LET me offer some admiring words for Rep. Ed Case, chairman of the House of Representatives' Committee on Hawaiian Affairs. At least eight leaders of diverse Hawaiian groups have shelled his proposed 124-page Native Hawaiian autonomy bill and/or him personally. Ed Case's Native Hawaiian autonomy bill
The bill obviously is dead on arrival at the Legislature. But that doesn't mean the bill is useless. Case never had any intention of trying to bring it to the floor this year.
But he sees it as a catalyst for discussion about the future of Hawaiian affairs in Hawaii. It still can be. And he's sticking by his guns.
He sees, perhaps better than many, that the blame-placing aspect of the Hawaiian renaissance, now over 20 years old, has been won. We have had a federal apology, Kahoolawe Island returned, the Hawaiian Homes program made whole with more land and $600 million, and the Office of Hawaiian Affairs formed and enriched with over $200 million of ceded land revenue while seeking hundreds of millions more.
Case now seeks a focus on a future workable for Hawaiians and non-Hawaiians alike. He wants the silent majority to chime in.
The proposed autonomy bill would merge Hawaiian assets like Hawaiian Home Lands and the Office of Hawaiian Affairs into a single Hawaiian-controlled entity for enhanced economic power and leverage. It would be nonprofit and independent of state government.
He would transfer to it many present state and federal responsibilities such as creating Hawaiian language immersion programs and deciding whether the present 50 percent blood quantum required for Hawaiian Homes grants should be modified in the future. Today Hawaii may have less than 50,000 residents with 50 percent or more Hawaiian blood, perhaps over 150,000 more with Hawaiian quantums between 49 and 1 percent, and 900,000 or so with no Hawaiian blood.
Just about everyone agrees that initial decisions on the Hawaiian future must be worked out among Hawaiians. Next would come dialogue with the larger community, a process at least one of Case's Hawaiian-leader critics says Hawaiians are ready for.
Case in part is operating on that last assumption. He did not seek the Hawaiian Affairs chairmanship. Speaker Joe Souki asked him more than once before he took it. But he could be a good choice - a kamaaina haole apart from the still-continuing struggles to lead the Hawaiian movement, bright, level-headed and in love with Hawaii.
Verbal volleys were lobbed at him in a Sunday demonstration at Iolani Palace, in a full page ad by OHA in the most recent Sunday Advertiser, through five essays in the Jan. 11 Sunday Advertiser and on the "Price of Paradise" radio shows of Jan. 11 and 18. He appeared on the first show and stood his ground.
Case might do well to think of Winston Churchill. Churchill said democracy is the worst form of government in the world except for any other.
MY hunch is all the slamming and bashing Case has stimulated will come to some good end. At least it should if we define a good end as better Hawaiian and general public understanding of the alternatives ahead.
Some say Case is premature. Well, maybe. But is there ever really any good time to start a heated discussion? Mediator Peter Adler prefers quiet discussions to bring knotty questions to resolution. But quiet discussions often proceed better if the cards are first laid on the table for the public to see and fret about.
Adler and others, for example, now are working on the divisive issue of how to exercise traditional Hawaiian access and gathering rights on private property held by others. But a noisy public period preceded the quiet talk. Maybe the democratic process demands that.