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Related: • Main Feature: Do Native Hawaiians Count? • Washington Journal: Justice for Native Hawaiians • Lead Editorial: Payback Time

Captain James Cook is credited with "discovering" the Hawaiian Islands in 1778. He named them the "Sandwich Islands," in honor of John Montague, the Earl of Sandwich.

Justice for Native Hawaiians

I can walk into your house tomorrow and take anything I want. That’s right, I can grab your television, your sofa, or your favorite paintings, and not pay you a penny. All I have to do is say that I “discovered” your house, the way that Columbus “discovered” a land already inhabited by millions of people.

Similarly, history textbooks say that Hawaii was “annexed” in 1893 after a coup that was aided by the United States Navy. Clearly, we as Americans would not feel comfortable if some other country’s navy assisted in the overthrow of our government. And we certainly would not accept an injustice once the official euphemism was given its true name.

This is the context of the legal, administrative, and political issues that surround the current struggle for justice by Native Hawaiian peoples. From this original act of brutality 100 years ago has come a bittersweet history for Hawaiian peoples papered over by the myth of a land of happiness, harmony and honeymoons. Current administrative and legal actions rooted in the details of who can vote or who is entitled to a particular benefit must be seen against this backdrop.

The excellent report on Native Hawaiian issues just released by the United States Commission on Civil Rights (USCCR) coincides with major civil disobedience activities in Puerto Rico and on the United States mainland against the Navy bombings on the tiny island of Vieques, just off the Puerto Rican coast. Numerous people have been arrested, including Rev. Jesse Jackson’s wife, Jacqueline, Robert Kennedy, Jr., and numerous prominent Latinos. While these actions in Puerto Rico and the release of a document in Hawaii may seem like unrelated events, a student of Asian American history would see the connections.

The “We the People” who set up the original 13 colonies in 1776 did not envision having a colonial empire comparable to the British empire we were fighting against at the time. Between the founding of the United States in the 1770s and 1898, when the Philippines, Guam, Cuba, and Puerto Rico were “ceded” to the United States after the Spanish American War, new territories had followed a predictable trajectory. Following Thomas Jefferson’s Northwest Territory plan, those living in territories enjoyed the rights and privileges of citizens, and the territories eventually became states.

With the acquisition of Hawaii and the former Spanish colonies filled with non-European people, however, racism and greed changed the way we viewed the process of becoming a state. Unlike the mostly European-derived people who joined the Union from Indiana (1816), Illinois (1818), and Iowa (1846), the mostly Asian and Pacific Islander peoples who lived in Guam, American Samoa, and other so-called “Insular Areas and Freely Associated States” (www.doi.gov/oia/oiafacts.html ) are still treated as perpetual second-class citizens in the eyes of the American legal and political system. Their representatives can vote in committees, but not on the floor of the House of Representatives. Sounds a lot like taxation without representation to me.

Meanwhile, Puerto Rico is still a “Commonwealth” (a name still used by Massachusetts and Virginia — although they have enjoyed the privileges and rights of states for over 200 years), and Cuba might still be an American colonial step-child if Fidel Castro hadn’t kicked out the corrupt Batista regime in 1959.

Aside from reading the report produced by the USCCR’s Hawaiian Advisory Committee, “Reconciliation at a Crossroads,” (www.usccr.gov), those interested in more background on the current debates should read “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” (www.boondocksnet.com/twain/persit.html) and other writings by Mark Twain. Twain is the writer best known for Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn stories, but he also was active in the Anti-Imperialism League at the turn of the 20th century.

Another important resource are the Supreme Court’s infamous Insular Cases, decided in 1901, which used legal mumbo-jumbo to create a distinction between an incorporated and unincorporated territory. Dean Alegado of the University of Hawaii gives a good summary in Filipinas magazine (www.filipinasmag.com/museum/history/navy/main.html).

Unincorporated territories were not destined to become states, yet they could play two roles at once: American territory from an international perspective, yet a foreign territory from the perspective of the rest of the United States. Legalized discrimination could take place because the United States Constitution did not apply.

In sum, the legal status of residents of Hawaii and other former territories is a civil rights issue that links Asian Americans to Pacific Island peoples as well as Latinos and Native Americans. To understand and participate in the debate so eloquently outlined by the USCCR’s Hawaii Advisory Committee, we first have to open our eyes to the current and historical legacies of America’s unfortunate experiment with colonialism.