Next Tuesday marks the 130th anniversary of the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy.
A joint resolution of Congress passed in 1993 acknowledged the overthrow happened “with the active participation of agents and citizens of the United States.”
In ourongoing project with the University of Hawaiʻi's Center for Oral History, we hear from the voices of people marking the perseverance of Native Hawaiian people to exercise traditional practices this month.
Ethnic studies professor Ty Kāwika Tengan shares firsthand accounts from Chief Justice William Richardson and Adolph Helm.
Between 1968 and 1977, Native Hawaiian Hawaiʻi Supreme Court Justice William S. Richardson relied upon Hawaiian law and traditional custom in ruling that the vegetation line marked the shoreline boundary between private land and public trust lands. These decisions preserved public ownership of and access to Hawaiʻi's beaches.
Richardson: Marumoto, a great judge, mind you. On the shoreline case, he went down to the U.S. geodetic survey people to ask them what their records looked like. And he came up with some of the conclusions that they had come up with, but I remember asking them how long they had been in Hawai'i, and they had been in Hawai'i for 25 years. And I said, "Well, 25 years isn't long enough for me, because we've got some information on what was in existence prior to the time the U.S. people came to Hawai'i. Well, if that was the law then, why can't it be today?"
They shoot a horizontal line and tell you, well, that's the shoreline. Well, of course, I came up with what I thought the Hawaiians felt should be the shoreline, and that's the high wash of waves. And oh, they said, well now, look, we engineers can't buy that. You can't run straight lines that way because it changes by the season and all that. But that's the Hawaiian way. You couldn't leave your canoe on the beach and have it go out to sea at night. You must bring it far enough up. And as far up as you needed to bring it, must have been public domain.
In 1975, Moloka'i Hawaiian homesteader Adolph Helm helped organize Hui Alaloa, the Group of the Long Trails, to open access to the Moloka'i shoreline for Hawaiian subsistence fishing and gathering. This Native Hawaiian access eventually opened the beaches to public access for all.
Helm: The special thing about Molokaʻi is really access to the beach. The public was blocked off from the resort areas where they couldn't access the beach, and then private, you know, they had all these multimillion dollar homes that, you know, put signs up that you couldn't go into, you know, through my property.
So there were a group of people representing different parts of the community that got together and talk story about, you know, what we can name this organization. And it was basically Hui Alaloa is one name about the old trails and finding ways that we can start opening up those trails. And one of them was to raise awareness by, you know, marching or walking through these no trespassing places where can get, you know, media coverage.
That's kind of, to me, that's how it all started. So we had the march from right here. It started from here and it went all the way down to Kolo, all the way up up to Hale o Lono. And so we did that whole stretch because you had to go over gates because they locked it out. Nobody had accessibility for the public to go to those places. And that was the idea.
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This oral history project is supported by the SHARP initiative of the National Endowment for the Humanities through the American Council of Learned Societies.
