Letter to the Lāhui: Early this week I was a part of a panel “Hoʻopunipuni: The Myth of Statehood” organized by Arnie Saiki, in Los Angeles. Julian Aguon, Kekuni Blaisdell, Kuhio Vogeler and I all spoke about the many different and connected deceptions that have maintained the fiction that Hawaiʻi belongs to the United States. [...]

Assigning credit where credit is due, I am obliged to give Mr. Conklin his due for the development of a story based on correspondences between the U.N., the Department of State and the U.S. Congress that I’ve been discussing regarding Hawaii’s plebiscite and its controversial removal from the United Nations list of Non-Self-Governing Territories. In [...]

The story by which Hawaii became a state in 1959 usually mythologizes a heroic effort by the Statehood Commission and the lobbying efforts of Territorial representative John Burns, and highlights the hurdles that Congress confronted before eventually voting for Hawaii’s statehood. These hurdles mainly involve racist bigotry and communist allegations along with various facets of [...]

We haven’t digitized the video taping of the event yet, and I’m happy to report that the May 4th event was lively, engaging, and more than met our high expectations. Rather than summarize what Julian Aguon, Kekuni Blaisdell, Jon Osorio, Kuhio Vogeler, Randy Kaulana Chang or myself presented and discussed in the Ho’opunipuni: Myth of [...]

Go to original Mr. Conklin, you write: “The U.N. then did in fact remove Hawaii (and also Alaska) from that list in December 1959. Burgess (Laenui) claims that this notification about statehood was a fraud, because the ballot for the statehood vote did not offer the option of independence. And somehow the real experts on [...]