Walter Ritte has been a political activist in Hawaii for many decades, most recently as a leader in the movement against GMO (genetically modified organism) foods.
In 2005 he led protests on Molokai against Monsanto, a GMO company that has a large presence there, and later opposed efforts by the University of Hawaii and others to genetically modify and patent taro. Taro, of course, is virtually sacred in Native Hawaiian cosmology, and Ritte has been all about upholding Native Hawaiian culture and practices since his earliest days as an activist.
His passion for Native Hawaiian rights grew out of his upbringing on Molokai. He got in trouble there with major landowner Molokai Ranch, he said, because he would trespass to follow the deer he was hunting.
"The deer wouldn’t read the signs, and I had to follow the deer," he said. "So that’s the beginning of trying to figure out what happened — how come all my kupuna could go and I couldn’t go. That was the awareness of all these new signs and gates and fences that came up without any input from Hawaiians about their rights to go and feed their families. So that got me involved in Hawaiian rights."
The notoriety he gained from pursuing that issue led to him getting involved in the years-long effort to return to Hawaii control the island of Kahoolawe, which the U.S. military had long used for bombing practice. Securing the island’s return was "a huge success for Hawaiians," he said, because "Hawaiians defeated the United States of America — not with guns, but with aloha."
That, in turn, led to Ritte helping influence the outcome of the 1978 state Constitutional Convention, as it relates to Native Hawaiian rights, and then to being elected a trustee of the newly formed state Office of Hawaiian Affairs, where he agitated, unsuccessfully, for a settlement of the ceded lands issue. Later, Ritte succeeded as a plaintiff in a water rights case on Molokai, and just generally has been a thorn in the side of interests who try to ignore either Native Hawaiians generally or Molokai residents in particular. In recent years, for example, he has led protests against the arrival of cruise ships to the island and the development of 200 oceanfront homes at its La‘au Point.
Also a former director of the Molokai office of the state Department of Business and Economic Development, Ritte is a graduate of Kamehameha Schools and also attended the University of Hawaii for three years on a basketball scholarship. Now 67, he lives in a self-sufficient kauhale he built himself on three acres of Hawaiian homestead land in Ho’olehua, Molokai. He is married to the former Miss Hawaii Loretta Ann Perreira, with whom he has five children, 11 grandchildren and one great-grandchild.
For income, he said, he does odd jobs, receives Social Security and operates a fishpond, which doubles as an education center.
QUESTION: Why are you so concerned about the GMO issue? What’s the problem with that?
ANSWER: Well, the problem here on Molokai is that all of our lands that are supposedly producing food are producing seeds, and it’s exporting all the seeds.
Q: They’re growing the seeds on Molokai?
A: The largest employer on this island is Monsanto. That’s why we’re so involved. We’ve been watching them farm for the last seven years now.
Q: What’s wrong with it?
A: They’re killing our lands. Their farming techniques, they don’t follow any best-management practices. During the summer all we have is dust storms. It’s like the 1930s again. They’re turning us into a Dust Bowl.
Q: Isn’t it in Monsanto’s best interest to do a good job and preserve the land for the future?
A: (Laughter) Go ask Anniston, Ala., and St. Louis and all those places that they come from. They destroyed all of the resources and environments from everywhere they come from.
Q: Fred Perlak, vice president of Monsanto in Hawaii, wrote a commentary in our pages recently defending Monsanto.
A: Yeah, that’s his job. But for us, what we see is our lands turning into Dust Bowl. They’re farming at thousand-foot level, so everything goes into the ocean. The dust goes into the ocean. When it rains it goes into the ocean. And the ocean for us is our livelihood.
Q: What about the windfarm issue on Molokai?
A: The windfarm issue I stayed out of that one. It was all bogus. We knew that wasn’t going to happen.
Q: You think right now that it’s not going to happen?
A: Well, what they want is something huge from us. What they’re willing to give us is nothing. You can’t come here and take one-third of our island and the people of Molokai get nothing — with all the negative impacts we would have to live with. And we’re not quite sure if we’d be helping Oahu or just feeding a bad habit.
Q: Weren’t they promising lower electrical rates or something?
A: No, they was promising us nothing. Absolutely nothing.
Q: So that’s not really been a concern for you?
A: No, there’s other things. GMOs are in our yard, turning us into a dust bowl and killing our ice box (the shoreline). That’s at the top of my list.
Q: So that’s why you’ve been coming over to Oahu lately?
A: Yeah. Way too often. (Laughter)
Q: Why were you here last week?
A: I went to testify for the GMO labeling resolution. But then I decided I wasn’t going to support it, so I didn’t testify.
Q: Why did you decide against it?
A: Because it was a trap; it was deflection from them killing our bill for the year, which is House Bill 1774 for (GMO) labeling, … and one of the reasons for not testifying was because … Syngenta, Monsanto, Pioneer, the Hawaii Farm Bureau, they all were testifying for it. These were the guys testifying against our bill, and now these were the guys testifying for this thing.
Q: So it was like a legislative dodge?
A: Yeah. We call it shibai.
Q: A while back you directed a study titled "Molokai: Future of a Hawaiian Island." So what is the future of Molokai?
A: The future of Molokai is to be a self-sufficient island, and to follow what the elders set out to do. This island was always an island for production of food. This island fed all of the armies between Oahu, Maui and the Big Island.
Q: You mean the island armies, like under Kamehameha or whatever?
A: Yeah. When all of those battles were going on? Molokai never entered the battles. All we did was feed armies. The name of our island, it wasn’t the friendly isle. It was called aina momona, the fat land. Because we could feed all these armies.
Q: Is food self-sufficiency possible?
A: Yeah. Hawaii keeps saying they’ve gotta to be food self-sufficient instead of importing 90 percent of our food. So we’re here waiting to see if the state is ever going to get serious.
Q: What does it take to get serious?
A: We (Molokai) have the largest contiguous reef system in the United States; we’ve got 14,000 acres of reef here. Our ability to produce food on the reefs is huge, and the ponds today can be used to restock all of the Hawaiian Islands. Our farm lands are huge, too. We’re real famous for our sweet potato. Right now we’re producing 80 percent of the sweet potato in Hawaii. And then we have four major valleys on our North Shore that produce tons of taro. These valleys have wall-to-wall terraces that are all intact. And the water, we drink the water; the water is all pristine, in all these valleys. So it’s just waiting to produce food.
Q: What’s holding it back?
A: (Laughter) People are still trying to make money out of tourists and military. They still think they’re on a sustainable course and they’re not.
Q: You were one of the first trustees with the state Office of Hawaiian Affairs. What do you think about the settlement it reached recently about ceded lands revenues involving that waterfront land in Kakaako?
A: Yeah, that was really bad.
Q: Why is that?
A: Well, because OHA went in there as a state agency and talked to the boss, and they had no leverage whatsoever, so they just took the crumbs. And then they decided, you know, they’re going to become developers. Instead of going to the people and rallying the people and getting some leverage, they just went in there begging.
Q: What would have been a better alternative?
A: Well, we could have had four valleys on Molokai. We could have had fishponds to produce food. I mean, I’m just talking Molokai, because I’m from Molokai. But just imagine what each island could have asked for, instead of just one little speck on Oahu.
Q: What do you think about OHA these days?
A: I think that they’re making a big mistake by leaving their people behind. They have no real relationship with their people. They haven’t united all the ali’i trusts — you know, like Kamehameha Schools and Queen Liliuokalani Children’s Center and Hawaiian Homes and all these trusts. If they would all become united, we would have a tremendous resource, operating and going in different areas.
Q: What do you think about the state Department of Hawaiian Home Lands? What kind of job are they doing, in your opinion?
A: They’re struggling, making big mistakes and trying to correct as an individual state agency. In fact, OHA should never have considered themselves to be a state agency. It should have disconnected long ago.
Q: Don’t you think that actually DHHL … has more power than it really exerts, or is sort of the prototype for kind of a sovereign entity?
A: Yeah, that’s the land base; it’s a big land base. But they’re beginning to do the same thing the state is doing — privatizing public lands for money. They’re all following the same … I don’t know about same leaders … but they’re all on the same track and nobody’s investing in their people.
Q: Do you have a suggestion for how DHHL could put Native Hawaiians on its lands quicker, who have been on the rolls waiting for property?
A: Yeah, there’s no law that says you cannot put people on the land without putting all of the infrastructure in.
Q: So that’s what’s holding it up?
A: Yeah. They have the freedom to do that, and they should start developing independent places. There’s a lot of rural areas that can be developed without all that cost of infrastructure.
Q: What about the Native Hawaiian Roll Commission? What do you think about that?
A: Well, the Roll Commission is like the struggle for Hawaiian sovereignty and independence, and I’m for giving it a chance. You know, I’m not quite sure what the end result is going to be, but we need to try and get ourselves out of the mud here, stop grumbling at each other for the last 20 years.
Q: What would you say is the most important issue facing the Native Hawaiian community these days?
A: I think the most important issue is sovereignty. I think we need to realize how important that is. And I think the rest of the state needs to realize how important that is.
Q: How would that work? I mean, as a practical matter, you can’t really be speaking about an independent nation, can you?
A: Of course you can. Why would Hawaiians go after anything but the ultimate goal? … The ultimate goal is to restore what was once here, and what was once here was a sustainable, self-sufficient group of islands in the middle of the Pacific.
Q: Native Hawaiians can’t coexist in the current system?
A: No, I’m not saying that. I’m saying that we’ve gone from being a self-sufficient, sustainable group of islands to islands totally dependent on the import of food. And all of our resources are dying. We have no more fish in our ocean. Our rivers, you can’t drink the water; there’s no food in the rivers. We’re not sustainable anymore. We’ve been going in the wrong direction, as far as being people who live in the middle of the Pacific. So who better to give us direction about how we’re supposed to survive out here than the Hawaiians?
So that’s the reason I’m so adamant about Hawaiians having a leadership position in the state. This is not a continent. We cannot do what we’re doing.
So, I don’t know what the form is going to be, but as Hawaiians we should go after getting our nation back again and become leaders here, and that’s for the survival of everybody.
