Hawaiians Do Not Come from Adam and Eve – Nov. 30, 1985

Trask gave this speech at a conference on Hawaiian sovereignty in Honolulu.

I greet you today as a Native Hawaiian—one of the world’s endangered Indigenous people—who is committed to the survival of my race. I am a member of the movement for Hawaiian independence, and I am here to discuss the liberation of my people.

How do I show our people that they cannot be both American and Hawaiian? Because that is an impossibility. Make no mistake about it: you cannot be American and be Hawaiian. To be American is to be money-oriented, to be Christian, to be selfish, and above all, to be disconnected from—and disrespectful to—the island of Hawaiʻi.

We all know that what is unique about our culture is its dependence on, and love of, the land. Only Hawaiian culture comes from Hawaiʻi. Every other culture comes from someplace else. Only Hawaiians are born of the [town or terror – it’s inaudible], child of the earth and the sky.

We did not come from Adam and Eve, or China, or Japan, or Korea, or the Philippines—and we will not be saved by the Christ child from Bethlehem. We came from this earth. We grew right out of this earth. And our survival depends—especially today—on understanding and connecting to this land of our ancestors.

Our first and last loyalty has to be to Hawaiʻi nei. Not to Washington D.C., not to Tokyo, not to Manila, certainly not to Peking or Moscow.

How do we lift the veil from the eyes of our people and show them that they will always fill up the prisons and the unemployment lines, always occupy the lowest education and economic levels, always get squeezed out of their lands and put into rat-trap apartments—unless they resist, unless they fight back, unless they organize? In other words, unless they become political.

Therefore, I repeat: our philosophy as nationalist Hawaiians should be ʻohana—an alternative to tourism and militarism. Aloha ʻohana means, in economic terms, agriculture and aquaculture—not hotels, not military bases. It means preservation of rural areas and rural lifestyles, of fish farms, of streams, of forests, of cooler lands. It means a profound cultural belonging to the land as our ʻohana— our elder brother, our elder sister, our mākua, those who went before.

You cannot just dance hula and go to Hawaiian language class at night and think you're gonna get a land base. You can’t do that. Cultural people have to become political. It's not just that political people like myself have to become cultural.

Our culture can't just be ornamental and recreational. That is what Waikīkī is. Our culture has to be the core of our resistance, the core of our anger, the core of our mana. That’s what culture is for. It’s not what you do instead of watching television.

And people don’t understand that. Our people don’t understand that.

If we seize this opportunity, this conference will be remembered as the beginning of a new struggle, rather than the dying gasp of an old one.

Trask, Haunani-Kay. “69 – Hawaiians Do Not Come from Adam and Eve”: Speech on Indigenous Identity and Resistance. 1985. Transcribed by Winnie Dau. YouTube, uploaded by Noʻeau Woo-O'Brien, 8 Dec. 2019, www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAjX1kgv-e0.