Hawaiian Genocide

Genocide

The following is a link to the United Nation’s Convention on Genocide which took place on Dec. 9, 1948:

www.hrweb.org/legal/genocide.html

It defines genocide as:

• (a) Killing members of the group;
• (b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
• (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
• (d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
• (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

The Historical context of this definition is the post genocide of the Jewish people during WWII. While the definition is taken by some to be mean a calculated and conscious annihilation of people of a certain group, there is actually a deeper wisdom as to the true nature of genocide found in this definition. Genocide in this definition is ANY effort made, whether conscious or not, which causes a certain group of people to be destroyed in any manner.

One method of genocide which is being experienced by the Hawaiian people is “diaspora,” which is the spreading out of people which causes them to cease to exist by assimilation into other cultures and geographic locations. As we know today (through the US Census), almost half of the Hawaiians in this world are having to live outside of Hawaii.
Another form of genocide which is especially egregious is the internment of Hawaiians in the concentrations camps that are better known as “corrections facilities.” These jails and prisons located on the Hawaiian islands consist of around 40% Native Hawaiians, while the Native Hawaiian population in total in Hawaii is only around 12-20% (statistics on Native Hawaiian population in Hawaii differ depending on where you look, although all ranges of statistics are reported by equally legitimate sources.) What is the worst of all regarding these concentration camps is that the Hawaiian people are now being forcibly removed from their land and put in facilities on the mainland because of “overcrowding.”
I recently had a conversation with a representative from Kau Inoa because I wanted to get access to the prisons in order to register Native Hawaiians living there. It turned out that the Office of Hawaiian Affairs had already tried to do this and that it was stated that no project could take place in the prisons which would heighten the awareness of racial differences due to an already apparent problem within the prison system over racial tensions.

Ironic isn’t it?

To look at this situation more abstractly – The Hawaiian people are being forced to undergo an unnatural poverty which has resulted from the robbery of our land. Poverty, no matter which way you look at it, results in certain behavioral outcomes for people. If you rob us – as a group- of our land, thereby forcing us into poverty, and then make laws against the behavioral outcomes which are natural to poverty, and then use those laws to render the “law-breakers” unable to participate in their own government, you have a formula for genocide.

I mention all this because it’s important to detect genocide in all its flavors. Last time I was home, a certain group of Hawaiian home owners were bragging to me about how they “cleaned up” their neighborhood and got all those evil drug dealers sent to prison. After they were through, they washed their hands of the whole situation.

Those evil drug dealers, however, were other Hawaiians and their being sent to prison IS genocide. Why would we be doing this to our own selves? How could the colonization in our minds become so thick that we’ve become unable to see the true process at work against us, that we should offer our own selves up as willing culprits?