Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 22, Number 4, 1 April 2005 — Original OHA trustee Roy Benham remembers, looks ahead [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Original OHA trustee Roy Benham

remembers, looks ahead

By Manu Boyd Editor's note: In commemoration of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs' 25"' anniversary, throughout the year Ka Wai Ola will be presenting memories and insights from some of the people who were invo1ved in OHA's creation. This month, Roy Ēenham, one of OHA' s first board. of nine trustees, recalls those early days. After living on the continent in the quiet of Marin County for five years and, before that, in Europe as an army civilian for five more, Roy Benham didn't know quite what he was coming home to more than a quarter century ago. With the 1978 State Constitutional Convention completed, Benham, a year later, received a eall from Ray Pua in the City Clerk's office. "A meeting was to be held at Kawaiaha 'o Church enlisting help in registering Hawaiians to vote," Benham remembers. "What was most compelling was that we were going to register Hawaiians for the first-ever elee lion to select leaders - trustees - for the brand-new Office of

Hawaiian Affairs. "A few months into the registration, people started asking if I was running, and said that they'd vote if I did," Benham said. "So I did. It was a long shot. There were 80 candidates or more, and only nine would be selected." Benham remembers Election Day in November 1980 well: "They told us to go down to the Capitol to eheek out the print-outs. I went pretty late and hardly had anyone there. I looked at the OHA elections and saw that I was number eight. 'Are you running?' someone asked. 'Yeah, Office of Hawaiian Affairs,' I said. 'Oh then you're in already since you're that high up."" Turns out that somebody was Ben Cayetano, himself a legislative candidate that year. "The first gathering we had after the elee lion was in the lieutenant governor's office," Benham recalled. "We had no staff or office of our own. We had to piek our leader, and someone suggested that the highest vote-getter be ehainnan of the board. That was Walter Ritte from Moloka'i. I was a teacher and had done personnel work in the army, so I sort of took the lead in helping get things organized.

"We set up committees for culture, education, employment and all, and we also included community members in our committees for input. One problem we had was in getting neighbor island participation. We had no money. All we got was per diem payments for attending meetings - so we started holding plenty meetings. "The employment rate among Hawaiians was our big priority. The eulture was being renewed, and we wanted to support that too. What we didn't want to do was duplicate services of other state agencies, like the Department of Health, so we met with them and encouraged them to better serve Hawaiians. These agencies had so many Hawaiian 'customers'; we wondered why they weren't better served. "The Legislature was very pleased with OHA because they didn't really know how to handle Hawaiian issues. They eame to us for advice." Looking back over the years, Benham feels that OHA may have lost its sense of community. "In the few meetings I've been to, it seems that OHA now tells the community what to do, rather than getting their input," he said. But Benham

sees the recent increase in community grants as a step in the right direction: "I like what OHA is doing now in assisting the community in establishing a Hawaiian governing entity. I don't throw out independence, but it needs to be timed right. The Akaka Bill is okay for now, but future generations may want to negotiate differently. We need to keep the door open. "In the next 25 years, I'd like to see Hawaiians have a governing entity fully responsive to Hawaiian people's needs, like education, health and kupuna care. Today, we don't have the expertise to run a government, but we will. In 25 years, we'll be so good that non-Hawaiians will look at us and say, 'They're doing a mueh better job than the state."" When asked what his grandmother might say about what was going on with Hawaiians today, he pondered. "Grandma always wanted to help Hawaiians, especially those less fortunate. She spoke fluent Hawaiian, and was alive during the time of the overthrow. I think she would be pleased," he said, of the rejuvenated Hawaiian language, culture and sense of identity. "She would be overwhelmed." Ll

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