Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 13, Number 1, 1 January 1996 — Sovereignty Survey [ARTICLE]

Sovereignty Survey

Choosing numbers randomly, the telephone survey questioned 400 Hawaiians from across the state on a range of sovereignty-related issues. It revealed that 53 percent of Hawaiians support some sort of sovereignty, a number that balloons to 84 percent when it is seen as promoting Hawaiian culture and 78 percent when it is seen as promoting ethnic pride. Support for sovereignty drops considerably if it comes at the expense of U.S. benefits, damages ties with nonHawaiian neighbors, or hurts tourism. The Advertiser survey indicates that the majority of Hawaiians are comfortable with the American system but

in land or money as compensation for the overthrow of the monarchy. The Advertiser results differ slightly from an informal survey done of Ka Wai Ola readers a year ago. That survey found nearly 60 percent of respondents supported some sort of sovereignty with 37 percent opposed. There were 177 responses to the Ka Wai Ola survey whieh eame from all over the islands and the Mainland. No attempt was made to determine the ethnicity of the Ka Wai Ola survey respondents but as the vast majority of Ka Wai Ola recipients are registered OHA voters it could be safely assumed that most, if not all of those who participated in the survey were