KUKUIULA — Warren Perry, after symbolically turning over the responsibility of emcee at the Prince Jonah Kuhio Kalanianaole commemorative service to his son Kimo Perry, could not resist the opportunity for a verbal fencing match with Tom Shigemoto, an A&B Hawaii vice president.
“Thirty years,” Perry said. “We’ve been talking about this 16 acres for the past 30 years at each of the Prince Kuhio services. Eveything was finally finalized May 10, 2018 (just weeks after the Prince Kuhio service held in late March) and many of us won’t be around when this addition to the Prince Kuhio Park becomes as beautiful as the park is today. Chadley Schimmelfennig will be leading the effort to clear the land.”
The Royal Order of Kamehameha, Chapter No. 3 Kaumuali‘i not only coordinates the annual service celebrating the birth of Kuhio, described as the great grandson of Kauai Ali‘i Kaumuali‘i, the order is the caretaker of Prince Kuhio Park, the property situated close to where Kuhio was born on March 26, 1871.
The gift by A&B Hawaii to the royal order was just one of a steady flow of ho‘okupu (gifts) from the significant Hawaiian organizations, government dignitaries and community groups that benefit from Kuhio’s work of trying to rehabilitate the Hawaiian people.
He did this through the formation of the first Hawaiian Civic Club in 1918, a movement that has grown to include more than 60 distinct organizations across Hawaii and in the continental United States.
“He wanted people to be engaged, civically,” said Kaliko Santos of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs. “When I reflect on the Hawaiian ali‘i, I am impressed with the wide areas of concern and the differences they made for the people of Hawaii. I look in the mirror, and I have to tell myself, ‘What can I do to make a difference the way Kuhio had?’”
Kuhio also worked to re-establish the Royal Order of Kamehameha and served as its ali‘i ‘aimoku from 1903 until his passing in 1922.
On his deathbed, Kuhio urged a friend to continue fighting for native rights, being quoted with advice that remains useful today: “Stick together and try to agree to the best of your ability to meet the most important problem: the rehabilitation of our race.”
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Dennis Fujimoto, staff writer and photographer, can be reached at 245-0453 or dfujimoto@thegardenisland.com.
Some ethnic Hawaiians revere Kuhio as a prince for the same reasons the peasantry in any monarchial nation reveres its royalty — majesty, mystery, pride in the nobility of a great leader, and hope for handouts to help the poor and downtrodden. Wealthy racial separatist Hawaiian government institutions today honor Kuhio as their founding father, the man who bowed low enough to the colonizers to bring home the bacon from their far-away seat of power.
The Kingdom, Republic, and Territory had a perfectly good homesteading program allowing people of all races to carve out a piece of the public lands for a fee-simple homestead for their family, which they could later hand down or sell to anyone they wished. But Kuhio pushed the Homes Commission Act through Congress, abolishing the race-free program and replacing it with race-based program restricted to native Hawaiians, who could hold the land only in leasehold as part of a communal racial ghetto. So the tycoons of the Hawaiian racial entitlements empire love him.
Was Kuhio’s personal behavior princely? At least two major events in Kuhio’s life after the revolution of 1893 should cause Hawaiian sovereignty activists to question his worthiness as their torch-bearer. On these two occasions Kuhio was grossly unpatriotic to his Hawaiian “nation.” The first occasion was when he abandoned his nation at its time of greatest peril in order to pursue personal pleasure and foreign adventure. The second occasion was two decades later when he abused his power and prestige to launch a personal attack against Queen Liliuokalani in order to steal her land, for his personal enrichment, from the children she intended to help. Kuhio’s behavior on both occasions should be viewed as not merely selfish, but treasonous from the viewpoint of the sovereignty activists.
The following 2 details are documented in a webpage. Google its title:
“Prince Jonah Kuhio Kalanianaole — Just how princely was he?”
1. Kuhio was absent from Hawaii for many years on an adventure trip during the crucial period in the late 1890s leading to annexation. He extended a European vacation by going to Africa where he spent three years fighting on the side of England in the second Boer War. Let’s put that in different terms so that today’s sovereignty activists will get the point. Kuhio, designated heir to the throne, abandoned his native land during a time of great political upheaval and went to war halfway around the world, fighting on the side of one white colonial power against another white colonial power in a war to see which one would win control over the land of a poor, downtrodden dark-skinned native population.
2 The case of Kuhio vs. Liliuokalani in 1915-1916 is perhaps even more troubling. The “prince,” now Hawaii’s Territorial Delegate to Congress for 13 years, abused his power and prestige to launch a personal attack against Queen Liliuokalani in order to steal her land from the children she intended to help. Kuhio publicly accused her of mental incompetence in order to nullify her creation of the Queen Liliuokalani Childrens’ Trust, and to establish himself as conservator of her estate, so that after her death her Waikiki properties would go to him instead of to the benefit of the Hawaiian children. Luckily for the children, his lawsuit failed. Full text of the Hawaii Supreme Court decision, including details about what Kuhio was trying to do, is on the webpage.
Kuhio filed his lawsuit on November 30, 1915. The Hawaii Supreme Court handed down its decision on August 16, 1916. Liliuokalani died broken hearted, only 15 months later, on November 11, 1917.
Racial, cultural and political wheels are threshing out the lies from the truth….. A&B owns nothing! The Hawai’ian Kingdom still exists and the ROYAL family is about to put all the illegal occupies where they belong….
ICC and the reclamation of all lands stolen from the people is underway…….
HAWAIIANKINGDOM.ORG