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These are selected parts of the essay I submitted as my application to become a trustee of the Bishop Estate. It was evidently not what the search committee was looking for, nevertheless it sums up my thoughts about the qualities that I believe are necessary to move Hawaiʻi into the future, not just as a Bishop Estate trustee but as a leader of our State:   Bishop Estate Trustee Cover Letter and Vision Statement “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 [Read More...]

I was shocked and deeply saddened to read that Merata Mita passed away. It was evidently sudden and totally unexpected and so a flood of memories rushes in as I think of the tremendous impact she had not only on the indigenous filmmaking community in general but on my life in particular.   I first met Merata sometime in the early nineties, when she came to Hawaiʻi to present one of her films at a fledgling film I had started as executive director of Pacific Islanders in Communications. I wasnʻt very familiar with her or the world of Maori filmmaking before then but by the time she left, I was in complete awe of her and of everything going on in the Maori film community in Aotearoa. Intimidated is probably a better word as I held her in such high esteem for everything she was doing for her community that I felt [Read More...]

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...]