The “Prime Minister” of the Kingdom of Hawaii stands before about 30 people at the Anahola Marketplace earlier this month, eagerly awaiting his chance to speak about his plans for action in the coming months and years.
Henry Noa was on Kauai for three days to give presentations each night to locals about the illegal occupation of the Kingdom of Hawaii by the United States and to encourage people to take action on what he believes is an inevitability — the recognition of the Hawaiian Kingdom as a sovereign nation.
Noa said his goal of the presentations was to educate the Kanaka base and get them to understand there is a process that is going to be followed in the path to the reinstatement of the Hawaiian Kingdom.
“I think the fact that we didn’t have a land base, our government didn’t have a land base, that’s what I have been trying to acquire is our land base, so I went to take Kaho‘olawe,” Noa, who operates with The Reinstated Hawaiian Government, said on his third night of presentations when asked how the Kingdom of Hawaii goes about official recognition as a kingdom.
“You actually have to fulfill, there are certain elements to make the claim under international protocol, these elements that you are now a recognized nation,” he said.
“Recognition is a very interesting application. Very interesting. Some people think that you have to get somebody else to recognize you. No. In our case, it’s not getting somebody else to recognize us, it’s us being able to fulfill our obligations so that we can execute our sovereign authority. Without the land, we haven’t fulfilled the last protocol.”
Noa said the amazing thing that happened in the presentations he gave on Kauai and is giving on all the Hawaiian Islands, except Ni‘ihau, is that the tables have turned in the quest for official recognition. Even more so after President Bill Clinton’s 1993 “Apology Bill” was signed into law, recognizing Hawaii’s perfect right to sovereignty.
“It’s no longer about us asking for recognition,” he said. “The tables have been beautifully changed or flipped. Now we’re in the position to take back all this land. We’re not the first nation that was ever acknowledged of reclaiming lands. There’s plenty of them in the world, loaded. Some of them were done with the army, you’re talking war, you’re talking war. Others, they accepted the facts.
“The owners worked it out with those who under good faith bought land, like (Mark) Zuckerberg. He bought land under good faith, that’s all I see. So, how do I work with it? First, go get the land. Otherwise, they are not going to go lease it, but once they see we are taking back our lands, yours next, you’re going to work with us or not.”
Noa, in his Kauai three presentations, at Anahola, Salt Pond Beach Park and Kalihiwai, points to American Samoa and the land system that exists in the nearby island, where the United States pays “rent” to the ruling chiefs to this day. It’s something that he says never happened in Hawaii.
“American Samoa is considered the independent nation of Samoa, but American Samoa, I always thought that American Samoa is like Hawaii,” Noa said. “Because America came and took over your country, they not only came and took over your country, but they took your lands.”
It led Noa to ask the question, who owns the lands in American Samoa? He was told the lands still belong to the Samoan people.
“I was like, ‘what went wrong with us?’” he said.
Noa, who gained notoriety through his political activism starting on the island of Kaho‘olawe and the 11-year legal battle that has taken place between the state over trespassing charges brought forward by the state, in a case that continues to drag through the state court system.
Noa has been a catalyst in the Reinstated Hawaiian Government represented by Kanaka Maoli ancestry from across the Hawaiian Islands which convened on March 13, 1999, on Oahu to, “return their true and lawful government from its century-long exile.”
It’s a fight that he has been a part of for over 40 years.
“I started with Kaho‘olawe,” Noa said of the island that was used for bombing practice by the U.S. Navy until 1990. “At the time it was all, I guess you could say, emotions. And then I realized that emotions are not going to get this done, that I gotta go find another way. Then I went into finding out about how other countries went about getting their recognition. They did processing, they did applications. That’s what we ended up doing and I felt that ‘gee, within four or five years we should be done,’ not realizing our oppositions.”
Noa and two other men, Nelson Armitage, and Russell Kaho‘okele, argued that their occupation of Kaho‘olawe, which the three sailed to Kaho‘olawe to claim for the Kingdom of Hawaii on July 31, 2006, was done as a sovereign entity under international law. The trio were cited for a violation of “Entrance into the Reserve,” state statute 13-261-10.
Attorneys for the state argued that the sovereign entity argument was “irrelevant in the case at hand, specifically because this court is bound by the laws and rules of the State of Hawaii, as well as the U.S. Government. And at this point in time (Jan. 2009) the U.S. Government, nor the state of Hawaii, has recognized the defendants’ entity as being a sovereign government.”
The three defendants were granted a motion to dismiss the Kaho‘olawe case on May 27, 2008, after which the state later attempted to recharge the trio for the following seven years before it was dismissed again on Aug. 28, 2015, despite being dismissed by the Hawaii Supreme Court on Jan. 28, 2014.
The Kaho‘olawe case has served Noa in many capacities, he said.
“I put all of my faith into an abstract thought, an abstract application,” Noa said. “It’s sovereignty. Sovereignty is very abstract, but that’s when I started to tell myself, ‘why cannot I get substance connected to that abstract? I don’t think I’ll be able to finish what I started.’ When we did Kaho‘olawe, I got interested, but because our land system is so diluted, I could never find our land law book. There is no land law book in Hawaii, which means there are no land laws that we can actually apply. And that was the hardship. Now figuring that out only took me five years.”
Noa said through his land occupations after Kaho‘olawe, on Oahu, that the opposition has revealed their offense.
“Our case lasted five and a half years,” Noa said. “We were able to stay in the court against the biggest corporation, and we are still in it.
“Now I’ve learned how this system is so bent that there can only be one way. Sometimes if you work hard enough and you believe in what you are doing, hopefully, you are going to get in favor. That’s how I feel. That’s what the presentation is about. It’s about understanding why all of these lands still belong to us.”
Noa added that it took three years to convince himself to go out into the general public with his message, a message that he has now delivered on Kauai.
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Ryan Collins, county reporter, can be reached at 245-0424 or rcollins@thegardenisland.com.
Editor’s note: A paragraph regarding the State Court of Appeals has been removed from this story.
