Haunani-Kay Trask : PRACTICE QUESTION 5 : How would you describe your lecturing style?

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Transcript

I have always just told students when I'm lecturing analytically, I just say, "This is the way things are." And they can ask me questions about it or not. But I don't come into the classroom and say, "What did you think about this?" I come into the classroom and say, "This is the situation today with Rice v. Cayetano."(1) And then their reading is a background to enable them to understand the lecture. 

In the beginning, my students are always semi-traumatized, they're terrified. It's too much, it's overwhelming. She's too energetic, she's too out there. Halfway through the semester, you can see it. (snaps fingers) 

I'm a very aggressive teacher, lecturer. And I'm always writing all over the board too, so there's a lot of energy being expended. And I'll say, "So what is it? What is it?" And they all sit there… you know, TV generation - they think I'm a television show. I go, "You guys are so dead! What is the answer to this question??" So I'm a real… sort of a… dynamic, jumping around kind of teacher. In the beginning, that shocks them. Halfway through the semester, they're yelling out the answers. They're saying, "Yeah, yeah, yes, it was like that! Yes, it's like this, yes!" 

And right about now is when we start having elections for student government. And sure enough, they all come out of my class, because I tell them, "You absolutely have to take the reins of government." They're engaged. And of course now, because of the sovereignty movement,(2) a lot of students are engaged in all kinds of other struggles. There isn't anybody in the class who isn't engaged in some way in something, whatever that might be.

Notes

(1) Rice v. Cayetano: A successful lawsuit filed in the U.S. Supreme Court to extinguish the political rights of Native Hawaiians to choose their own representatives for the state Office of Hawaiian Affairs elections.

Specifically, this lawsuit was filed by haole settler and missionary descendant Harold “Freddy” Rice, alleging that the voting requirements for the Office of Hawaiian Affairs’ (OHA) elections were discriminatory on the basis of race (Hawaiian voters only) and in violation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution. OHA currently controls over $350 million in assets, excluding past due payments in the millions of dollars still owed by the state to Native Hawaiians.

Denied at the district and appellate courts, Rice and his settler attorney, John Goemans, were encouraged and supported to take their case to the U.S. Supreme Court by the Virginia-based, racist advocacy group, The Campaign for a Color-Blind America. In February 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court ignored the established political relationship between the United States and Native Hawaiians and ruled in favor of settlers voting on Hawaiian issues.

Emboldened by the Supreme Court decision, other settlers soon filed court cases to terminate other existing Federal and State Hawaiian entitlements and to use those resources (lands and monies) for all citizens, Native and non-Native alike. In September 2000, the U.S. District Court ruled that settlers could run for OHA Trustee seats on the once all-Native Hawaiian OHA Board. A month later, the numerically larger settler population of Hawaiʻi voted for a Japanese settler, Charles Ota, to occupy an OHA seat. The assault upon Native Hawaiian entitlements continues to this day.

(2) sovereignty movement: A decades long struggle by Hawaiians to reclaim their nation, land, and resources from their colonial overseer, the United States. Haunani-Kay Trask writes:

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. (Haunani-Kay Trask, "The Birth of the Modern Hawaiian Movement: Kalama Valley, O'ahu," The Hawaiian Journal of History, Honolulu: Hawaiian Historical Society, 1987, p.126.)

During the 1980's and 1990's, the sovereignty movement continued to evolve. In 1993, over 15,000 Native Hawaiians marched to the ʻIolani Palace, the site of the 1893 overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom. Under the leadership of Mililani Trask, Ka Lāhui Hawaiʻi created a comprehensive plan for achieving sovereignty, the “Hoʻokupu a Ka Lāhui Hawaiʻi: The Master Plan” (1995) which can be found in Haunani-Kay Trask’s From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawaiʻi.