Kalamau, Jo-Ann Leialoha Dela Cruz (with attachments)

176

Manaku, Ray Aukai, member, Board of Directors, Anahola Hawaiian

Homes Association (with attachments)

867

Patterson, Rev. Kaleo, First Hawaiian Church and Koolau Hui Ia (Ana

Additional material submitted for the record:

Federal-State Task Force on the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act,

report.

395

The Cause of Hawaiian Sovereignty, Hayden F. Burgess..

827

Letters:

NOTE.-Other material submitted for the record will be retained in Committee files.

ADMINISTRATION OF NATIVE HAWAIIAN

HOME LANDS

TUESDAY, AUGUST 8, 1989

U.S. SENATE SELECT COMMITTEE ON INDIAN AFFAIRS,
MEETING JOINTLY WITH THE COMMITTEE ON INTERIOR
AND INSULAR AFFAIRS, HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES,

Lihue, HI. The committee met, pursuant to notice, at 11:08 a.m., at Kauai Community College, 3-1901 Kaumualii Highway, Lihue, Hawaii, Hon. Daniel K. Inouye (chairman of the select committee) presiding.

Present from the Select Committee on Indian Affairs: Senator Inouye.

Present from the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs: Representative Blaz.

Also present: Representative Akaka.

STATEMENT OF HON. DANIEL K. INOUYE, U.S. SENATOR FROM HAWAII, CHAIRMAN, SELECT COMMITTEE ON INDIAN AFFAIRS The CHAIRMAN. Fellow Americans and ladies and gentlemen, aloha.

[The audience responds "aloha."]

The CHAIRMAN. As chairman of the United States Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs and on behalf of Congressman Morris Udall, chairman of the House Interior and Insular Affairs Committee, I wish to welcome all of you on the second day in a series of 5 days of hearings on Native Hawaiian Home Lands.

Yesterday the committees received testimony from the Honorable John Waihe'e, Governor of the State of Hawaii and members of his cabinet and important members of the Hawaii State legislature; the chairman of the Hawaiian Homes Commission and a member of the commission, as well as the former director of the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands.

The committees also received testimony from Native Hawaiians who are eligible beneficiaries under the act but who have not yet received an assignment of land and from representatives of homestead associations on the island of Oahu.

I am pleased that all of the testimony we received was of significant importance to the issues which we intend to address this morning. However, before we begin today's hearings, I would like to take a moment to focus upon the purpose of these hearings and to emphasize that these hearings have been organized and re-organized in order to accommodate all of the concerns and the needs of

the people that are the subject of these hearings, the Native Hawaiians.

On June 30, 1921, Prince J. Kuhio Kalanianaole, Delegate to the United States House of Representatives from the Territory of Hawaii, appeared before the assembled Members of the Congress and spoke on a bill that was then pending before the United States House of Representatives. We are here, 69 years later, to examine whether the intent of the law which J. Kuhio Kalanianaole urged his colleagues to enact has been fulfilled.

Although known as the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act of 1920, as all of you are aware, it was finally passed by the Congress and signed into law on July 9, 1921. In the ensuing 69 years there have been various inquiries into the specific subjects affecting the Hawaiian Home Lands, but there has never been any comprehensive oversight by the United States Congress to assess whether the act's objectives are being realized.

So, today and throughout this week these hearings mark an important date in the history of the Native Hawaiian people. We are here because of the people and to assure that the trust responsibilities that are owed to them are being carried out under the highest fiduciary standards. For these reasons, we hold these hearings.

Upon enactment of the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act, the United States Government assumed the trust responsibility for the lands that were set aside for the benefit of Native Hawaiians. The United States administered that trust from 1921 until 1959 when the Territory of Hawaii became the State of Hawaii, and at that time the responsibility of administering the lands was transferred to the new State of Hawaii.

But the commitment and the responsibilities of the United States did not end with that transfer, and a 1979 interpretation of the Federal Government's responsibility by the Solicitor's Office of the United States Department of the Interior confirms this ongoing relationship. This is a very important relationship.

The U.S. Department of Interior defines the relationship of the Federal Government to the Homeland Trust as, "more than merely ministerial or nondiscretionary. The United States can be said to have retained its role as trustee under the act while making the State its instrument for carrying out the trust.'

In a few days we will be celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Territory of Hawaii's admission into the Union of the United States. To those who would question the appropriateness of the Federal congressional oversight hearings on the Hawaiian Home Lands, I wish to call the attention to section 5(f) of the Hawaii Admissions Act which states, "Such lands shall be managed and disposed of by the State for the betterment of the conditions of Native Hawaiians and their use for any other object shall constitute a breach of trust for which suit may be brought by the United States."

It is an important power. It is this important power, the power to enforce the trust, the fact that the United States reserved this power to itself, that provides the strongest evidence that the United States Congress intended a continuing Federal role in overseeing, monitoring, and enforcing the trust that was created for the benefit of Native Hawaiians.

These hearings are also being held to examine an important earlier work and to determine what has been done since that work was commissioned. As many of you are aware, in 1983 the Secretary of the Department of the Interior and the Governor of Hawaii commissioned a special task force to study the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act. This Federal-State task force on the Hawaiian Homes Commission submitted a study and findings and made 134 recommendations for actions that could be undertaken by the State and Federal Governments to strengthen the Home Lands Program. At this hearing we thus intend to assess the status of the implementation of the task force recommendations. We want to know whether these recommendations have been ignored or have been carried out, and let the chips fall where they should. We want to find out what has been done and to determine what additional action is necessary.

I know that there has been much discussion and some controversy associated with these hearings since they were first announced earlier this year in February. The committee has made many changes in an effort to accommodate all of those who will be participating in the hearings.

First, because these hearings are designed to focus on Hawaiian Home Lands, the Hawaiian Homestead Associations felt that they should play a predominant role in the hearings. So early on I made a commitment that the homestead associations would be allocated one-half of the committee's hearing time, so that they could develop their own agenda and determine what information would be brought before the committee.

My colleagues here and my colleagues in Washington will tell you that this is not the usual, customary practice of the Congress. It is highly unusual to turn over the responsibility of congressional hearings to a non-Federal entity.

Your homestead associations will be selecting the witnesses and setting the agenda for one-half of these hearings. That is from 4 p.m. to 8 p.m.

Second, in May the Select Committee on Indian Affairs held meetings in Native Hawaiian communities to discuss the hearings, and at that time some of you recall that I was here and to hear firsthand from the people most directly affected by the program what their concerns are.

In those meetings and subsequently, the committee heard from Native Hawaiians who comprise a group of Hawaiians that have over 18,000 applications for lots on the commission waiting list but who have yet to receive an assignment of land. These individuals do not belong to any homestead association because they are not yet on the land, but they are beneficiaries of the act and they expressed the desire to present testimony to the committees.

Accordingly, the committees initially set aside 1 hour of each day's hearing for non-homestead testimony, but because of the large number and heavy demand of persons to testify, we have set aside an additional hour for non-homestead testimony. Today we will have two hours for non-homestead witnesses.

My colleagues will tell you that, without exception, congressional hearings are usually held between the hours of 9 a.m. and 4 p.m., and they are usually no more than 2 or 3 hours in length. But in

response to the requests of Native Hawaiians who are working people, the committee rescheduled the hearings so that those wishing to participate would not have to forego 1 day's wages to do so. As can be seen from the schedule which we have published in newspapers and announced in the media, these hearings go far beyond the 2- or 3-hour length. Yesterday we began at 9 a.m. precisely and ended at 8 p.m. with a 15-minute break to go to the lua and have some lunch.

Today's hearings and the hearings on the neighbor islands will be about 9 hours in length, and we will have no break. We just spent 10 minutes having lunch. Although some of us might want to eat or heed the call of Nature, we have strong bladders. [Laughter.] As I indicated, we rescheduled the hearings so that homestead testimony could be presented during non-working hours, but then we received complaints that the hearings would be going too late into the evening and that the kapunas would not be able to attend. So, again, we adjusted the hearing schedule so that the hearings would end at 8 p.m., and so that kapunas, the most important of persons among us, would attend and participate in the hearings.

Originally given the other demands on the time of the Members of Congress, hearings were scheduled to be held on Oahu, Kauai, Molokai, and Hawaii, and we included the Maui Homestead Associations in the Molokai hearing. But, as one should have expected, the homestead associations on Maui complained, and so we are going to Maui also.

Finally, as many of you know, the committee's hearing schedule was originally to be held in July, but we were advised by the Governor's office that the Governor's annual statewide planning meetings were scheduled at the same time and that, if the Hawaiian Department of Hawaiian Home Lands could not participate in the hearings, it would be excluded from the statewide planning process. This seemed too high a price to pay for the hearings, and, after all, a hearing without the DHHL, would not be a full hearing. So, we rescheduled the hearings again, and now we are here in August. I mention all of this because there have been some in the Hawaiian community who seem to want to focus all of their energy not on the constructive and positive things that can be achieved through these hearings, and not on the opportunity to make their concerns known to the Congress, but rather to spend their time being critical and focusing upon changes in the hearing schedule, as if those changes were the most important issue and as if such changes were evidence of some bad motive or hidden agenda.

I can assure you there is no hidden agenda here. These hearings are for the people, the Native Hawaiian people, and the schedule of the hearings has been changed several times to accommodate what the people have said were their concerns.

Thus, I hope we can begin today and we can go forward with our eyes fixed on what can be accomplished. The record of these hearings will provide the basis for action by the Congress to address the concerns that are expressed, if such action is warranted and recommended. The record will also serve a very important purpose, and that is to educate the Federal agencies as to what they can do to support the development of these lands.