Anne Keala Kelly: U.S. Occupation of Hawaii Killing Indigenous Roots

If you've just tuned in and missed Part One of this compelling interview with Hawaiian filmmaker, Anne Keala Kelly on her documentary film 'Noho Hewa', then go check it out.

In the Part Two, Keala:

• shares how Hawaiians have lost their spiritual center 
• talks about desecration of the land 
• offers her opinion of what we can do 
• briefly touches on how poverty kills resistance 

Exploiting Natural Resources is Part of the Ongoing Genocide
Our natural resources are exploited in every conceivable way.  Water is diverted from farming to golf courses and condos and hotels.

Our land is tortured and used to death by the military industry… 60 % of what the military uses right now in Hawai'i is on the most contested land in the archipelago, the Crown and Government land of the Hawaiian Kingdom, referred to as “ceded land.” But it’s land that was never ceded… it’s land that was illegally taken and is illegally and immorally occupied by the U.S. military.

Another issue is with regard to land is desecration.

Our people’s bones are buried throughout this place and our sacred sites are everywhere as well. The practices here is removing our ancestors and bulldoze the sites to make way for foreigners.

It’s part of the ongoing genocide in Hawaii. Cultural genocide and spiritual genocide of Hawaiians, nobody else, just us Hawaiians.

And the GMO industry here… we have the largest concentration of open field genetically modified organism test sites in the world.

While we have more endangered species habitat per square mile than any other place on earth, we have the largest military command on earth to go with it.

So our natural resources are being used to manifest the most unnatural things imaginable: food that cannot be eaten and the practice of murdering people and dominating the world through the U.S. military.

And just a quick note on resources: water and land are finite. To waste it on polluting industries that can’t feed us, and only destroy what we need to survive here is evil.

But it’s business as usual here.

Our land can grow whatever we plant in it. Instead of living off the land, about 98% or more of what people consume here in Hawai'i is shipped in from the continent. So the way natural resources are used here is insane, economically and otherwise.

Poverty Has Taken Its Toll on Hawaiians

As the economy gets worse and worse, yes, the homeless population grows. There are lots of people out there who are not Hawaiian, but about 70% or more are Hawaiian.


It’s an ongoing problem because a) our disappearance or assimilation, which is the same thing, is the U.S. agenda here, and b) poverty is a powerful tool for removing a people from their land. It keeps them from political action because they are too busy trying to survive.

The homeless woman you see in the trailer is Annie Pau. She was a friend, and I say was because she died this past August. Poverty probably shortened her life by 20 years or more.

Image Credit: jayul

Destroying Our roots Has Caused Spiritual Damage

This is a tough one for me right now because I see so little resistance these days. I see fear and assimilation and I see Hawaiian gatekeepers, mainly from the academic industrial complex and non-profit industrial complex.

I see Hawaiians selling us all out for their individual middle class lives and personal gain. There is more energy put into containing the movement than there is into growing it.

Noho Hewa: The Wrongful Occupation of Hawaii

Editor's note: Due to the length of this interview, this post is a two-part series. Read Part Two!

Hawaiian filmmaker, Anne Keala Kelly's Noho Hewa (Noho means "to occupy" and Hewa means "wrong") was named best documentary at the Hawaii International Film Festival and was awarded the Special Jury Prize at the Pacific International Documentary Film Festival.

The film offers a contemporary look at Hawaiian people, politics, and resistance against U.S. laws and militarism that continue to erase their history.

As a journalist, Keala has used various multimedia platforms to bring the voice of indigenous peoples and environmental issues to a global audience. During my time as a news producer for Free Speech Radio News (FSRN), I had the pleasure of working with this amazing spiritual ruckus maker. The following is a the first part of an excerpt of her discussing her thoughts on Hawaii.

The Reality of Colonization

"The history of slavery in Jamaica is so contrary to the vacation mentality people have about the island. And that history, isn’t so long ago.

People there are still dealing with slavery’s legacy, as are Haitians, right? 

I mean the earthquake in Haiti crippled that country but it was crippled by its insane debt to France, right? 

For over a hundred years, they were forced to pay restitution to the slave masters they liberated themselves from in a “pay or perish” deal they made with France and they’ve never recovered from the forced impoverishment the colonial masters constructed for them. Their poverty, like that of any people that resisted colonisation, has been passed down generation to generation. 

The fantasy of Jamaica is grotesque when you think of what’s really gone on there, and that fantasy/vacation industry is modeled after what has been done to Hawai'i. 

Hawai'i is ground zero for the American fantasy of paradise. Jamaica is essentially ground zero for slavery in conjunction with genocide in the western hemisphere… the essential tools white people employed to “build America.”

Same thing in Hawai'i, sans the slavery. Our end of the colonial project has manifested differently. 

That’s the thing about white supremacy: it doesn’t mind morphing into different forms of genocide to accomplish its goal, or waiting a couple of centuries for the outcome.

The plantation system here in Hawai'i used impoverished Asian immigrants to build the wealth of the handful of white plantation owners, missionary descendants from America. And they did it with Hawaiian land that, like that of the natives on the continent, was stolen and or cheated out of native hands over the course of less than a hundred years.

And then the Asian immigrant population established itself as the middle class settler population alongside the haole (white) settlers and today these two settler groups have all the power in Hawai'i.

Hawaiians Have Always Been Here

In brief, white anthropologists say Hawaiians have only been here 2,000 years. Some say we’ve only been here 700 years.  Some say there were only 400,000 Hawaiians living in Hawai'i when Captain Cook got lost and ended up here; a white scholar named David Stannard wrote an interesting (very short) book called “Before the Horror” that argues that there were more like a million Hawaiians living in Hawaii when Cook showed up.

But this place is so small… it is the most “isolated” archipelago on earth, but I say that in scare quotes because to say it’s isolated is to look at it from the outside in.