ON A WING AND A PRAYER: We've all read them- national newspaper stories that attempt to make sense of a local story but instead make a mess of it.
"Parachute journalism" isn't easy but can be downright impossible when the story you're looking for isn't really there but the author is determined to pound that square peg into an existing round hole.
We came across just such a piece at the popular "Truthout" website this weekend. It's a very strange- and skewed- little article on the supposed "Occupy movement" on Kaua`i by Michelle Fawcett Ph.D., an adjunct professor in the Media, Culture and Communications Department at New York University who "is currently traveling across the US covering the Occupy movement."
For those who might have missed it when the Occupy Wall Street movement came to Kaua`i last year in its nascent days, after a fairly well-attended sign-holding rally in front of Safeway and an attempt a few days later to actually occupy the county building lawn overnight- where attendees kind of drifted away before they rolled up the sidewalks at 9 p.m.- things kind of fizzled.
We speculated that it might be because, if you're not homeless, a transient or working six jobs, you are, almost by definition, among the very privileged just to live on Kaua`i. Living here permanently means you're apt to be in the 90th percentile of the "99%." On Kaua`i the 1% is more like 75% (to pull some numbers out of our butt).
But that didn't stop Fawcett who somehow dug up a few FOB North Shore malahini who assured her the Kaua`i version of the Occupy Wall Street movement is alive and well here and that "we" are planning on permanently occupying the County Building lawn.
As to the controversy over naming a group "occupy" in the islands - what with the overthrow in 1893 and the military occupation that persists to this day - it somehow feels insulting to the real ongoing occupation. Instead of the "Occupy with Aloha" name that had been adopted by those who organized and participated in those events last year, somehow she came up with the "Occupy Movement" moniker.
But at least she tried, circling around the sovereignty issue by interviewing the Reinstated Hawaiian Government's Kane Pa- although it was apparent she didn't really "get" the irony involved in new haole group occupying a "country" that another haole group has been occupying for more than a century.
Fawcett first introduces us to her sources, writing
Members of Occupy Kapaa on Kauai, Toni Liljengren, 54, and Andy Fitts, 57, are transplants to the northernmost island they now call home. Toni, a lomi lomi massage therapist, relocated over 20 years ago, while Andy, director of a local Tibetan peace park and a real estate developer, and his wife are more recent arrivals. Speaking over lunch in a sun-washed café, both warned of an imminent global "systems shift."
Where do you start with the oxymoronic absurdity of a North Shore real estate developer as spokesperson for a non-existent "Occupy Kapa`a" group?
At least the writer kind of got the idea that there's a sustainability movement here, albeit presenting it as a self-contained part and parcel of the local "Occupy" movement- as if it all just occurred to us last October as a result of the establishment of the original "Occupy Wall Street" outpost, about a quarter-mile from Fawcett's NYU campus.
So what will Liljengren and Fitts do "when da boat no more come?" Liljengren says:
"I feel really safe on Kauai. There's fish. There's fruit. This is a very sustainable place. It's probably one of the best places to be at the time of the collapse."
Toni is confident she can survive a crisis because she already barters for food, shelter and chelation therapy. While Andy is more wary, he concludes that a systems shift will "bring out the best in everyone because all the intelligence will be called upon. It will be survival time. Everyone will be scrambling for a new paradigm. But it will be a wonderful time because people will actually stop sleepwalking."
So we'll all be okay just the way things are now- no gardens (and no land for them), little or no large scale sustainable crop agriculture, prime Ag land broken up into gentlemen’s estates, everyone working 11 jobs in the all-pervasive tourism industry- because there'll be plenty of free fish and fruit trees for Toni and Andy expects everyone to be so "awake" and "aware" that they apparently won’t need food or fuel anymore.
Yeah we'll live on love. Or better still we'll become "breatharians."
There's a certain rare skill to airlifting into town and jumping right in journalistically- one that many try but few master. Not everyone is a Tony Sommer, a Denis Wilken or a Mike Levine. But even more difficult is doing it for a "one-off." And it's even harder still if you came with a thesis and the facts on the ground don't jibe with those you thought you'd find.
The solution is to change your theory, instead of trying to change what you find on the ground, Mr. Jones.
Showing posts with label Hawaiian soverignty. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hawaiian soverignty. Show all posts
Monday, January 30, 2012
Thursday, July 8, 2010
INSIDE OUTSIDE, USA
INSIDE OUTSIDE, USA: Back in the 70’s it was just a funny line from a movie. But as the years go by it’s become an epic inside joke that seems to pertain more and more one of our pet peeves- the “he said she said” nature of what passes for journalism in the 21st century corporate newsroom.
As the Blues Brothers are setting up to play the chicken-wire redneck bar someone proclaims that “we like BOTH kinds of music- country AND western.”
So when reporters go to BOTH sides- Democratic and Republican- it yields no less a bizarrely narrow Hobson’s Choice.
So it comes as no surprise that today’s article on the “compromise” Akaka Bill in the Honolulu Starvetizer neglects to ask any sovereignty much less independence advocates what they think about the fact that the new bill compromises away a measure that would give them the same rights that the rest of the country’s indigenous people have been so benevolently granted by their overlords.
It more or less like offering a turd sandwich and then removing the bread and mayo.
The effort to steal the kanaka maoli land base “one last time fair and square” is bad enough without having to depend on a newspaper- one with a legacy of that very theft- that ignores the rights of those being crushed once again by an occupying armed force hell bent on a final act of genocide and asks only the perpetrators what they think of it.
Now that we’re a one newspaper town we apparently have both kinds of journalism- crappy and none.
As the Blues Brothers are setting up to play the chicken-wire redneck bar someone proclaims that “we like BOTH kinds of music- country AND western.”
So when reporters go to BOTH sides- Democratic and Republican- it yields no less a bizarrely narrow Hobson’s Choice.
So it comes as no surprise that today’s article on the “compromise” Akaka Bill in the Honolulu Starvetizer neglects to ask any sovereignty much less independence advocates what they think about the fact that the new bill compromises away a measure that would give them the same rights that the rest of the country’s indigenous people have been so benevolently granted by their overlords.
It more or less like offering a turd sandwich and then removing the bread and mayo.
The effort to steal the kanaka maoli land base “one last time fair and square” is bad enough without having to depend on a newspaper- one with a legacy of that very theft- that ignores the rights of those being crushed once again by an occupying armed force hell bent on a final act of genocide and asks only the perpetrators what they think of it.
Now that we’re a one newspaper town we apparently have both kinds of journalism- crappy and none.
Thursday, April 9, 2009
BUT IT MAKES ITS OWN GRAVY
BUT IT MAKES ITS OWN GRAVY: Another day another “casualty” as we move toward a world where people won’t have anything in which to wrap fish or train puppies.
But of course you wouldn’t know that the demise of the corporate press is self-inflicted due to the friendly fire death of solid investigative content combined with a penchant for printing truth and lies side by said and calling it objectivity.
In the Honolulu Advertiser’s version of the story of the 23 layoff at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and MidWeek, Rick Daysong writes
The layoffs come as the nation's newspaper industry has lost thousands of jobs because of economic conditions and advertising revenue due to the Internet.
Yup- blame it on the economy and the internet, even though the problems started long before the current conditions and the fact that it is the newspaper industry’s own greed and competitive nature that has stopped them from micro-charges for the on-line news- probably because no one would pay for either the pap or articles that promote the corporate version of events they publish these days.
Sometimes you wouldn’t even know you were hearing about the same source content when you read the corporate version and the alternative or independent press reports,. as when the articles describing a study of the effects of sonar on dolphins was released recently.
Today the Advertiser’s “Military Writer” William Cole has an article headlined (what did you expect?) “Sonar's effect on dolphins minimal”..
He rotely regurgitates the apparent military press release version of what the study found:
In a study replicating Navy sonar, the Hawai`i Institute of Marine Biology found that a captive bottlenose dolphin had to remain relatively close to a high-intensity sonar source for a prolonged period to experience even temporary hearing loss — a finding the Navy seized upon to say it "may have vastly overestimated impacts of mid-frequency active sonar on marine mammals."
But the day before independent reporter Joan Conrow reported on the study in her reporting blog quoting an Associated Press article on the study as saying
When the pings reached 203 decibels and were repeated, the neurological data showed the mammal had become deaf, for its brain no longer responded to sound.
You’ll want to read Joan’s entire entry. Turns out the “study” was done in what amounts to a swimming pool with short bursts, negating the effects on behavior such as rapid surfacing, which is how many marine mammals deaths have apparently occurred due to sonar.
So how far does the clutches of corporate press go?
Well in the broadcast realm the “news” is usually even more worthless than the modern “objective” newspaper.
Thank goodness we have PBS, eh?
Not so fast.
A couple of Monday nights back we watched “Sick Around America” on PBS’s program “Frontline”, public broadcasting’s signature, award-winning, investigative series.
And while we were stuck with the usual liturgy of horror stories about insurance companies killing their clients to make more money- similar to the stories in Michael Moore’s disturbing movie "Sicko"- the program quite blatantly pinned the whole problem on the fact that there are “uninsured” who are not paying into the system until they get sick and, therefore, promoting the Massachusetts model of “mandatory insurance”.
Though the first half of the program seemed to lead to the obvious conclusion- one that polls show the vast number of American’s hold- that only eliminating insurance companies from the equation and implementing a single-payer so-called “Medicare for All” system will really do anything about what all acknowledge is our “healthcare crisis”.
So it was with great interest that we read a piece by Russell Mokhiber of Corporate Crime Reporter entitled Something is Rotten at PBS.
He detailed how Washington Post reporter T.R. Reid had done a Frontline piece called “Sick Around the World” a few years back and Frontline had asked him to do another on America.
But when he turned in his work and the producers did their editing he found that “this is not my beautiful documentary”.
The article describes how apparently instead of presenting Reid’s work presenting the well known horrors of insurance company coverage and reaching the obvious conclusion that getting the profit motive out of the equation is the sensible way to proceed, the produces went 180 degrees on him.
As we said they stressed the “mandatory coverage” model saying the problem of high costs wasn’t due to insurance company greed and need to maximize profit but due to people not paying the insurance companies to be covered when they’re healthy..
The article tells the sorry tale in Reid’s own words:
.
“We spent months shooting that film,” Reid explains. “I was the correspondent. We did our last interview on January 6. The producers went to Boston and made the documentary. About late February I saw it for the first time. And I told them I disagreed with it. They listened to me, but they didn't want to change it.”
Reid has a book coming out this summer titled The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper and Fairer Health Care (Penguin Press, August 2009.)
“I said to them -- mandating for-profit insurance is not the lesson from other countries in the world,” Reid said. “I said I'm not going to be in a film that contradicts my previous film and my book. They said – I had to be in the film because I was under contract. I insisted that I couldn't be. And we parted ways.”
“Doctors, hospitals, nurses, labs can all be for-profit,” Reid said. “But the payment system has to be non-profit. All the other countries have agreed on that. We are the only one that allows health insurance companies to make a profit. You can't allow a profit to be made on the basic package of health insurance.”
“I don't think they deliberately got it wrong, but they got it wrong,” Reid said.
As you can imagine the producers tried to defend themselves. The next week Mokhiber wrote that they accuse Reid of being the one with a bias and actually tried to deny that they promoted the mandatory converge model even though the whole second half hour essentially did nothing but present the case for it.
The single payer Medicare for all model was never even mentioned except in passing and then as being a political impossibility.
In reality PBS is nothing but a non-commercial version of the corporate press these days except the corporate world just pays them directly, using the phony term “underwriting” instead of “bought and paid for programming”.
Although there used to be a strict PBS rule forbidding underwriting for a specific program by a company who had any “interest” directly or even indirectly in the subject they abandoned that almost 20 years ago- a move which encouraged other non commercial media such as public access TV and community radio like KKCR on Kaua`i to justify doing the same and abandoning all pretense of lack of commercial control over content.
While the newspaper industry keeps up the drumbeat of their supposed investigative reporting being essential to a democratic America, the examples of it cited recently are few, far between and generally weak, especially when compared to the 99% of the fare consisting of essentially free advertising and “he said- she said” shilling for the same politicians they should be- and aren’t- investigating.
Instead of actually improving their product to be once again a commodity people will pay for, their penny-wise pound-foolish methodology is to fire more reporters and say they can’t afford to do real journalism any more out of one side of their mouths while claiming they are worth saving because they are still doing it out of the other.
As Conrow concluded in her blog piece today, where she links to her two excellent articles in the Honolulu Weekly- one on the Reinstated Nation’s case regarding their trip to Kaho`olawe and one on GMO's in Hawai`i- “Support your independent newspapers!”
The press is dead- long live the press.
But of course you wouldn’t know that the demise of the corporate press is self-inflicted due to the friendly fire death of solid investigative content combined with a penchant for printing truth and lies side by said and calling it objectivity.
In the Honolulu Advertiser’s version of the story of the 23 layoff at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin and MidWeek, Rick Daysong writes
The layoffs come as the nation's newspaper industry has lost thousands of jobs because of economic conditions and advertising revenue due to the Internet.
Yup- blame it on the economy and the internet, even though the problems started long before the current conditions and the fact that it is the newspaper industry’s own greed and competitive nature that has stopped them from micro-charges for the on-line news- probably because no one would pay for either the pap or articles that promote the corporate version of events they publish these days.
Sometimes you wouldn’t even know you were hearing about the same source content when you read the corporate version and the alternative or independent press reports,. as when the articles describing a study of the effects of sonar on dolphins was released recently.
Today the Advertiser’s “Military Writer” William Cole has an article headlined (what did you expect?) “Sonar's effect on dolphins minimal”..
He rotely regurgitates the apparent military press release version of what the study found:
In a study replicating Navy sonar, the Hawai`i Institute of Marine Biology found that a captive bottlenose dolphin had to remain relatively close to a high-intensity sonar source for a prolonged period to experience even temporary hearing loss — a finding the Navy seized upon to say it "may have vastly overestimated impacts of mid-frequency active sonar on marine mammals."
But the day before independent reporter Joan Conrow reported on the study in her reporting blog quoting an Associated Press article on the study as saying
When the pings reached 203 decibels and were repeated, the neurological data showed the mammal had become deaf, for its brain no longer responded to sound.
You’ll want to read Joan’s entire entry. Turns out the “study” was done in what amounts to a swimming pool with short bursts, negating the effects on behavior such as rapid surfacing, which is how many marine mammals deaths have apparently occurred due to sonar.
So how far does the clutches of corporate press go?
Well in the broadcast realm the “news” is usually even more worthless than the modern “objective” newspaper.
Thank goodness we have PBS, eh?
Not so fast.
A couple of Monday nights back we watched “Sick Around America” on PBS’s program “Frontline”, public broadcasting’s signature, award-winning, investigative series.
And while we were stuck with the usual liturgy of horror stories about insurance companies killing their clients to make more money- similar to the stories in Michael Moore’s disturbing movie "Sicko"- the program quite blatantly pinned the whole problem on the fact that there are “uninsured” who are not paying into the system until they get sick and, therefore, promoting the Massachusetts model of “mandatory insurance”.
Though the first half of the program seemed to lead to the obvious conclusion- one that polls show the vast number of American’s hold- that only eliminating insurance companies from the equation and implementing a single-payer so-called “Medicare for All” system will really do anything about what all acknowledge is our “healthcare crisis”.
So it was with great interest that we read a piece by Russell Mokhiber of Corporate Crime Reporter entitled Something is Rotten at PBS.
He detailed how Washington Post reporter T.R. Reid had done a Frontline piece called “Sick Around the World” a few years back and Frontline had asked him to do another on America.
But when he turned in his work and the producers did their editing he found that “this is not my beautiful documentary”.
The article describes how apparently instead of presenting Reid’s work presenting the well known horrors of insurance company coverage and reaching the obvious conclusion that getting the profit motive out of the equation is the sensible way to proceed, the produces went 180 degrees on him.
As we said they stressed the “mandatory coverage” model saying the problem of high costs wasn’t due to insurance company greed and need to maximize profit but due to people not paying the insurance companies to be covered when they’re healthy..
The article tells the sorry tale in Reid’s own words:
.
“We spent months shooting that film,” Reid explains. “I was the correspondent. We did our last interview on January 6. The producers went to Boston and made the documentary. About late February I saw it for the first time. And I told them I disagreed with it. They listened to me, but they didn't want to change it.”
Reid has a book coming out this summer titled The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper and Fairer Health Care (Penguin Press, August 2009.)
“I said to them -- mandating for-profit insurance is not the lesson from other countries in the world,” Reid said. “I said I'm not going to be in a film that contradicts my previous film and my book. They said – I had to be in the film because I was under contract. I insisted that I couldn't be. And we parted ways.”
“Doctors, hospitals, nurses, labs can all be for-profit,” Reid said. “But the payment system has to be non-profit. All the other countries have agreed on that. We are the only one that allows health insurance companies to make a profit. You can't allow a profit to be made on the basic package of health insurance.”
“I don't think they deliberately got it wrong, but they got it wrong,” Reid said.
As you can imagine the producers tried to defend themselves. The next week Mokhiber wrote that they accuse Reid of being the one with a bias and actually tried to deny that they promoted the mandatory converge model even though the whole second half hour essentially did nothing but present the case for it.
The single payer Medicare for all model was never even mentioned except in passing and then as being a political impossibility.
In reality PBS is nothing but a non-commercial version of the corporate press these days except the corporate world just pays them directly, using the phony term “underwriting” instead of “bought and paid for programming”.
Although there used to be a strict PBS rule forbidding underwriting for a specific program by a company who had any “interest” directly or even indirectly in the subject they abandoned that almost 20 years ago- a move which encouraged other non commercial media such as public access TV and community radio like KKCR on Kaua`i to justify doing the same and abandoning all pretense of lack of commercial control over content.
While the newspaper industry keeps up the drumbeat of their supposed investigative reporting being essential to a democratic America, the examples of it cited recently are few, far between and generally weak, especially when compared to the 99% of the fare consisting of essentially free advertising and “he said- she said” shilling for the same politicians they should be- and aren’t- investigating.
Instead of actually improving their product to be once again a commodity people will pay for, their penny-wise pound-foolish methodology is to fire more reporters and say they can’t afford to do real journalism any more out of one side of their mouths while claiming they are worth saving because they are still doing it out of the other.
As Conrow concluded in her blog piece today, where she links to her two excellent articles in the Honolulu Weekly- one on the Reinstated Nation’s case regarding their trip to Kaho`olawe and one on GMO's in Hawai`i- “Support your independent newspapers!”
The press is dead- long live the press.
Thursday, November 20, 2008
SERVING TWO MASTERS
SERVING TWO MASTERS: The blogs and press are all trying to make heads or tails of what many claim is a scam of native Hawaiians trying to reclaim lands stolen from them and then resold despite purportedly “irrevocable” Royal Patents granted in the mid-19th century.
Mahealani Ventura-Oliver of the Hawaiiloa Foundation has been giving seminars and presenting compelling evidence that people who can trace their genealogy to those to whom the patents were granted may be able to reclaim the lands and those that still own them do not have to pay taxes, mortgage payments and other debts.
You can read up on a lot of it in everything from two articles lacking exposition in Honolulu paper to Ian Lind’s three link-filled but inconclusive blog entries to the racist treatment in the right wing Hawaii Free Press.
But what none report is whether, upon examination, the chain of events from those days to this comprise a valid legal case.
We haven’t the time or inclination to determine if there is a valid claim but the real question is one that is at the rhetorical core whre the winding road of the erosion of Hawaiian rights and theft of Hawaiian lands is concerned:
Even if they are perfectly valid claims, do we really expect justice in an American court?
We all know of the successful attempt to show that annexation of Hawai`i never legally took place. That and other dubious transactions by the US government should, by all rights, result in the return of lands and rights to a sovereign native kanaka maoli body politic
And we all know the results of almost 25 years of these and other efforts backed by seemingly proper precedence - the American so called “justice” system refuses to acknowledge the cases much less rule favorably on them..
Maybe in the 80’s if you were kanaka maoli it might have been a good gamble to put your life and possessions at risk in an attempt seek justice from American courts. But even then it seemed like a long shot to those who saw the way the government treated the valid claims of the native communities on the mainland.
The genocide of native Americans is well documented and continues today. Though treaties were signed and land rights designated, the supra-judicial theft of both lands and rights- many times validating actions taken at the same point of a gun that stole the Hawaiian kingdom- has prevailed in the realms of American jurisprudence.
Just this week a program on PBS’ “Independent Lens” series detailed the plight of the residents of the Swinomish Reservation in northwest Washington State. Despite the fact that they own a portion of land called March Point the fact that an oil refinery sits there – a plant that has polluted and killed-off their traditional fishing grounds and so their subsistance lifestyles- has made reclaiming the land impossible.
It’s an all too familiar and common story- though they have a apparently legitimate claim to the land, no court will apparently ever rule in their favor
What is obvious is that even if Ventura-Oliver’s claims are valid it takes a bit of schizophrenia on the part of kanaka to think that the very American system that is denying them the actualization of their inherent sovereignty is a good place to seek redress of their grievances.
Those who own property, have mortgages, credit card debt and owe taxes have by their actions already bought into the American government’s occupation of the islands. They have helped give legitimacy to the illegal occupation by allowing the greed and individualism of westerners to take hold over their own lives.
In doing so they make apparent that on some level they believe in the corrupt American system so it would make sense that they would naively go to American courts to enforce the law.
But at the same time they’ve got to know that they are asking for the recognition of their sovereign rights flies in the face of the corporate control of the American government and it’s courts.
Whether this woman and her aides are actually stealing from gullible people is something that requires we examine her motives just as with the “Perfect Title” case in the ‘90’s and early ‘00’s. And that’s something we’ll leave for others closer to the situation to determine
But participation in both requires a duality in thought on the part of the alleged victims- the belief that the very entity they believe stole what is rightfully theirs is the right entity to petition to voluntarily restore those rights.
Next time it might be wise to ask the Swinomish people how that’s going for them.
Mahealani Ventura-Oliver of the Hawaiiloa Foundation has been giving seminars and presenting compelling evidence that people who can trace their genealogy to those to whom the patents were granted may be able to reclaim the lands and those that still own them do not have to pay taxes, mortgage payments and other debts.
You can read up on a lot of it in everything from two articles lacking exposition in Honolulu paper to Ian Lind’s three link-filled but inconclusive blog entries to the racist treatment in the right wing Hawaii Free Press.
But what none report is whether, upon examination, the chain of events from those days to this comprise a valid legal case.
We haven’t the time or inclination to determine if there is a valid claim but the real question is one that is at the rhetorical core whre the winding road of the erosion of Hawaiian rights and theft of Hawaiian lands is concerned:
Even if they are perfectly valid claims, do we really expect justice in an American court?
We all know of the successful attempt to show that annexation of Hawai`i never legally took place. That and other dubious transactions by the US government should, by all rights, result in the return of lands and rights to a sovereign native kanaka maoli body politic
And we all know the results of almost 25 years of these and other efforts backed by seemingly proper precedence - the American so called “justice” system refuses to acknowledge the cases much less rule favorably on them..
Maybe in the 80’s if you were kanaka maoli it might have been a good gamble to put your life and possessions at risk in an attempt seek justice from American courts. But even then it seemed like a long shot to those who saw the way the government treated the valid claims of the native communities on the mainland.
The genocide of native Americans is well documented and continues today. Though treaties were signed and land rights designated, the supra-judicial theft of both lands and rights- many times validating actions taken at the same point of a gun that stole the Hawaiian kingdom- has prevailed in the realms of American jurisprudence.
Just this week a program on PBS’ “Independent Lens” series detailed the plight of the residents of the Swinomish Reservation in northwest Washington State. Despite the fact that they own a portion of land called March Point the fact that an oil refinery sits there – a plant that has polluted and killed-off their traditional fishing grounds and so their subsistance lifestyles- has made reclaiming the land impossible.
It’s an all too familiar and common story- though they have a apparently legitimate claim to the land, no court will apparently ever rule in their favor
What is obvious is that even if Ventura-Oliver’s claims are valid it takes a bit of schizophrenia on the part of kanaka to think that the very American system that is denying them the actualization of their inherent sovereignty is a good place to seek redress of their grievances.
Those who own property, have mortgages, credit card debt and owe taxes have by their actions already bought into the American government’s occupation of the islands. They have helped give legitimacy to the illegal occupation by allowing the greed and individualism of westerners to take hold over their own lives.
In doing so they make apparent that on some level they believe in the corrupt American system so it would make sense that they would naively go to American courts to enforce the law.
But at the same time they’ve got to know that they are asking for the recognition of their sovereign rights flies in the face of the corporate control of the American government and it’s courts.
Whether this woman and her aides are actually stealing from gullible people is something that requires we examine her motives just as with the “Perfect Title” case in the ‘90’s and early ‘00’s. And that’s something we’ll leave for others closer to the situation to determine
But participation in both requires a duality in thought on the part of the alleged victims- the belief that the very entity they believe stole what is rightfully theirs is the right entity to petition to voluntarily restore those rights.
Next time it might be wise to ask the Swinomish people how that’s going for them.
Saturday, August 9, 2008
A NOT SO DIFFERENT BREED
A NOT SO DIFFERENT BREED: It seems like today is some kind of day of self examination for white people across the state, not just the supporters of the Naue protesters on Kaua`i but also the those involved in a planned cultural visit by children to Kaho`olawe in light of the refusal of the military to even test for much less acknowledge the use of depleted uranium on the sacred island.
A comment on the discussion of the direct action to preserve the north shore graveyard and the police response on Katy Rose’s Breaking The Spell was quite provocative in response to Katy’s description and discussion with Joan Conrow of some of the actions and reactions.
The anonymous poster said:
It’s amazing to observe the effects of the tremendous influx of malahini who have come here to “settle” and “immerse” themselves in the “host” culture; to hear them voice in their best PC manner their support of the island’s “indigenous” residents’ struggles bemoaning their plight. How, incredibly hypocritical this is! They totally ignore the fact that it is their continuing invasion that has caused the severe lack of affordable housing here; caused by their renting and buying up everything in that category. It is their competition for housing that has caused the steep rise in rents as more and more of these working class immigrants arrive. All that’s left available are expensive luxury homes that local folks can’t afford. So, with their true colors flying, they voice their objections to all the overbuilding on expensive properties that they helped create. It is their numbers which have contributed by their unnecessary presence to Kauai’s traffic problems, crowding of beaches and surf sights. They compete for what decent jobs there are on the island, and by their hand enable the contractors and developers to do the very over building they so openly despise. They fill the jobs in the islands tourist industry thereby enabling its expansion that they so strongly bemoan for all its ill effects on this once rural environment. This is more than hypocritical; this is duplicitous. How can they look themselves in the mirror, write their blogs and present their testimonies on how Kauai is losing its cultural identify when it is they who are the problem; it is they who are killing it. If it weren’t for them, local folks could more easily find housing so that their children can remain on the island of their birth and find decent jobs so they don’t have to leave. The voices of these patronizing malahini ring false when it is their very presence that hurts most those they seem to want to support. This is the inconvenient truth!
Some good points, as Katy said. But the problem with that is that mainlanders are not just one monolithic demographic.
The settlers causing the problems are the ones who come to develop and rip-off the local resources and culture. They come and rape the land and give back nothing but degrading low pay jobs in an offensive tourism industry, instilling plantation mentality in their wake.
And although pacific islander immigrants including the undocumented ones probably equal those from the states you don’t hear people complain about “ those stupid f—in’ Filipinos”.
It’s not the working class people who are causing this mess. As a matter of fact to say so is to blame the victims of the system whether locally born and raised or immigrant..
It’s not the transplant population explosion itself that has cause the problems but rather it’s the imposition of another culture that values money and progress over the individual rights and local lifestyle of working people who are caught in a trap, not of their making or in their ability to directly resolve it.
And there’s the rub.
Because even assuming the poster’s premise was correct and all the people who came here are destroying the island, is the correct response to say “join the club” with an “if you can’t beat them join them attitude” as many who comment in the various blogs and newspaper comment sections across the state emphatically pronounce?
Or is the right action to do all you can to curb the negative effects of the invasion by doing what you can to stop the degradation of exploitive predatory development that is causing it?
Another cultural clash within the non-native community came across our desk late this morning in an email to a list of almost 100 community activists, politicians and journalists sent by Maui public interest attorney par excellance Lance Collins in response to a letter from Big Island depleted-uranium (DU) activist Shannon Rudolpf .
Rudolpf saw a press release from Collins’ Malama Hawai`i organization announcing a workshop regarding “(a)n opportunity to go to Kaho`olawe with the Protect Kaho`olawe 'Ohana and learn about the island firsthand” for secondary school teachers and presumably students.
This caused Shannon to write to Collins saying:
Aloha,
It's completely irresponsible to take children to Kaho'olawe unless you are CERTAIN no depleted uranium has been used there. I've asked this question many times over the years but have never gotten a straight answer from anyone. I'm no expert but I would guess a lot of DU was used there. (The Target Island)
Please don't let your children go to Kaho'olawe without a working and properly calibrated radiation monitor.
I was present (across the road) from the Pohakuloa Training Range, on the Big Island in May 2007...many of us watched the radiation levels stay at or below background levels for an hour and a half, (5-20 counts per minute) on residents monitors...suddenly the wind came up and blew dust directly across the monitors... which then zoomed up to 75 cpm.
I would never have gone up there if I had known this was going to happen and would have discouraged others. Please heed this warning. Please discourage anyone from going to Kaho'olawe until there is a long term, 24/7 monitoring system in place, preferably with independent verification, such as the Hawai'i County Council has recently recommended for our training range.
Sincerely,
Shannon Rudolph– Kona
This drew what some might call an outrageous response from Collins, who has admirably worked with and represented many cultural and political Hawaiian groups including apparently this workshop. He wrote:
Shannon,
I think the issue of going to Kaho'olawe is more complex for many people than your black and white assessment -- which impregnates the issue with Western medical/scientific reasoning as the basis for your moral claims of what responsibility is for other people and their practice of culture.
During the cholera outbreaks in the turn of the century in the Philippines, U.S. military authorities used Western medical discourse to make similar black/white claims regarding what the proper conduct of Filipinos should be towards themselves and their children -- characterizing those that didn't listen to them as irresponsible and childish.
Western medicine and science has a long history of partnership with U.S. military and cultural imperialism and I would suggest caution before or nuance in telling other people how to practice their culture.
lance*
Wailuku, Maui
Ooooo- snap....
But who is the one telling whom how to help someone else practice their culture?
It’s certainly not an easy issue. It sounds similar to clashes that occurred in the northwestern US and Canada and in Alaska regarding whale hunting.
With good intentions many western activist said killing whales is killing whales and shouldn’t be allowed in an age when they are endangered no matter what the cultural importance.
The indigenous cultural practitioners and their supporters argued that even the questioning of the cultural significance is cause for outrage and to stop them from practicing their ritual was sacrilege tantamount to cultural genocide.
But then again some “cultural practice” claims regarding whales like those in Japan are seen by most as a thinly veiled attempt to engage in commercial whaling.
Rudolph was apparently just assuring the health and safety of children and the need to have the military to clean up their act and either admit to or show that there has never been use of depleted uranium on Kaho`olawe.
Does insuring that children aren’t exposed to radiation violate cultural practices of kanaka maoli- isn’t keeping children safe part of that culture too?
It seems presumptuous of Collins to attack Rudolpf even if it is in the name of sustaining cultural and religious practices. It feels disingenuous to claim that ascertaining the safety of the people going to Kaho`olawe is somehow an excuse for continuing cultural suppression.
Collins’ apprehension may be well placed because some of the most sacred places in the islands have been desecrated by the military such as Makua Valley on O`ahu.
The military has used dangerous conditions they created as an excuse to keep native practitioners out of the sacred valley of Makua, battling against practitioners in court and using and twisting court- mandated cleanup and access to actually keep practitioners out during traditional ceremonial periods like this year’s makahiki.
But the response Collins gave is not that maybe the importance of instilling culture in our children outweighs the risk of the DU but in fact he’s apparently dismissive of even finding out what the danger is much less taking the dangerous realities into account when people, especially children, visit
Would Collins object to taking a Geiger counter and keeping children away from radioactive areas if they exist? He doesn’t say
Does he want to keep the parents of those children- and for that matter the teachers and anyone else traveling to the island- ignorant of the risks and possible presence of DU on Kaho`olawe? He doesn’t say.
It certainly sounds like he is saying to Rudolph “shut up- what people don’t know won’t hurt them”.
Seems the least Collins and Malama Hawai`i could do is to insure full disclosure and the consent of those whose culture he’s defending.
Kipling’s white man’s burden thrives when westerners think they “know what’s best” for the “noble savages” and endeavor to protect them from themselves.
It’s the kind of attitude apparent in the way the state and federal governments still hold the never-really ceded “crown” Hawaiian lands they stole “in trust” and wants to pass the Akaka bill to “steal them one last time, fair and square”
Most Americans routinely say “we’d be glad to give them their land back and insure their cultural and political self-determination if they’d all just agree on what they want”.
Uh, they have- they want their land back and their cultural and political self determination insured.
As our friend, Anahola kanaka maoli sovereignty activist Michael Grace once said to us: “Hey- we big boys now- can handle”.
If they can handle, can’t we?
A comment on the discussion of the direct action to preserve the north shore graveyard and the police response on Katy Rose’s Breaking The Spell was quite provocative in response to Katy’s description and discussion with Joan Conrow of some of the actions and reactions.
The anonymous poster said:
It’s amazing to observe the effects of the tremendous influx of malahini who have come here to “settle” and “immerse” themselves in the “host” culture; to hear them voice in their best PC manner their support of the island’s “indigenous” residents’ struggles bemoaning their plight. How, incredibly hypocritical this is! They totally ignore the fact that it is their continuing invasion that has caused the severe lack of affordable housing here; caused by their renting and buying up everything in that category. It is their competition for housing that has caused the steep rise in rents as more and more of these working class immigrants arrive. All that’s left available are expensive luxury homes that local folks can’t afford. So, with their true colors flying, they voice their objections to all the overbuilding on expensive properties that they helped create. It is their numbers which have contributed by their unnecessary presence to Kauai’s traffic problems, crowding of beaches and surf sights. They compete for what decent jobs there are on the island, and by their hand enable the contractors and developers to do the very over building they so openly despise. They fill the jobs in the islands tourist industry thereby enabling its expansion that they so strongly bemoan for all its ill effects on this once rural environment. This is more than hypocritical; this is duplicitous. How can they look themselves in the mirror, write their blogs and present their testimonies on how Kauai is losing its cultural identify when it is they who are the problem; it is they who are killing it. If it weren’t for them, local folks could more easily find housing so that their children can remain on the island of their birth and find decent jobs so they don’t have to leave. The voices of these patronizing malahini ring false when it is their very presence that hurts most those they seem to want to support. This is the inconvenient truth!
Some good points, as Katy said. But the problem with that is that mainlanders are not just one monolithic demographic.
The settlers causing the problems are the ones who come to develop and rip-off the local resources and culture. They come and rape the land and give back nothing but degrading low pay jobs in an offensive tourism industry, instilling plantation mentality in their wake.
And although pacific islander immigrants including the undocumented ones probably equal those from the states you don’t hear people complain about “ those stupid f—in’ Filipinos”.
It’s not the working class people who are causing this mess. As a matter of fact to say so is to blame the victims of the system whether locally born and raised or immigrant..
It’s not the transplant population explosion itself that has cause the problems but rather it’s the imposition of another culture that values money and progress over the individual rights and local lifestyle of working people who are caught in a trap, not of their making or in their ability to directly resolve it.
And there’s the rub.
Because even assuming the poster’s premise was correct and all the people who came here are destroying the island, is the correct response to say “join the club” with an “if you can’t beat them join them attitude” as many who comment in the various blogs and newspaper comment sections across the state emphatically pronounce?
Or is the right action to do all you can to curb the negative effects of the invasion by doing what you can to stop the degradation of exploitive predatory development that is causing it?
Another cultural clash within the non-native community came across our desk late this morning in an email to a list of almost 100 community activists, politicians and journalists sent by Maui public interest attorney par excellance Lance Collins in response to a letter from Big Island depleted-uranium (DU) activist Shannon Rudolpf .
Rudolpf saw a press release from Collins’ Malama Hawai`i organization announcing a workshop regarding “(a)n opportunity to go to Kaho`olawe with the Protect Kaho`olawe 'Ohana and learn about the island firsthand” for secondary school teachers and presumably students.
This caused Shannon to write to Collins saying:
Aloha,
It's completely irresponsible to take children to Kaho'olawe unless you are CERTAIN no depleted uranium has been used there. I've asked this question many times over the years but have never gotten a straight answer from anyone. I'm no expert but I would guess a lot of DU was used there. (The Target Island)
Please don't let your children go to Kaho'olawe without a working and properly calibrated radiation monitor.
I was present (across the road) from the Pohakuloa Training Range, on the Big Island in May 2007...many of us watched the radiation levels stay at or below background levels for an hour and a half, (5-20 counts per minute) on residents monitors...suddenly the wind came up and blew dust directly across the monitors... which then zoomed up to 75 cpm.
I would never have gone up there if I had known this was going to happen and would have discouraged others. Please heed this warning. Please discourage anyone from going to Kaho'olawe until there is a long term, 24/7 monitoring system in place, preferably with independent verification, such as the Hawai'i County Council has recently recommended for our training range.
Sincerely,
Shannon Rudolph– Kona
This drew what some might call an outrageous response from Collins, who has admirably worked with and represented many cultural and political Hawaiian groups including apparently this workshop. He wrote:
Shannon,
I think the issue of going to Kaho'olawe is more complex for many people than your black and white assessment -- which impregnates the issue with Western medical/scientific reasoning as the basis for your moral claims of what responsibility is for other people and their practice of culture.
During the cholera outbreaks in the turn of the century in the Philippines, U.S. military authorities used Western medical discourse to make similar black/white claims regarding what the proper conduct of Filipinos should be towards themselves and their children -- characterizing those that didn't listen to them as irresponsible and childish.
Western medicine and science has a long history of partnership with U.S. military and cultural imperialism and I would suggest caution before or nuance in telling other people how to practice their culture.
lance*
Wailuku, Maui
Ooooo- snap....
But who is the one telling whom how to help someone else practice their culture?
It’s certainly not an easy issue. It sounds similar to clashes that occurred in the northwestern US and Canada and in Alaska regarding whale hunting.
With good intentions many western activist said killing whales is killing whales and shouldn’t be allowed in an age when they are endangered no matter what the cultural importance.
The indigenous cultural practitioners and their supporters argued that even the questioning of the cultural significance is cause for outrage and to stop them from practicing their ritual was sacrilege tantamount to cultural genocide.
But then again some “cultural practice” claims regarding whales like those in Japan are seen by most as a thinly veiled attempt to engage in commercial whaling.
Rudolph was apparently just assuring the health and safety of children and the need to have the military to clean up their act and either admit to or show that there has never been use of depleted uranium on Kaho`olawe.
Does insuring that children aren’t exposed to radiation violate cultural practices of kanaka maoli- isn’t keeping children safe part of that culture too?
It seems presumptuous of Collins to attack Rudolpf even if it is in the name of sustaining cultural and religious practices. It feels disingenuous to claim that ascertaining the safety of the people going to Kaho`olawe is somehow an excuse for continuing cultural suppression.
Collins’ apprehension may be well placed because some of the most sacred places in the islands have been desecrated by the military such as Makua Valley on O`ahu.
The military has used dangerous conditions they created as an excuse to keep native practitioners out of the sacred valley of Makua, battling against practitioners in court and using and twisting court- mandated cleanup and access to actually keep practitioners out during traditional ceremonial periods like this year’s makahiki.
But the response Collins gave is not that maybe the importance of instilling culture in our children outweighs the risk of the DU but in fact he’s apparently dismissive of even finding out what the danger is much less taking the dangerous realities into account when people, especially children, visit
Would Collins object to taking a Geiger counter and keeping children away from radioactive areas if they exist? He doesn’t say
Does he want to keep the parents of those children- and for that matter the teachers and anyone else traveling to the island- ignorant of the risks and possible presence of DU on Kaho`olawe? He doesn’t say.
It certainly sounds like he is saying to Rudolph “shut up- what people don’t know won’t hurt them”.
Seems the least Collins and Malama Hawai`i could do is to insure full disclosure and the consent of those whose culture he’s defending.
Kipling’s white man’s burden thrives when westerners think they “know what’s best” for the “noble savages” and endeavor to protect them from themselves.
It’s the kind of attitude apparent in the way the state and federal governments still hold the never-really ceded “crown” Hawaiian lands they stole “in trust” and wants to pass the Akaka bill to “steal them one last time, fair and square”
Most Americans routinely say “we’d be glad to give them their land back and insure their cultural and political self-determination if they’d all just agree on what they want”.
Uh, they have- they want their land back and their cultural and political self determination insured.
As our friend, Anahola kanaka maoli sovereignty activist Michael Grace once said to us: “Hey- we big boys now- can handle”.
If they can handle, can’t we?
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