Hank Fergerstrom

Why is Hawaii a state?  That is a really loaded question. Its a state because a large majority of the people who were living here voted for statehood.  However there was no other alternative than either statehood or territory and so the alternative that was left out was the rights of the indigenous peoples like ourselves and that was the right of free association, they didn't tell us there were things like that.

Native Hawaiians and Statehood

When you take over peoples and you take their land away, and you take their religion away, and you take their language away, you even make those things like their religion or language illegal, and you take them away from the things that they know how to do like planting taro, you take their water away, and you give them a can of corned beef, and these guys are saying well this is a lot easier to do, and pretty soon he becomes enslaved to it, then you have social problems that creep up, with the poor people, or the people who choose to live in the old way as opposed to the more modern way-- well the old way has sustained up for thousands of years.  The modern way seems to have created an enormous amount of problems- I mean we only have a little over a million people in Hawaii and prior to the western civilization coming here, we had almost a million people, but we did not have homelessness, we did not have starvation, we did not have all these medical problems, and so society, the way that this society is, it creates its own disease and it's eating itself. It creates abnormal social conditions-- that are actually-- one could actually write formulas on this-- I mean if you deprive someone for so long, then he's obviously going to get angry, because you have and he does not, how do you stop this guy--he's mad because you got it-- and so what they do is that they create all these little laws, people get angry, they get into fights about it, that kind of stuff, and we go to jail. We're put in the institutions. So every time we try to say something to try to defend our right to be, it suddenly becomes a criminal offense.

The Prison Problem

Currently we have a system that is so off balance.  The Hawaiians are probably the largest of all the stats in prison incarceration, mental institutions. Right now our prisoners are really in dire straights because we have a problem with what I call cruel and unusual punishment. And that's the removal of our prisoners from our lands and taking them to America because of the price. Where anybody who knows anything about social reform knows that one of the greatest things to help a prisoner become adapted to society is to have his family around him, to bring him back into that society, but here you have it, you just send him off the mainland, they have no contact with anybody, it's extraordinary expensive on their families to go visit him and really extraordinary expensive even on phone calls.  When you call a party they have to be verified by the operator to accept the expense-- and its not the same expense you'd expect with a regular phone call, oh no no no no  no, everybody makes money on the side here, everybody makes a great deal of money on it, at the expense of the people.

Ecological Issues

In the old days in the kapu system, the kapus were really about ecological things, things like you don't take lobsters when they have eggs. You don't fish a certain type of fish when they're breeding.  So a lot of those kinds of things have become something that is no longer in control of the hawaiian people themselves, they've become under the control of the state, and the state does not have the same philosphy of malama aina, and malama kekai, or which is malama the land and malama the ocean, they don't have the same philosophies-- at least the depth of philospohy.  They say it but they don't necessarily enact it.  And so we end up in kinds of these battles over things like water-- water use.  In fact, today we had a large demonstration over the thought of GMO, the genetically modified organizations that are trying to get a patent on out taro. Now genetic modification as it's been applied has been used really because the natural occurances of things like water, space and stuff like that is diminishing, and so they keep trying to modify these plants to help them survive in the things that were not providing them.  Like for example, with the GMOs, they want inject certain kinds of bug juices into these plants to get that gene so that type of bug will not react with that type of plant.  Well I'm sure there are uses for genetically modification for some things but when you talk about a whole peoples staple food, one like the taro is, one which we as Hawaiians feel like we are related to, a blood relationship to it, the taro, it creates a very awkward situation. That you are actually saying to me that you want to modify my gene, my DNA, and you want to have a patent on it, and this is totally absurd, I mean, the way of America-- and I say that cautiously-- the way of America is to just sell it and sell it and sell it, and keep selling it and selling it, grabbing and exploiting it and selling it to the next guy, and maybe that's fine in the United States of America where you have vast amounts of land, and land that is not used, but when you are in an island situation like we are  in the middle of the Pacific, you don't have the luxury of wasting anything, not your water, not your land, you can't afford to pollute your waters, can't afford to pollute your oceans, you can't afford genetic modification testing, because if something went wrong, it's at our expense.

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