Birth of the Modern Hawaiian Movement: Kalama Valley, O'ahu

Abstract

Holding a banner lettered in bold colorful strokes, KOKUA HAWAI'I ("HELP HAWAI'I"), some three dozen non-violent protesters were arrested for trespassing on private land on May 11, 1971, as they sat atop the last unbulldozed house in rural Kalama Valley on the Hawaiian island of O'ahu. 1 They were well aware that, in the words of one of their young leaders, Linton Park, "Hawaiian history was being made" by the very act of their resistance.2 What they could not know was that their collective effort to preserve the land rights of local people in that dry, 250-acre valley on O'ahu's east end would be remembered long after as the spark that ignited the modern Hawaiian Movement, an ongoing series of land struggles throughout the decade of the seventies that was destined to change the consciousness of Hawai'i's people, especially her native people.More akin to the American Indian Movement than to the Black Civil Rights Movement, the Hawaiian Movement began as a battle for land rights but would evolve, by 1980, into a larger struggle for native Hawaiian autonomy.Land claims first appeared, as in Kalama Valley, as community-based assertions for the preservation of agricultural land against resort and subdivision use.By the mid 1970s, these claims had broadened to cover military-controlled lands and trust lands specifically set aside for Hawaiians by the U.S. Congress but used by non-beneficiaries.Justification for these claims had also expanded.In the beginning of the decade, the rallying cry was "land for local people, not tourists."By 1976, the language of protest had changed from English to Hawaiian, with emphasis on the native relationship to land.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 66 citations exist upstream.