Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 7, Number 7, 1 July 1990 — When land stealing is called "land reform" [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

When land stealing is called "land reform"

by A. Frenchy DeSoto T rustee-at-large

In 1967, a law was put on Hawaii's books that was to have corrected a variety of soeial ills — housing shortages, high costs of living, inflation, etc. These ills were supposedly caused by the ex-

istence of several large landowners in Hawai'i who chose to lease-out their lands rather than sell them. The law was called the Leasehold Conversion Act of 1967. Today it's better known as the Hawai'i Land Reform Act. In theory, land reform was to have benefitted all Hawaii's people. It was supposed to make more land available for people to buy whieh would bring prices down and make housing more affordable. In reality, though, land reform has benefitted a relatively small number of people and, in large part, it has done so at the expense of the Hawaiian people.

For instance, the Waialae-Kahala area eontained house lots leased out by Kamehameha Schools/Bishop Estate to people who bought or built their houses there. Under land reform, the KS/BE was forced to sell these lots to the residents at prices set by a jury. Many of these residents, who pleaded before the legislature and the courts that "their homes were their castles," then turned around and sold the land and house, in

some cases, for millions more than the court had ordered them to pay Kamehameha Schools/Bishop Estate. That scenario continues to be repeated in other areas, Hawaii Kai, Portlock, Kailua, Kaneohe, even today. Some properties are being acquired in fee and then resold in less than a month. More

than 90-percent of the land that has been taken by the state under land reform has been taken from one landowner; Kamehameha Schools/Bishop Estate. That was land left by Bernice Pauahi Bishop to provide for the education of Hawaiian children. Now it is someone else's property. And aside from the pnee people paid to gain the title to the land, it is not likely to serve that purpose ever again.

Land reform was to have prompted fundamental social change. That is, a change from having Hawaiian lands held in trust for the Hawaiian people to having those lands wrenched from our hands and put into the hands of others. But this is nothing new to Hawaiians. For the past 100 years we have been victims of "fundamental social change." We lost an entire kingdom to people whose only eoneem was to effect social change with little regard for native people. That they prospered as a result, of that their chi!dren were afforded the benefits or landed-living while ours are asking, "Kupuna, what happened?" seems, at least to the few who profited, to be beside the point. To us, though, that is the point: land reform has made stealing land legal, and it's being stolen from the Hawaiians.

Why is it a social evil for Hawaiians to have a land base held intact for their benefit? And I'm not just talking about the Bishop Estate. Lili'uokalani and Emma both left legacies of land for their people, as did Lunalilo and Kapi'olani. Mueh of what remains of these estates is in danger of being lost to land reform now. And if the law is extended to include the land under condominiums and other multi-family projects — as some legislators have proposed — even more could be taken. In Japan, it's okay for Japanese to own and eontrol land . It's okay for Germans to own and control land in their homeland, too. The same is true in Canada and every other democratic nation in the

world. But Hawaiians owning and controlling land in Hawai'i somehow constitutes a "social evil." Never mind that this is the only homeland we have on earth. Never mind that we are the only group indigenous to this land. Land reform is merely a mechanism for taking native lands away from the native group.

What makes it even more insidious, though, is that the state legislature plays an integral role in the taking. So the very body that is supposed to be protecting the interests of the minority from the tyrannv of the majority is actually helping to extinguish some of the last glimmers of hope we have of surviving as a race. Some organizations fought land reform from the beginning and eonhnue to do so today. Kamehameha Schools/Bishop Estate contested the act all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, and they must continue to fight any further extension of the law even now.

OHA and the Council of Hawaiian Organizations, the Association of Hawaiian Civic Clubs and other Hawaiian groups have also gone on record against the Act. But the theft will eontinue as long as our state legislature sees fit to allow it.

As Hawaiians, we have lost too muchasa result of land reform, and we stand to lose even more. This is not just a matter of political maneuvering or activist rhetoric. We are talking about the continued erosion of rights to our ancestral lands and the eventual loss of those lands to others who couIdn't care less about what happens to us as a group. To me, this is a matter of our survival. It's time to stop the stealing.

Call your state legislators and demand that this continued stealing stop immediately.