The federal government more than 90 years ago gave Hawaii the responsibility to administer a newly created trust designed to provide homestead lots for eligible Native Hawaiians.

But the government never gave Hawaii the federal regulations to govern how the roughly 200,000-acre trust should be administered.

President Barack Obama has been asked to change that.

In a private meeting at the White House last week, Native Hawaiian advocate Robin Danner, sitting with the president in a West Wing conference room, asked Obama to authorize the Department of the Interior to start the process for developing federal regulations.

Danner was there as president of the Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement. She was one of a dozen Asian-American and Pacific Islander advocates and leaders from across the country who were invited by the White House to meet with the president. It was arranged as part of Asian American Pacific Islander month.

While most of the 30-minute meeting was devoted to immigration and health care — two hot national topics — the final third was set aside to discuss Native Hawaiian issues.

During that time, Danner mentioned the lack of federal rules — a topic that the advancement council she leads identified as one of its top public policy priorities two years ago.

Not having rules is like canoe voyagers "essentially left mapless without a navigator," Danner said in a telephone interview from Washington, D.C., after the meeting. "They’re paddling all over the place, sometimes paddling into areas that are unlawful or at a minimum unethical."

The absence of federal rules has contributed to an environment of lax oversight at the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands, the beleaguered state agency that administers the trust, according to those pushing for federal regulations.

That lax oversight — the focus of a three-day Star-Advertiser series last week — includes the Interior Department not aggressively exercising its authority over the federally established trust, rule proponents say.

"The federal government’s position has been hands off," said Ian Lee Loy, a member of the Hawaiian Homes Commission, the board that oversees DHHL.

Having clear and comprehensive rules will help bring stability to DHHL, which in turn will help beneficiaries — those at least 50 percent Native Hawaiian — because everyone will be able to see what the regulations are, and those rules won’t change from administration to administration, according to Danner and others.

"This will go a long way toward reforming the system," said Bill Fernandez, a retired California state judge and chairman of the advancement council’s policy committee. "The bottom line is that something needs to be done to change an abysmal situation."

DHHL itself doesn’t seem to put as much significance on the lack of federal regulations as the advancement council.

Deputy Director Darrell Young said the agency already is following and complying with applicable Interior requirements, established over the years through so-called memorandums of understanding.

Interior’s policies, procedures and requirements have been set by the memorandums, Young said in written responses to Star-Advertiser questions.

But he said DHHL is open to any mechanism that will help clarify and define the relationship between the two parties and that will ensure consistency in federal decision-making.

In her first meeting with an Interior representative in July, Jobie Masa­ga­tani, who was appointed by Gov. Neil Abercrombie a year ago to head the commission and DHHL, discussed the possible issuance of federal rules, Young said.

Subsequent conversations have been held to discuss the procedures for determining whether congressional approval is needed for amendments to the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act and for obtaining federal approval for land exchanges involving trust property, according to Young. The commission act was the 1920 federal legislation establishing the Hawaiian land trust.

The advancement council has said establishing federal regulations would do more for the success of the trust than any other policy action.

Asked whether DHHL shares that view, Young said the administration holds that state-level policies and rule-making would have a greater positive effect.

In the absence of federal regulations, DHHL has been criticized for its lack of sufficient policies and rules.

The Star-Advertiser series noted that the agency has failed for decades to adopt administrative rules for a problem-plagued revocable-permit program used to lease mostly undeveloped trust land on a monthly basis. Even though a federal-state task force 30 years ago urged the department to adopt such rules, the recommendation basically has been ignored — without any apparent sanctions.

At the West Wing meeting, Danner said the president greeted her with a hug and a "Howzit back home?"

When her turn came to address Obama during the meeting, she told him, "As Native Hawaiians we have waited 93 years for this presidency, your presidency."

She said the president was "amazing, completely engaging and interested in our issues, even though compared to immigration and health care, they weren’t necessarily national in scope."

Based on the ground rules for the meeting’s participants, Danner was not able to characterize how the president responded to her request for federal regulations.

A White House spokes­man declined comment.

An Interior representative did not address a Star-Advertiser question about the department’s position on the issue. But she said in a written statement that the agency over the past four years has made great strides in increasing oversight of the trust.

She noted, for instance, that Interior’s Rhea Suh was the first assistant secretary for policy, management and budget to meet with beneficiaries and DHHL officials in Hawaii since 1999. Suh came to Hawaii late last year.

For the past year, the spokes­woman added, Interior has had monthly meetings with DHHL and state attorneys to discuss Hawaiian homeland issues, and Interior is regularly consulting with Native Hawaiians on proposed amendments of the commission act.

She did not deal with why federal rules have yet to be established for a law that is 93 years old.

Fernandez, the retired judge, said that in the 1920s sugar plantation owners controlled the islands and didn’t want regulations that would have prevented them from leasing or using trust lands.

Since then, he and others said, no one has had the interest or political will to develop rules. That has to change, they added.

"We can’t continue to have business as usual," Fernandez said.