Keli’i Akina

Keli’i Akina is one of six plaintiffs in a lawsuit filed recently against the state of Hawaii and others seeking to stop an election and convention that possibly would help establish a sovereign Native Hawaiian government.

Among other things, the complaint filed in U.S. District Court alleges that the election and convention are state-related and would be race- and viewpoint-based, and thus violate the U.S. Constitution. The race-based aspect is that voting would be restricted to Native Hawaiians; the viewpoint aspect is that voters registering with the Native Hawaiian Roll Commission must affirm that they believe in "the unrelinquished sovereignty of the Native Hawaiian people."

Akina, who is president of the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii and part-Hawaiian himself, doesn’t go along with either of those conditions, and generally thinks there are better ways to help Native Hawaiians than to set up a separate government.

He added that the issue is just one of many that he and the institute are concerned about.

"I can honestly tell you that at least 80 percent of what we do is in the broader areas of economics, government and society, and what hit the newspapers with the lawsuit happens to be just one of those areas," he said.

Akina took over the helm of the institute in March 2013 from Dick Rowland, who founded the think tank in 2001. Akina also is an adjunct faculty member at Hawaii Pacific University, and president emeritus of Youth for Christ Hawaii.

He earned a doctorate in East-West philosophy and ethics in 2010 and a master’s degree in philosophy in 2000, both from the University of Hawaii, and a bachelor’s degree in the history of religion and economics from Northwestern University, in 1992. A graduate, too, of Kamehameha Schools, Akina was a candidate twice to be a state Office of Hawaiian Affairs trustee, garnering 93,000 votes in a run-off in 2014.

Age 57, Akina is married to the former Tseng-Fan Patty Hsieh, with whom he has four children and lives on Punchbowl Crater, overlooking downtown Honolulu.

Question: I take it that, though you are part Native Hawaiian, you will not be among the candidates for election to the constitutional convention being organized by Na’i Aupuni to establish some sort of independent Hawaiian government, right?

Answer: That’s right.

Q: And why not?

A: I’m very proud of my Hawaiian heritage, and I’m very involved with helping to craft the future for Native Hawaiians as individuals and as a people.

But I think it’s important to realize that we are not a tribe or a single mass of people who think the same way. There’s tremendous diversity among Native Hawaiians. We are Democrats and Republicans and Libertarians. We are people who believe in a future sovereign nation of Hawaiians and people who don’t believe in that.

So my major concern is when a small group of people uses government resources to represent Hawaiians as one entity. That’s simply not the case.

There’s a growing stereotype today of Native Hawaiians as being in opposition to all things American or all things dealing with technological progress. That’s a false stereotype. The truth is that Native Hawaiians can be found along the entire range of positions onthe key issues in Hawaii today.

Actually I believe that there is a silent majority of Native Hawaiians who are very glad for our relationship with the United States, and at the same time very proud of our cultural heritage as Hawaiians. And I think that the numbers bear out, when we pay close attention to efforts such as the Native Hawaiian Roll.

Q: How is that?

A: Millions of dollars over a four-year period were spent trying to create a tribal list of Native Hawaiians. At this stage, clearly more than 85 percent of Native Hawaiians have chosen not to be part of this.

Q: Is that because they chose not to, or could it be it was failure of their outreach programs or whatever?

A: (Laughs) The outreach programs have spent more money and put more energy and engaged more public relations efforts than any voter registration drive in the history of Hawaii.

They originally targeted more than 500,000 Native Hawaiians across the nation, according to census data, which now shows that figure is 560,000. When little more than 40,000 signed up, the Native Hawaiian Roll decided to go to prior lists of Hawaiians and dumped them, by the tens of thousands, in order to achieve the numbers that they have today. Currently they state approximately 95,000 Native Hawaiians have been certified. Just taking that figure itself, you’re clearly dealing with a minority of Hawaiians, and a minority of all people in the state of Hawaii.

Q: In that regard, too, were you disappointed in how the Native Hawaiian Roll Commission handled providing you with the names on the list that it produced of Native Hawaiians deemed eligible to vote for its planned constitutional convention — you know, how they produced it in paper, and late and everything else?

A: Since Grassroot Institute began exposing the fact that the Native Hawaiian Roll Commission dumped names of individuals who had not given their consent to be put on the roll, we have been contacted by large numbers of individuals through email, mail, phone calls and in person who’ve expressed their anger and disappointment in OHA and the Roll Commission.

One woman identified several deceased relatives on the list, and these are individuals who passed away prior to the list coming into existence. Another gentlemen, a Native Hawaiian gentlemen, called our office and broke down into tears as he read off the names of relatives of his whose names had been put on the list — deceased relatives who’d been put on the list — without their consent. The responses have ranged from anger to cynicism to a sense of betrayal that organizations that should be looking after the welfare of Hawaiians have betrayed them.

Q: Some Native Hawaiians have called your lawsuit divisive, and that Native Hawaiians need to stand together and have some sort of government of their own to finally address these perpetual problems that they’ve been facing for so many years. How do you see it?

A: Native Hawaiians do have a government already, one which follows principles established under the constitutional monarchy of the kingdom, and that government is the government of the United States, which ensures a far greater level of rights, privileges and opportunities than were ever available under the Hawaiian kingdom.

I have no problem with individuals organizing and protesting against the government of the United States. That’s a constitutional right, ensured by the First Amendment. But I do have a problem when a small number of government officials uses resources that belong to all the people of Hawaii in order to pursue such a political campaign.

Q: Is there a crass motive, do you think, in all of this, or do you think even though it’s small minority, that they are sincere, and that some sort of fundamental change really is needed?

A: The biggest problem is that the vast resources that the Office of Hawaiian Affairs and other Hawaiian agencies have had to serve the Native Hawaiian people have not gone to solve the problems of homelessness or education, low job opportunity or health. Instead, tens of millions of dollars have been spent over the last 20 years in the pursuit of a political campaign for sovereignty when that money would have better been spent directly serving the needs of Native Hawaiians. My goal is to see that priority of serving Native Hawaiians is restored, and that it is done so in a way that it doesn’t divide the population of the state on the basis of race.

Q: What do you think about OHA? I know you ran a couple of times as a candidate to be a trustee of OHA. Does that suggest that you think that OHA actually makes sense in some way?

A: OHA could be a valuable organization for the sake of preserving the aloha spirit in Hawaii and for seeing that the needs of Native Hawaiians are met. But in order to be valuable, OHA needs to quit wasting funds on political sovereignty and instead serve the real needs of Native Hawaiians. Additionally OHA needs to do that in a way that does not divide people on the basis of race, but unite all people in the state of Hawaii.

Q: I wanted to ask you about this notion of having a convention to set up a new sovereign nation. The whole premise, it seems, is that the kingdom was illegally overthrown, then America illegally annexed it. So you would think that the proposal to reestablish sovereignty would have something to do with going back to that point in time, rather than starting from scratch. Has that ever occurred to you?

A: Hypothetically, if we were to return lands to the citizenry of the Kingdom of Hawaii before 1893, those lands would not be returned to people of a single race but they would be returned to people of multiple races — Hawaiians, Caucasians, Chinese, Japanese, and others. Because Hawaii, from the inception of the kingdom, practiced open and inclusive citizenship, not a race-based citizenry. So efforts today to create a race-based sovereign nation are not in keeping with Hawaiian values and the history of the Hawaiian kingdom, which from Kamehameha I through Liliuokalani was a kingdom of citizens of multiple races.

The efforts by OHA and Native Hawaiian Roll to create a race-based tribe, in order to qualify for federal recognition as an American Indian tribe, are at odds with what the Hawaiians are. Hawaiians are not and never were a tribe.

Two of the major criterion for Native American tribes, for the definition of a Native American tribe, are, No.1, citizenry based on a single race, and 2, a continuous form of government. Neither of these things describes the Hawaiian people.

Q: Has the Grassroot Institute produced any research regarding what should be done with Department of Hawaiian Home Lands, which after a hundred years still has thousands of Native Hawaiians waiting for housing, for example?

A: That’s a separate issue altogether from the OHA-Native Hawaiian Roll sovereignty issue.

The Hawaiian Home Lands were set aside so Native Hawaiians could practice homesteading. Prince Kuhio felt that what made Americans great was that they could stake a claim to private property and pass on real property to their heirs. … Unfortunately, in 1920, a scheme for 51 percent blood quantum was set up so that ultimately Native Hawaiians are not able to build long-term generational wealth. They can lease it so long as the blood quantum is met. Consequently, in the long run, land will return to the state, rather than build generational wealth.

Q: Do you think that was a paternalistic thing or a crafty thing? What do you think was going on there?

A: Well, I don’t judge motives, but the blood quantum concept and leasehold land has been used, and had been used elsewhere, in order to maintain control over the land by the landlord. And basically — you asked about Grassroot — what we have researched and what we do promote is private property ownership, and believe that the Native Hawaiians would be better served by a program that converts leasehold land into fee simple.

Q: Besides this issue, what other concerns are you focusing on?

A: Issues that are front-burner for us are those that deal with building a better economy, operating a more transparent government and strengthening society.

In terms of the economy, our heartbeat is for those who benefit least in today’s economy, particularly the homeless and the poor. We believe that Hawaii’s homelessness situation … is directly related to failed government policies toward the economy. We believe that a freer market economy with less interference by centralized government control would allow for a more prosperous Hawaii that would benefit all individuals.

Some of our current projects include the development of free market solutions to the housing crisis, which means we’re not looking merely at the ground-level attempts to relocate or meet the immediate needs of the homeless, but also at policies that have to do with the investment climate of Hawaii, the land and zoning laws in Hawaii, business regulations as they affect affordable housing, the impact of minimum wage laws, the regressive nature of the GET (general excise tax), … and even reform of shipping laws such as the Jones Act of 1920.

In terms of government, I’m really excited about the team of men and women at the Grassroot Institute who are engaged as watchdogs, putting government spending, pension programs, overtime, procurement decisions and so forth under a microscope. We frequently challenge government agencies, and even go to court to obtain hard-to-get information and make that available to journalists and the public on our OpenHawaii.org website.

With respect to society, the lead issue here for us is the improvement of education in Hawaii. We actively attempt to apply free market principles such as developed by Milton Friedman to the management of our public school system. The key thing is to increase the power of parents and principals at the local level, and hold central government control accountable here.

… Then there’s the protection of the aloha spirit, which is why we are so concerned about the actions of government agencies representing Native Hawaiians, because we feel that the aloha spirit is the most important thing that binds us together in Hawaii, unites us, and it is completely consistent with the Constitution and Bill of Rights.

But when government acts in ways that are harmful to the aloha spirit, by splintering people on the basis of race, we need to speak up.