Hawaiian Sovereignty: The Question 1993 Did Not Settle

The Office of Hawaiian Affairs was created by the Hawaii State Constitution in nineteen seventy-eight, thirty years after statehood. Its existence in the state constitution is an acknowledgment that the interests of Native Hawaiians are distinct enough to require specific institutional representation within the government of a state where they are a minority. Article Twelve of the constitution establishes the office and defines its mandate: to serve as a trustee for and to advocate on behalf of the Native Hawaiian people.

The Apology Resolution of nineteen ninety-three acknowledged the overthrow and acknowledged that Native Hawaiians never relinquished their sovereignty. But it did not address what legal status that acknowledgment created, or what it required of the United States government going forward. The resolution was law; it was not a framework for action.

In the years since, Congress has considered but not passed legislation to extend to Native Hawaiians a form of federal recognition comparable to what is available to American Indian and Alaska Native tribal nations. The Akaka Bill, named for Hawaii Senator Daniel Akaka, was introduced multiple times between two thousand and two thousand twelve and never reached a floor vote. The question it sought to address, whether Native Hawaiians constitute an Indigenous people with inherent sovereignty rights enforceable under federal law, remains formally unresolved.

What the sovereignty movement argues, and what the Apology Resolution concedes without resolving, is that the Hawaiian Kingdom was a recognized sovereign nation whose territory was acquired by the United States through an act that the United States government's own investigation called illegal. The question of what legal consequence follows from that fact is the question that every institution involved has spent more than a century declining to answer.