Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 8, Number 1, 1 January 1991 — Native land rights book wins honor [ARTICLE]

Native land rights book wins honor

"Native Amenean Estate: The Struggle Over Indian and Hawaiian Lands" by Linda S. Parker (University of Hawaii Press, 1989, 256 pages, $24) has just been named an outsfanding book on the subject of human rights in the United States. The Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Human Rights in the United States in Fayetteville, Arkansas granted the award on Human Rights Day, Dec. 10, 1990. Land ownership and sovereignty — to whom do the land, the water, hunting, and fishing rights really belong? Parker's book deals both with the Native Americans' landed estate on the mainland and in Hawaii, and with their struggle with non-natives to possess it. The introduction to the book explains the perceptions, and rationale for dispossessing the native people whose land-tenure systems differed so radically from the European system. Parker, a Cherokee trained as both a historian and an attorney, uses case law and history to eompare American Indian and Hawaiian land and resource issues. She covers a multitude of issues, region by region, during the 19th and 20th eenturies. The legal arguments used by non-Indians in the past are shown to be based on the analytical justification of cultural superiority.