using it for bombing practice.) The tribunal's work, conducted with an eye on the U.N.'s new Draft Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, was partly aimed at reestablishing Hawaii's claim as a non-self-governing territory eligible for decolonization under Article 73 of the U.N. Charter. The state of Hawaii has no established a sovereignty commission, and results are expected in the next year or so.

The sovereignty movement was initially modeled on black. Chicano, and Native American nationalist movements of the '70s, but it has just as much in common with other Pacific nationalist movements in their decolonizing efforts to creat an independent and nuclear-free Pacific. (This in a region where megatrend economists still talk of the Pacific Rim, as if there were nothing inside it.) Pursuing the drive for self-government is an association called Hui Na auao, a consortium of over 40 different organizations spearheaded by the largest sovereignty group. Ka Lahui Hawaii, Ka Lahui's political goals are currently focused on the attainment of "nation-to-nation" status--of a relationship similar to that between several hundred American Indian nations and the federal government. In the meantime, however, the movement has generated a massive renaissance of traditional or customary local culture: Hawaiian language, arts, sports, and ritual performance (including the hula kahiko) are now routinely taught to all schoolchildren in the islands.

Bound up with the cultural revival (nothing is more hip among the young) is the issue of land, specifically the reclaiming of a native land base, to be carved out of the 2 million acres of ceded homelands entrusted to the state and predominantly leased out to nonnatives. Activists have made the principles of aloha 'aina (oneness with the land) and malama 'aina (care of the land) the cornerstones of the movement's philosophy. An ecological ethic has been a crucial vehicle for the recovery of land, water, and gathering and access right according to customary law. Its antiquity as a lived practice among Hawaiians has been questioned, but aloha 'aina and malama 'aina have emerged as appropriate responses to the state's misuse of native lands.

Tradition itself is a malleable notion. As with other Pacific movements, nonnative islanders and anthropologists of the "invention of tradition" school have analyzed the revival of indigenous customs as a creative construction base on urban intellectuals' ideas about rural life. All over the Pacific, moreover, indigenous elites have presented idealized versions of the past in order to promote unity among peoples whose ancestors were often divided by clan and language, or were even warring antagonists. As in postcolonial nations around the world, ideas of tradition and solidarity are useful tools to rulers who fee structurally compelled to sup press internal cultural diversity. (Precontact chiefs surely employed equally selective representations of the past--by constructing their own genealogies, for example--to consolidate their power.) The tradition may be cited in the continuing name of anti-colonialism, and unde stood as the opposite of Western ways. Yet it often includes cultural forms tha developed during the colonial period, or as a result of colonial entanglements.