Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 18, Number 9, 1 September 2001 — TRUSTEE MESSAGES Leo ʻElele [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

TRUSTEE MESSAGES Leo ʻElele

Federal home loans, recognition bill revisited

Rowena Akana Trustee, At-large

As the chair of the Committee on Program Management it is one of my goals to make OHA's home loan program availahle to Hawaiians who are not on homestead lands. One of the pressmg needs for native Hawaiians are loans for homes. As chair, I have been looking for ways to iehieve this. I recently traveled to \Sashington. D.C., to speak to a representative of the Fannie Mae program. 1 would like to be able to use federal monies to help OHA to expand the home l,oan program. The meeting went very well. It appears that Fannie Mae might be able to work with OHA on a pilot program to achieve our goal. I will keep you posted on this project. On another note — the Akaka

Bill, S.B. 746, will be heard in October. There are two areas of the bill of concern to me. Last year a similar bill was introduced in the United States Senate — S.B. 2899. S.B. 2899 provided a process that was to be used in determining the governing entity of the Native Hawaiians and the creation of a membership roll (see Section 7). The current bill, S.B. 746, deietes this process. Without reinserting this language into the current bill the process will be doomed to failure. I believe that Section 7 of S.B. 2899 should have been left intact replacing the current Section 6 of S.B. 746. Without a process to determine membership and establish an interim governing body there is too

mueh room for error and capriciousness. As currently written, any group claiming to represent the Native Hawaiian people could form an organization, send in papers to the Secretary of the Interior and ask that they be certified as the official membership roll. In order for this process to be fair, the creation of a membership roll needs to be reinstated. Additionally, the new section, Section 6(b)(2)(B) requires the Secretary of the Interior to certify that the State of Hawai'i supports the Native Hawaiian governing entity by resolution or act of the state. I believe the recognition process should not have as a requirement that the State of Hawai'i be involved in the process. Given the

fact that the State of Hawai'i has controlled all of Hawaiian ceded lands since statehood in 1959. this would create a conflict of interest between the state and its native people. For this reason this section needs to be deleted. I have sent testimony on S.B. 746 as stated above to the Committee on Indian Affairs regarding my concerns on this new bill. In conclusion, Section 7 of S.B. 2899 regarding the roll and the process for recognition should be reinserted as recommended by the United States Justice Department in its testimony in the year 2000, and Section 6(b)(2)(B) requiring recognition by the State of Hawai'i should be deleted. ■