Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 23, Number 5, 1 May 2007 — Reflecting on our future [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

Reflecting on our future

£ A no'ai kākou. First, may / \ I weleome Trustee Bob A. A.Lindsey to the Board and wish him well on his representation of the Big Island and all Hawai'i as we continue to move forward. I look forward to many years working with him. I have in recent weeks had oeeasion to attend funerals of friends, family and associates, including former Trustees Linda Dela Cruz and Tom Kaulukukui. The latest notice was of a high school classmate, Kahimoku Nahulu, with whom I spent 12 years at Kamehameha. All have been Hawaiians of noble character, humility and love of their people and families. As they move on to another existence where others have gone before, I cannot help but ponder the future of us all and what we need to accomplish before we join those who have left us for now. What is it that we best leave to our posterity? How will we be remembered by those we love and those who may not love us? Why should we even be concerned about the future and our reputation or the memories of us? Who are we and why are we here and where are we going? As a Hawaiian, as an American and as a child of God, I believe that I have an obligation to my fellow man to seek and achieve justice, to help bring peaee to mankind and to establish the means for all people to find true happiness in this life and joy in the eternities. How? As I focus on Hawai'i and the Hawaiian people to answer these questions, I begin with the genealogy by whieh our posterity ean learn of us and by whieh we ean appreciate our ancestors who eame before. By maintaining a journal or diary we at least leave something of ourselves for others to view some day. A personal history or autobiography

summarizes our lives and gives others insight into our history, thoughts and intentions. As for our ancestors, recording all we know and ean discover of them for us and our posterity will continue their lines into the future. Our decisions today may even be affected by our ancestry as aptly demonstrated in inherited physical infirmities and characteristics of personality, land title issues, etc. My family probably has the longest hapa-haole line in Hawai'i dating from the time of Kamehameha I with the marriage of his kidnapped aide, Isaac Davis, to Nakai Nalimaalualua. The Adams, Boyd, Harbottle and Mossman families are all in my genealogy going back seven generations. If the posterity of Nakai and Isaac Davis all married non-Hawaiians, my Hawaiian blood would be about 1/128 and my grandchildren 1/512. So what? Well, as our children and grandchildren continue to marry non-Hawaiians, it is only a matter of time before there will be a significant population of Hawaiians with only that amount of Hawaiian. And so, it should not be race or blood that is the motivating factor for recognition as argued against us in the courts, but justice as provided in the efforts for federal recognition and the Akaka Bill and the aeknowledgment that the Constitution allows Congress to make political decisions that ean preserve an entire people as well as their culture, traditions, language, heritage, etc. so long as they are the indigenous people of America. In our case, not only are we indigenous, but we were an independent nation and internationally recognized as well. The case for federal recognition does not rest on racial discrimination but on the political will, authority and desire of Congress to right an egregious wrong. For our posterity we ean leave a sense of justice and a homeland. Their future is in our hands. Do we let it slip out as we argue amongst ourselves, or do we join hands and work together? Long are the disputes, short is the time. E

LEO 'ELELE ■ TRUSTEE MESSAGES —

Bnyd P. Mūssman TrustEE, Maui