Like the “Vanishing American,” indigenous Hawaiians had long been depicted as a dying race within a society dominated by the Americans and Asian Americans primarily of Japanese and Chinese extraction. Yet the Kanaka Maoli persisted and resisted. According to the 2010 census, Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders comprised about 10 percent of the population of the islands; about one-quarter of Hawai’i’s population was “white” and about 39 percent were Asian. Just under a quarter of the population reported two or more races of origin.20
In Hawai’i, as on the mainland, in Australia, and in other settler societies, historical denial is intrinsic to the legitimation of settler colonial society. Settlercentric historiography “attempts to redeem the settler state by casting it as a multicultural nation.” In Hawai’i, the “scarcity of direct references to colonialism coupled with virtual absence of references to settler colonialism” in museums, exhibitions, and public discourse perpetuates historical denial.21
A movement for Hawaiian sovereignty began to gain momentum in the 1980s and 1990s in tandem with the rise of the global indigenous rights movement. Some Kanaka Maoli refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance, file US or state tax returns, or get a driver’s license, explaining that American laws were illegitimate and that Hawai’i was under colonial occupation. With the UN Human Rights Commission and other nongovernmental organizations providing a forum, the legacies of colonialism and postcolonial condition of indigenous peoples garnered unprecedented international attention. Pressured by the rise of the indigenous rights movement, settler states acknowledged the colonial past as a means of declaring closure to the issue.22
In 1993, on the centennial anniversary of the US-led coup, the US Congress passed an Apology Resolution, which President Bill Clinton duly signed. The resolution conferred no new rights, privileges, or compensation nor did it address the destruction of Kanaka Maoli culture.23 Postcolonial Hawai’i remained firmly in US hands, a critical outpost in the global US military and security empire.24
Also marking the centennial of annexation in 1993 was the Peoples’ International Tribunal, which conducted hearings and proceedings throughout the Hawaiian Islands. The Tribunal, based on the model established by Bertrand Russell during the Vietnam War, convened for 12 days, visited five islands, and involved hundreds of scholars and activists. In the end, the Tribunal leveled nine charges of human rights violations against the United States including illegal annexation, forced assimilation and imposition of statehood, environmental destruction, and genocide. The Tribunal based the latter charge on the appalling and still deteriorating health conditions and deliberate destruction of indigenous culture, including historically imposed restrictions on the use of the Hawaiian language. The Tribunal’s records and findings became part of the international human rights regime. The Tribunal was the subject of a documentary film (“The Tribunal,” 1994) and a book (Islands of Captivity, 2004). While it “received a significant amount of press coverage in Hawai’i” the Tribunal was “largely ignored by the U.S. media.”25
Meanwhile, the legacies of settler colonialism remain palpable on the Islands. Ultimately, less than 5 percent of Hawaiian land was set aside as indigenous homelands, reflecting the near-total usurpation of colonial space. Colonialism thus created “the very structure of the settler state and its persistent, institutionalized policies of elimination.”26 In addition to being dispossessed, indigenous Hawaiians like Indians and other colonized peoples around the world face higher rates of homelessness, unemployment, poverty, declining health, substance abuse, crime, and incarceration, all legacies of American and Asian American settler colonialism.27 Some analysts have characterized as a “hidden holocaust” the rates of infant mortality and the shorter lifespan of Hawaiians in comparison to virtually all other US ethnicities.28
The high level of homelessness of the Kanaka Maoli is a bitterly ironic albeit “frequently overlooked part of the ongoing legacy of settler colonialism.” Homelessness underscores a “transformation of the indigenous into the indigent.” Thousands of indigenous Hawaiians are unable to afford housing in one of the most expensive real estate markets in the United States and are simultaneously faced with “ever-dwindling state assistance.” New laws clamped down on the homeless, making it illegal to sleep in public parks or beaches, casting these Hawaiians “as a blight on the landscape damaging the state’s touristic image.”29
The blood quantum provision defining Hawaiian identity remains contentious, as it minimizes rather than maximizes the number of people who can claim indigenous status. Blood quantum also perpetuates notions of the Kanaka Maoli as “a racial minority rather than indigenous people with national sovereignty claims” and frames indigenous policy as colonial welfare rather than entitlement to the land. Moreover, J. Kehaulani Kauanui explains, many indigenous Hawaiians oppose the blood quantum criterion today, because it “undercuts indigenous Hawaiian epistemologies that define identity on the basis of one’s kinship and genealogy.”30
Today a vocal contingent of Kanaka Maoli demands full sovereignty and separation from the United States while others seek a degree of autonomy. Some identify with Asian settlers generically as “locals,” drawing a distinction with the haole and mainlanders, while others link the Asian settlers with whites as invaders of the islands. Many work within the American legal system in pursuit of civil rights and welfare reform while also advancing an agenda of indigenous rights. Collectively, they have called attention to indigenous issues and sparked a “resurgence of Hawaiian language and culture.”31
Over a Barrel: The Politics of Alaskan Indigeneity
As in Hawai’i, statehood brought indigenous Alaskans de jure legal equality yet they remained second-class citizens in terms of income, housing, education, health care, and almost any other quality of life measure, a federal study concluded in 1968.32 At the same time, the rise of rights consciousness in the 1960s—not only the African-American civil rights movement but the American Indian movement as well—galvanized indigenous protests and legal challenges in Alaska. American settler colonial migrants, meanwhile, anchored the state’s economic development, which increasingly revolved around the drive to tap Alaska’s massive oil reserves.
The legacies of settler colonialism remained strongly entrenched in Alaska, as many Americans opposed any settlement with the indigenes and continued to view them as primitives who had no legitimate claim to the land. “They wouldn’t use it,” explained Alaska’s lone congressman, Ralph Rivers. “It would just lie there.” The Alaska Miners Association declared, “Neither the U.S., the state of Alaska, nor any of us gathered here as individuals owes the Natives one acre of ground or one cent of taxpayers’ money.”33
Despite these hostile sentiments, the US economic and political elite could not dispense with the legacies of colonialism so easily, mainly because indigenous claims posed an obstacle to the proposed Alaska oil pipeline project as well as the broader development agenda. A negotiated settlement unique to Alaska emerged, yet included characteristics redolent of a long history of treaty making with indigenous people, who had given up land as whites pledged their commitment to benevolent assimilation. What made the Alaska settlement unique, however, was the extent to which the indigenes participated in forging the agreement.
In 1971, indigenous activists and US negotiators came to terms on the historic Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA). Under ANCSA, Congress paid US$962.5 million in compensation for extinguishing indigenous title to all but 44 million acres of Alaska land. Under the settlement, the indigenes relinquished claims to 330 million acres of land in return for stock in village corporations. “The chief objective of the complex landmark act,” Stephen Haycox explains, “was to free Alaska’s potential economic development from Native protest while simultaneously empowering Natives through economic capitalization and achieving justice in terms of Aboriginal land claims.”34
As with the Dawes Act and other settler colonial initiatives, promoting indigenous assimilation was “
a principal objective of the ANCSA settlement,” though the agreement did not force indigenous Alaskans to leave their villages. The agreement provided economic incentives to indigenes albeit with attendant social values that were “antithetical to those embodied in traditional cultures.” Although ANCSA did little to preserve indigenous culture, and its corporate structure clearly reflected a modernist framework, indigenous leaders participated meaningfully at every level in the drafting of the agreement. ANCSA provided unprecedented empowerment of indigenous Alaskans, as some of new corporations became large and prosperous. The settlement also provided for parks, wildlife refuges, and protection of wild and scenic rivers. In a subsequent out-of-court settlement, the state agreed to provide village schooling for indigenes at a substantial cost.35
The active role played by indigenous Alaskans was unprecedented in the history of American settler colonialism. “In Alaska the act was received by Natives and non-Natives alike as a great milestone in the history of the territory and its people.” As Mary Clay Berry pointed out, despite its flaws the settlement “was an extraordinary agreement in view of the United States’ traditional way of settling its Indian problems.”36
Despite the high level of consultation afforded indigenes in the ANCSA, the results were ambiguous at best and did not relieve indigenous Alaskans from economic and social marginalization. While ANCSA removed obstacles in the path of development, enabling completion of the oil pipeline in 1977, the settlement “has done little to alleviate the economic and social problems that are pandemic in Native villages.” Some of the village corporations made poor investments and then sold off their debts for cash payments. Swept into the modern world, indigenes bought snowmobiles, ATVs, vacations to the lower 48, and some managed college tuition for their children. As Donald Mitchell notes, “Alaska Natives have sought as much access as possible to modernity and the constantly expanding array of goods that modernity provides.”37
Modernization and the changes wrought by the ANCSA had a traumatic impact on many indigenous people and their cultures. Most of the nearly 134,000 indigenes in Alaska (about 19 percent of the state’s total population in the 2010 census) still lived in villages. “Poverty, though high, is much reduced since ANCSA’s enactment, but many of ANCSA’s benefits have not reached the villages,” a recent study found. “Perhaps one half of natives alive today do not own ANCSA stock.”38 The regional corporations failed to create sufficient employment opportunities in the rural areas, forcing many to leave for the cities. “If you leave the village, you desert your family,” an Alaska mental health counselor has pointed out. “If you stay in the village, you desert your future.”39 Faced with such a Hobson’s choice, many indigenes turned to alcohol or substance abuse and crime, as their incarceration and suicide rates exceeded those of the colonizing population.
Though ANCSA made Alaska unique, the relationship between indigenous Alaskans, the federal government, and settler society remains similar to the mainland. In 1988, Congress restructured ANCSA to make indigenous Alaskans eligible for all federal Indian programs on the same basis as Indians on the mainland. In both cases human service programs expanded substantially following passage of the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act in 1975.40
The suggestion by indigenes and their supporters that more ought to be done to redress the continuing legacies of settler colonialism has received little traction in the politically conservative “red” state of Alaska. Suppressed feelings of guilt and rationalization are common, as some settlers aver that the indigenes have been “given” enough, a viewpoint that elides the colonial past. “I get tired of [hearing] they gave us forty four million acres and a billion dollars,” an indigenous Alaskan shoots back. “They didn’t give us shit. They stole it, and the only time they were interested in settling it was when they found a few barrels of oil.”41
Indigenous Alaskans, increasing in numbers and assertiveness, still “own or control substantial lands and resources either as corporations or tribes.” Indigenous people and their governments are well positioned to reinvigorate their cultures and traditions. Indigenous empowerment offers the possibility that, in the twenty-first century, Alaska “will eventually find a place where the relationships between immigrant and indigenous Americans may enrich each other.”42
Taking Colonialism to Court
ANCSA underscores the role of law and reconceptualization of space in postcolonial society, and here some of the most significant reversals in the history of American settler colonialism have unfolded. Just as the colonizer used the law to deliver a number of nasty surprises over centuries of dispossession and treaty making, Indians turned the tables by marshaling legal precedent as a weapon of redress and even repossession of land. Thus the quest to disavow the colonizing act by using the law as the primary tool of dispossession boomeranged on the colonizer, as the indigenes and their lawyers resurrected old treaties, sued for legal enforcement, and variously demanded expanded jurisdiction, exclusive rights, compensation, and autonomy.
By the 1970s, the Red Power movement and indigenous activism produced change in public perceptions that carried over into the law. The Nixon administration backed Indian self-determination while the Supreme Court issued the landmark Boldt decision (1974), restoring exclusive indigenous rights to a portion of the Puget Sound salmon fishery on the basis of treaty rights dating to the mid-nineteenth century. Congress weighed in with a series of legislative reforms, including the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act (1975); the Native American Religious Freedom Act (1978); the Indian Child Welfare Act (1978); the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act (1988); the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (1990); the Native American Languages Act (1990); and the Indian Tribal Energy Development and Self Determination Act (2005).
Spurred by the Boldt decision, Indians and their supporters mounted an ongoing series of legal challenges based on historic treaty violations. After the Penobscot and Passamaquoddy Indians brought suit in Maine, the tribes in 1980 received US$81.5 million in compensation for lands illegally taken from them. Several Iroquois bands followed suit, literally, and won substantial land claims in the courts during the 1980s.43
These and other successful indigenous legal challenges ultimately produced a backlash within settler society. In an effort to reassert authority, the colonizer effects an inversion in which tribes are framed as the colonizers (if not as “socialists”) demanding special privileges.44 Under this frame, the ethnic minority becomes the aggressor and the majority population the victims deprived of their prerogative through, for example, the enforcement of treaties or restoration of exclusive rights. Anticolonial activism and legal challenges have thus spurred political conflict within a settler society that continues to feel threatened by indigenous people, no matter how marginalized.
By the time of the conservative Rehnquist Court (1986–2001), the Supreme Court as well as lesser courts began to shoot down indigenous claims. “The late twentieth century to the present has seen a consistent erosion of the federal common law rights of indigenous peoples,” legal scholars pointed out in 2012. Supreme Court decisions turned against the trend toward broadened recognition of tribal jurisdiction and un-extinguished claims to colonized space. “As the progressive era of Indian law jurisprudence has receded, the new tendency in the Court’s tests, rules, and rhetoric is to define tribal powers according to policies, values, and assumptions prevalent in non-Indian society.”45
The struggle for legal rights included efforts to protect indigenous land from natural resource extraction industries, which placed “enormous pressure” on the tribes. As Colin Calloway has noted, “In the nineteenth century the United States wanted Indian land; in the twentieth century it wanted Indian resources such as coal, natural gas, uranium, timber and water.”46 Mining operations scarred Indian land and often had damaging health impacts such as excessive levels of radiation from uranium mining. Indians sued for damages in some of these cases yet the tribes fac
ed difficult choices of their own between profiting from the use of their land balanced against the impact on the quality of life. Bands could be divided, for example, on whether to allow strip mining or to accept toxic wastes on reservations, which became a favored dumping ground for industry.
As they pursued both rights and anticolonial politics, Indians as well as Alaskans and Hawaiians thus had to consider the extent that they wished to join or maintain distance from capitalist development and mainstream lifestyles in order to preserve culture and community. Indian gaming is a case in point. In 1983 a Pequot band won federal recognition and tribal autonomy that enabled casino gambling. The tribe proceeded to open the massive Foxwoods Resort Casino in eastern Connecticut, which generated enormous profits in a state that otherwise outlawed casino gaming. Throughout the country various tribes have turned their land into gaming meccas, yet many Indians view gambling as a scourge that erodes indigenous culture and community while promoting addiction among tribal members. Thus while some bands generate wealth through gaming, others remain mired in abject poverty with few routes of escape.
Indigenous people in North America, as in other postcolonial settings, continue to suffer disproportionately from childhood mortality, sharply lower rates of life expectancy, disease and limited access to health care, lack of education and employment opportunities, alcoholism and drug abuse, crime and incarceration, and other social problems. In 2003, the US Commission on Civil Rights issued a report entitled “A Quiet Crisis” concluding that indigenous people continued to rank at or near the bottom of almost all social health and economic indicators. The report recommended increased funding for health care, infrastructure development, tribal courts, as well as allocations to “permit tribes to pursue their own priorities and allow tribal governments to respond to the needs of their citizens.”47 A conservative Congress and fiscal crises have not been conducive to addressing these needs.
American Settler Colonialism: A History Page 34
