Chang, Williamson B. C. 1992. "Native Hawaiians and the Reconstruction of Communal Property Values." Presented at Inequality and the Commons, the third annual conference of the International Association for the Study of Common Property, Washington, DC, September 17-20, 1992.

Abstract

"Native Hawaiians, in the hierarchy of the world's oppressed, stand in a unique position. Hawaiians were annexed by the nation that claims the birthright of democracy and self-determination. Moreover, as the United States continues a world stance of enforcing the legal high ground in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, Hawaiians continue to live with the consequences of their own version of invasion of Kuwait or the Hitler Stalin pact that annexed Lithuania. Hawaiians are unique in the means by which the world as a whole finds a means of overlooking the obvious parallels that undermine United States credibility as the world's enforcer of inherent rights of self-determination.

"In this paper and elsewhere, the author has explored how a repressed political groups attempt, over many generations, to retain the essence of its traditional identity, often in the face of severe political oppression. Thus, the first section, 'Suffering and the Persistence of Culture' summarizes the authors work to date on how Hawaiian defiance against the totalizing destruction of their culture represented by wholesale assimilation to American values is resisted in a variety of microcosmic forms of political sabotage.

"The second part of this paper, 'Law and the Reconstruction of Local Knowledge,' answers those who cannot imagine an institutional means by which a culture which has been repressed and lost much of its day to day reality as a practice can be reconstructed through an institutional for of 'indexical' reproduction of the core states of being."