There was still a chance this week that the Native Hawaiian recognition bill would be one of the loose ends of legislation that Congress would tie up before the end of the year, putting in writing the federal government’s acknowledgment
There was still a chance this week that the Native Hawaiian recognition bill would be one of the loose ends of legislation that Congress would tie up before the end of the year, putting in writing the federal government’s acknowledgment of a trust obligation similar to its relationship with American Indian tribes.
Ironically, one of the latter recently received the type of payback that some advocates of Native Hawaiian sovereignty would like: The return of land that once was theirs as part of an independent people.
The U.S. government, in a ceremony in Utah, deeded back to the Ute Tribe 85,000 acres of land that Congress took from the tribe 84 years ago. The land could someday be lucrative to the Utes for its reserves of natural gas and oil shale. But tribal leaders initially are happy that the largest giveback of land to any Indian tribe in more than a century helps make amends for what the Utes contend was shoddy treatment back in 1916.
The U.S. is making efforts to repent the cultural sins of its past. Native Hawaiians and observors of the sovereignty movement are wondering what’s in store here.
