Native Hawaiians are the only federally recognized native people without a government-to-government relationship with the United States. This, in part, is by the will of Native Hawaiian activists; but the federal recognition of Native Hawaiians poses a logistical challenge as well.
First, simply, there are 680,442 Native Hawaiians in the U.S., according to the last Census. Native Hawaiians organized under a single governing entity would constitute the largest tribe in the U.S., with more than half of its members residing outside of Hawaiʻi. Second, a Gordian knot of complication, is the challenge of defining Native Hawaiian indigeneity. The Hawaiian Homes Commission Act of 1921 (HHCA) created a land trust for the homesteading of Native Hawaiians on ceded lands from the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi. The act included a blood quantum definition, outlining Native Hawaiians as persons with 50% or more Hawaiian blood (a difficult threshold to meet, let alone substantiate in records lost to denationalization). The federal government oversaw the administration of the land trust, but that responsibility passed onto the state of Hawaiʻi after statehood, and it is now overseen by the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands (DHHL), with a portion of ceded lands managed by the Office of Hawaiian Affairs (OHA). Many people in federal corridors point to OHA as the likely governing entity of a prospective Native Hawaiian tribe, due to its longstanding, state-recognized partnership and bestowed authority. At its founding, OHA was governed by an elected board of trustees who were of Native Hawaiian ancestry (qualified voters also had to be of Native Hawaiian descent). But a lawsuit in 2000 accused OHA of violating the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments in its race-based provision, and a Supreme Court ruling allowed for non-Hawaiians to vote and be elected to serve on the board. The ruling means that any Native Hawaiian tribal group helmed by OHA could include members who are not descendants of aboriginal Hawaiians (making determinations of indigeneity). Hawaiʻi Sen. Daniel Akaka proposed a bill, which has taken various forms since 2000, that attempted to create a semi-sovereign Native Hawaiian tribal group. In one configuration, the bill would create a nine-member commission appointed by the Secretary of the Interior to make determinations of indigeneity, but this commission, too, would allow for non-Hawaiian membership. In 2014, the Department of Interior held a series of hearings to begin an administrative procedure to allow for federal recognition; with a final rule creating a framework for recognition drafted in 2016. Native Hawaiians have been unable to agree on a path forward. In 2022, the Interior Department announced it would seek input from community leaders over a new consultation policy to put Native Hawaiians on a path to recognition. “Fulfilling the Federal trust responsibility to our Indigenous nations isn’t simply a matter of goodwill. It is a matter of justice, of promises kept,” said Sen. Daniel Akaka in March 2011, discussing a bill he sent before Congress to establish the process for tribal status. “The Kingdom of Hawaii was never a tribe,” Francis Moku Malani, Jr. testified in a hearing before the Department of Interior, “We are a sovereign nation.” Comments are closed.
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