Part II Sovereignty: The Hawai`i Context
Women's Mana and Hawaiian Sovereignty
          "For us nationalist Hawaiians, the lesson of statehood is a lesson of
         loss and despair: the loss of land, of self-government, of language;
         the despair of political powerlessness, of cultural prostitution,
          of economic exploitation."
     Trask articulates that American citizenry afforded Hawaiians "rights"  of "universal sufferage, private property, public education, mass consumption, mass communication, and mass popular culture." She explains the term
"rights," as the colonizer's llanguage, a colonizing term, rendering as legitimate, a colonial paradigm that destabalized kanaka `oiwi thinking, or as she describes "mental colonization" in which kanaka `oiwi participated, and still do today. The colonizer's language is embedded and used by the Hawaiian, and soon Hawaiian identity, way of life, and culture have become "rights." In this way the politics of language or words, become part of a colonizing process, in particular, after annexation and right up to statehood.
     Trask speaks to the disenfrachisment of kanaka `oiwi, from land now being held in trust by the state and federal governments, and under military occupation. We, who live in Hawai`i today, know all too well the dismal state of affairs within the Department of Education and the problems of the public school system. Trask speaks to the survival as "a Native person in any colonial situation as a strange mix of refusal, creation, and assertion" and is especially problematic as the generational assimilation and acculturalization become survival functions. "Native cultural alternatives" must be employed as part of the resistance to unhinge the colonized mentality and thrust forth what Trask refers to as "a conscious rejection" or ku`e to the dominant western structures. She notes how cultural practices (hula and Hawaiian language) have been appropriated and commodified for tourism as a means to lure the visitor to the Hawai`i. From Trask's personal involvement in the movement for self-determination, she locates and identifies women as leading in the nationalist forefront. She identifies 3 women in particular who have contributed as leaders. Dr. Pua Kanahele, Dana Naone Hall, and Trask's sister,
Mililani. These women have been in the forefront of cultural, political, and international arenas and are experts in their field of knowledge, and further, have been of service to kanaka `oiwi or the lahui. The most important linkage between these women, according to Trask, is their "identification with their ancestral value of caring for the people and for the land.