Yearly Archives: 2010

This is an essay I wrote for a Native Insights contest on Economic Recovery. This essay was one of five winning essays and was chosen in the Native Hawaiian category.   There was once enough for everyone. That was before Captain Cook “discovered” our Hawaiian islands on his way to find a northwest passage, before the missionaries came to save our heathen ancestors and before the American businessmen called in the U.S. Navy to protect their land investments. For centuries before western contact, the Hawaiian people flourished. There was no disease, no hunger, no homelessness, no economic recession. That was then. Today, we who call Hawaiʻi home are mostly mainstream Americans, often holding two or more jobs just to survive, and are dependent on the outside world for virtually everything, even bottled water. When Captain Cook arrived on our shores in 1778, the population size was somewhere between 400,000 and a million. [Read More...]

The Oscars are tomorrow night and two of the movies up for Best Picture are The Hurt Locker and Avatar, both of which I actually got to see. I just saw Hurt Locker last night at a theatre - there were only around half a dozen other people in the theatre, which I presume means everyone else is watching it on dvd. This was a very powerful movie. Painful to watch but I believe a very important movie. We invaded Iraq in 2003 under the false pretense of searching for weapons of mass destruction. We predictably didn't find any yet we are still in Iraq seven years later, fighting a war that is not ours, in a country that is not ours, in a situation that we can't possibly win and where we are hated by most people in that country. Hurt Locker featured three main characters, each representing a different kind [Read More...]