Hawaiian Sovereignty and Resistance, with Ikaika Hussey

[00:00:00] Sound on Tape: This podcast is presented by Convergence, a magazine for radical insights. 

[00:00:07] Ikaika Hussey: To me, that’s all evidence of a desire to make Hawaii into something that it has not been before. And it’s a desire to change Hawaii. And. What I like to remind everyone is that we’re really old, like we’re much older than the United States.

[00:00:25] We’ve had a deeper democracy in some ways than the United States for longer. Like the legislature, which which I’m running for right now was established in 1841. And. In the original 1841 legislature that was convened by Kamehameha III, it had female leaders in the legislature. I don’t know where, at what point the United States had women in Congress, but yeah.

[00:00:55] William Lawrence: This is the Hegemonicon podcast, where we are investigating the workings of power. What is power? How does it work? Who has it? What are they doing with it? How the heck do we get it? And other small questions like that. I’m your host, William Lawrence, and I’m an organizer from Lansing, Michigan. Currently, I work with the rent is too damn high coalition, an alliance of tenant unions and housing justice groups across the state of Michigan.

[00:01:24] Formerly, I was a climate justice organizer for 10 years, including as a co founder of sunrise movement, the youth organization that put the green new deal on the political map. Just a quick note we recorded the interviews for this season between May and July. Now we’re releasing them in August and September.

[00:01:42] A lot has happened in the world in between those times, such as Biden dropping out of the race. So if you hear us speaking with blissful ignorance of what was to come, that’s what’s going on. But I think that the conversations are going to hold up very well for our tasks of building an internationalist left in the months and years to come.

[00:02:06] One of the things I’ve been thinking about through this series we’ve been doing on internationalism is the tension between two political positions. The first is the social democratic position, which organizes for economic and racial justice gains and an overall better deal for workers and oppressed people in the United States.

[00:02:27] This is the perspective that I’ve been a part of. It really found its voice in our times through a series of social movements and upsurges in the labor movement in the 2010s, and now continuing as well as taking on this political expression due to the Bernie 2016 campaign, which kind of brought all of that energy into the political arena.

[00:02:47] The second position is a radical anti imperialist position, which highlights the real, historical, and ongoing militarist violence that has been necessary to establish, expand, and maintain the United States from the beginning. And the obvious injustice of this entire history And the urgent moral need confront and oppose both militarism and economic imperialism.

[00:03:19] If we are people who care about justice and believe that this history matters. So I’m actually, I’m not convinced that these positions are mutually incompatible. But I do see that they have a tendency to diverge. There are lots of ways of being a social democrat. That are compatible with imperialism. And there are lots of ways of being an anti imperialist that lead one to swear off social democracy or traditional politics or any project of domestic reform that leaves unjust global power relations intact.

[00:03:56] So my guest today is somebody who is situated in the midst of these tensions, and it would seem to me, although we’ve just met, exploring them very productively in his work. Ikaika Hasi is an organizer from Hawaii, which is As we know, a more recently colonized part of the United States and a place with a vibrant anti militarist, de colonial Hawaiian sovereignty movement.

[00:04:22] And Ikaika has been a convener of people and groups as part of this sovereignty movement. And he also does a range of other community and political work to win things that people need now. Even shy of independence Ikaika, I’m so glad to have you on the show. And I wonder if you could just begin by introducing yourselves to our, introducing yourself to our listeners.

[00:04:45] Ikaika Hussey: Thank you very much, William. It’s a pleasure to meet you and to have this opportunity to speak on your podcast. And I’m a big fan of the magazine in general. Yeah. I got started In the mid nineties, I’m 46 years old. I was recruited, as a high school student to get involved in the sovereignty movement around the time of the anniversary of the U.

[00:05:03] S. overthrow of our government. So the United States overthrew Hawaii’s constitutional monarchy in 1893. And. I think it’s important to have a sense of the overall history, because for a lot of folks, Hawaii comes into the imagination in around statehood in 1959, or maybe for a lot of a lot of folks around Pearl Harbor, but for our, from our perspective.

[00:05:28] We’ve been here for thousands of years and statehood is only 65 years old. My, my father is older than statehood and my father is not an old man, there’s what I draw upon is really the feeling of what we call Kuleana. It’s a word in our language, which means responsibility.

[00:05:45] And it’s simply because we’ve been here for for a very long time. And from within our cosmogony, we trace ourselves back to And our genealogy connects us to the land and to all of the creatures and all this stuff. And, as like many indigenous peoples, we see ourselves as being related in a very literal way to all of creation in a sense.

[00:06:06] And so to me, that’s all of these movements are part of. Our obligation to take care of both the kind of the responsibilities from our past, but also to think about future generations and the life of the land itself, the, all of the resources and the, which includes the, the entire biosphere and all and so all of these issues are tied into that, that feeling of really of responsibility.

[00:06:34] William Lawrence: Thanks for that. So you’ve had a very wide ranging and impressive breadth of experience in your work, following from that mission to care for the land, to care for the future generations. You’ve done community journalism, clean energy development. edited a collection on Hawaiian sovereignty, with dozens of authors.

[00:06:54] You have been a labor organizer. You’ve held various roles in support of local schools and other community needs. And so I wonder how you’ve how your internal compass works to calibrate your path and where you go next over that wide ranging career in service of a larger purpose.

[00:07:16] Ikaika Hussey: I think as of late, my compass has really been pointing at, uh,

[00:07:21] What does the next generation need? That’s helped to orient me personally. And I think also commensurate with that or, connected to all of that is, is thinking about our home here our homeland of Hawaii and what is, what does this place need?

[00:07:34] And then, that ties directly how, there’s like a hard line right between that and all the politics because, it immediately gets political. One of the things about being native Hawaiian is that you can’t really walk around and be alive without being forced to think about politics.

[00:07:48] It’s a part of our everyday. 

[00:07:53] William Lawrence: So I think as you mentioned, probably for us, North Americans, people think about Pearl Harbor or Hawaiian statehood, but in fact, the islands were, conquered in 1893. I wonder if you could fill in some of the history, for those who are less familiar, of the Hawaiian sovereignty movement, especially over your lifetime, and the, any moments you care to mention, and what are the issues, the sub issues within the larger issue that the movement has been focused on in more recent years?

[00:08:29] Ikaika Hussey: I think one of the key things is that I think a lot of us who were raised in the context Of the United States in Hawaii, where we were raised to think that our great grandparents generation or grandparents generation, which directly experienced the overthrow of the monarchy, that they were okay with it, that they that they essentially gave in.

[00:08:49] And one of the really interesting pieces of historical information that came out in the last. What year is it? It’s 2024. So this is about 25 years ago. One of our researchers, Noinoi Silva, she’s a she’s a professor at the university of Hawaii. She went to Congress I think around 98 or so, and she uncovered this incredible, A series of petitions that were circulated throughout the Hawaiian kingdom in 1898, the United States overthrew us in 1893.

[00:09:21] They overthrew our government and the immediate successor to that effort was the, was a quote unquote, provisional government. And then a Republic, and they were all dominated by the plantation business people who wanted Hawaii to be. Taken over by the United States. So those individuals constituted a government and they immediately tried to negotiate a treaty to cede Hawaii to the United States.

[00:09:50] And one of the key factors that stopped that treaty from ever being ratified was our ancestors, just a few generations ago, they had a massive, Organizing drive though, us organizers would call it a mobilizing drive, but it was an effort to get this petition signed and something like, I’m a bad historian.

[00:10:10] So it’d be like 90 percent of the people signed. And, I’ve found my own family’s names on that petition. And so that document was sent to Congress and it was used as evidence that the people of Hawaii, and particularly our native people, we didn’t want a treaty ceding sovereignty to the United States.

[00:10:33] William Lawrence: And 

[00:10:33] Ikaika Hussey: so we’re very proud of that fact that we’ve never actually ceded our sovereignty and it’s a similar feeling that I think a lot of Native Americans feel, there’s a lot of folks who there’s a lot of nations, Native nations that to this day maintain that they have never given away their claims to independence and self determination to the United States.

[00:10:53] So we’d have some consonants with that same idea. 

[00:10:57] William Lawrence: And you were saying that then this was all repressed, essentially, or some of this the details about this petition came to light only 25 years ago. 

[00:11:04] Ikaika Hussey: Yeah, exactly. It was like I have to check back with Dr. Silva on this, but I think it was like in a box, in, in in some nook of the Library of Congress or something like that.

[00:11:14] And, So when she found that document and brought it home, it was revelatory for us because we got to see that in fact, we are who we were, we’ve always maintained and the sense of our own spirit of independence. And. Obviously, a lot has changed between 1898 and 2024, there’s, we’ve never relinquished that, that desire and also the specific legal and political claims around self determination and sovereignty.

[00:11:42] William Lawrence: Yeah. That’s, I really love that story. Because. This is the, I don’t know, the modern way of thinking, or the western way of thinking, or the, perhaps, or just the American way of thinking, wants to say that this is this is past, this is so far past, and it’s, the term has expired, or the, these claims are not real, they’re not relevant, but in fact they are, or, They are absolutely real.

[00:12:06] The land was stolen and the injustice was done and people never consented and they fought it then and they’ve fought it every generation since. And if we believe in justice is the, we talk a lot about a justice and organizing and sometimes we really mean just like fairness or equity or something.

[00:12:22] But if justice is to really mean justice, then it means justice must be done. And that means that the right must be wronged. In this case. The right is to grant the sovereignty that was denied. 

[00:12:36] Ikaika Hussey: Yeah, absolutely. And from my perspective, it’s not that long ago. And it might be something that’s quirky about societies like ours, which are, which have an oral tradition and which will like, we’re really into genealogy.

[00:12:50] And so for us, time 1898 is only two or three generations ago, right? It’s not very long ago at all. So 

[00:13:00] William Lawrence: what have been the issues in recent years that have sparked and, propelled the independence movement or the causes that people have rallied around?

[00:13:11] Ikaika Hussey: So one thing that’s really fascinating is that the reason for the overthrow of our government in 1893 was so that the United States could establish a coaling station in Hawaii so that the United States could then go into Asia and the Pacific and start by conquering the Philippines. I happen to be Filipino and Native Hawaiian, and so it’s like on both sides of my family, we’re, it’s the same imperial story.

[00:13:38] The same colonial kind of story and that pattern of militarism has continued unabated in Hawaii, but that has, that’s been a real source of contention. The United States gosh, for 60 years or something like that, 50 years was bombing the island of Kaho’olawe. They had been bombing.

[00:13:57] Areas all throughout Hawaii. In fact, right now, today, the United States is planning to bomb another Island within our Island chain, the Island of Koola. And it’s this phenomenon that we have, we’ve experienced for decades, for generations, and it is something that. Has been a continual spark of activism and organizing.

[00:14:18] So a lot of our, a lot of our major leaders are people who have opposed, historically opposed and continue to oppose that sort of expansion of militarism in Hawaii. Right now, one of the issues that we’re dealing with is several of the. Of the lands, which the United States had been using since World War Two are finally up for a renewal of their leases.

[00:14:39] And so there’s a lot of organizing around rethinking that entire strategy of leasing land to the U. S. military. 

[00:14:46] William Lawrence: One 

[00:14:46] Ikaika Hussey: thing that I’d like to see us do is to approach the conversation, not just as a, There’s a lot of people who believe that we’re obligated to give the land to the U. S.

[00:14:56] military and I’d like us to take a full cost accounting approach where we look at the cost of cleanup for those lands the lost opportunity cost. of those lands, which some of them were towns. They were communities that were subsequently bombed and destroyed by the United States military for us to look at if those lands had not been bombed what would be the current economic sort of value of those places, their entire communities.

[00:15:25] And those are the numbers, which I’d like us to. To use when we’re sitting down in a negotiating session with the United States military to talk about anything like a renewal of leases to the military. 

[00:15:38] William Lawrence: Yeah, Evan briefed me on some of the details around the recent, the red Hill disaster, which was a catastrophic incident that poisoned I understand thousands of people’s water.

[00:15:50] I want to hear a bit more about it, but 

[00:15:52] Ikaika Hussey: poisoning it’s, it is ongoing. So yeah, tell us about 

[00:15:55] William Lawrence: the red Hill situation. And I understand that is it’s both an ongoing disaster and it also is proving to be a point of leverage in pointing out the full cost accounting you’re describing and being able to make some stronger demands of your local officials, as well as The, department of defense.

[00:16:13] Ikaika Hussey: Yeah. It’s a, it’s an incredibly severe problem. What we’ve seen recently. And my wife is really the expert on red Hill. So I’m hoping that you do get a chance to talk to her. William is and I say that because she had been working on red Hill. A full decade before it was something that was talked about in the newspapers.

[00:16:30] She, she really has, she has it all in her mind, but for instance we just saw a few weeks ago, evidence in evidence of the spreading of hydrocarbons farther West towards major population centers. So these were 

[00:16:45] William Lawrence: just to start with the first, this was, these are gasoline tanks or some sort of hydrocarbon storage tanks that were then have infiltrated the aquifer, which is the main aquifer or one of the main aquifers on the island of Oahu.

[00:16:58] And there’s tens of thousands of people who are still drawing from it to this day. 

[00:17:03] Ikaika Hussey: I’m not sure the exact quantity of people who are still drawing water from that aquifer. Okay. But yes, it is, it’s a subterranean fuel storage tanks. Um, that have pukas, they have holes, the, so what fuel had been leaking out of there for years.

[00:17:19] And we finally started to see, and I shouldn’t say finally, we are seeing evidence of contamination. There are families that to this day are still getting sick. A lot of whom live on military housing. And. And what we’re starting to see now is the expansion of the affected area into whole new communities.

[00:17:38] And Honolulu O’ahu is the economic heart of the entire state. This is a catastrophe and it’s a catastrophe which is expanding. As we speak, 

[00:17:51] William Lawrence: it’s terrible. So this is so interesting because this is cutting through the frame that I opened the show with, I was talking about the apparent tensions between organizing for reform within the state, sometimes called social democracy.

[00:18:05] And then, a decolonial or anti imperialist position in this case, the one is really the same. Whatever you can do to get accountability and to clean up this water, is absolutely necessary. And it also happens to be like on the tip of the spear in rolling back you military.

[00:18:21] US military installation in the Pacific, so it sounds like you want to say something on that. Then I got to follow up. 

[00:18:28] Ikaika Hussey: I guess the way that I’m thinking about it nowadays, William, is that

[00:18:34] like with the case of Red Hill is a Navy installation. But it’s not the only time where the Navy has shown us there’s that both kind of a carelessness, a recklessness, and also a lack of a desire to clean up their messes, very close to here are the Marshall Islands where there is ongoing military contamination.

[00:18:54] You’re probably aware of the dome that they’re using to maintain I believe it’s nuclear waste. 

[00:19:01] William Lawrence: I think I saw, I’ve seen a picture of that, but it’s I’ve almost told my, I didn’t quite realize that was true. I was like, maybe that was a movie I saw.

[00:19:09] Ikaika Hussey: It’s unfortunately quite real, and so what’s starting to become apparent to me is that. There are stories like Red Hill all throughout the area, all throughout the lands and territories that have been affected by the U S military. It’s all over the place.

[00:19:27] There’s in the Philippines, in Puerto Rico, in Guam, in the Marshall Islands, in Hawaii. It’s just a huge problem. It’s a global problem. And so actually where I think we need to make the intervention is to actually. In Washington, D. C. It’s in the United States. It’s in changing the political culture and what is what American citizens think is okay from the American government.

[00:19:53] We fundamentally and when I say we, It. Everybody else outside and within the United States context, everyone needs the United States to change we could even talk, obviously we could talk about what’s going on in Gaza, but it’s all about, it’s the same story.

[00:20:10] We need to flip some kind of principle bit at the heart of the American Political experience. 

[00:20:17] William Lawrence: Yes. 

[00:20:18] Ikaika Hussey: So that I’d like us to think about, okay, how do we start transitioning the military budget to become the healthcare budget and the budget to, to fund universities for everyone and and education.

[00:20:29] That’s. That’s the conversation that I think we need to be having and then that’s really where we see them the intersection Of those two questions that you posed earlier in this conversation William is you know in order to achieve a real? Social democracy for Americans we need to stop this process of u.

[00:20:48] s. Empire 

[00:20:51] William Lawrence: You said flip the switch, and I think that’s actually appropriate because 

[00:20:55] Ikaika Hussey: the bit flip flip, it’s something that Steve Jobs used to talk about. He would talk about what is the, like in a computer program, there’s the things that are defined early on in the, in the principal assumptions and.

[00:21:07] That’s what we need to change, 

[00:21:08] William Lawrence: I thought of a circuit breaker. It’s but which one is it, but which one is it? And I think this is the first task of political analysis actually is to say, okay, between the economy and the constitution and the various interests that are at play, which ones are the ones that are.

[00:21:23] are load bearing and if they’re all load bearing, which are the ones that are what’s the order in which in which we ought to go about flipping them. You’re talking about the the, the Pacific, you live in the Pacific. You were speaking about the, many of the impacts that Hawaii has faced have been faced by other Pacific islands and the people who live there.

[00:21:45] The Pacific is an interesting place right now in geopolitics owing to the Rising tensions between the United States and China is something we’ve talked about pretty extensively on recent episodes of this show, and I’m wondering how you know you’re living up against military bases and of course, people in Hawaii are very aware of the kind of politics of war and war making.

[00:22:11] I wonder how These tensions between the US and China have been showing up on the islands, if at all, and the conversations that people are having about that. 

[00:22:22] Ikaika Hussey: So it shows up here mostly as a rhetorical argument. And I think it’s important to see it in that kind of very limited frame because in, in the daily lives of the people of Hawaii, we’ve lived with China for first forever, there’s a huge percentage, I don’t know what the number is, but there’s, there, there’s a lot of native Hawaiians who are also Chinese.

[00:22:46] Chinese were a key group that immigrated to Hawaii during the kingdom and helped to enable our survival as a people, because there had been such a massive depopulation after initial contact with with Europeans that we lost something like 95 percent of our population.

[00:23:03] It’s an incredible number. And it was through intermarriage with immigrant groups, especially the Chinese that we’re able to survive. And so the bellicosity that I hear in American politics with regards to China seems very foreign to me. Just honestly, it seems strange. And I am not an expert on Chinese geopolitics.

[00:23:26] My sense is that China doesn’t really have in their own history, a pattern of sort of extraterritorial ambition outside of their immediate sphere of influence. And I’m, that’s just my own very layman’s understanding of. of Chinese politics. 

[00:23:44] William Lawrence: That’s my impression too, based on the people I listen to who, who know a lot more than I do.

[00:23:50] It’s not to defend anything in any of the, anything bad that we can observe them doing, and there are bad things, but is this the same in type to the ambition that the U. S. Has demonstrated to establish a global empire or its current obvious demonstrated ambition to maintain it. It’s I haven’t been able to be convinced that these are the same thing at all to the kind of ambitions being shown by China.

[00:24:14] And I think that’s very important to say and keep saying to two Americans who frankly just, drink the Kool Aid and a lot of them don’t know any better. Yeah. 

[00:24:22] Ikaika Hussey: Yeah. It’s the United States. It has the basis all around the world. That’s that is a unique American phenomenon. So it’s I don’t want Hawaii to be caught in, in, in the middle of that particular fight.

[00:24:35] But what I’m starting to understand as well is that,

[00:24:42] that the United States presence in Hawaii is it has less to do with at this point with geo strategic thinking, but a lot of it right now is just about real estate. It’s about Hawaii is a convenient place for U. S. service people to vacation and to have relaxation time and so my sense is that’s the, that’s the primary function that Hawaii is playing in the United States Empire.

[00:25:11] And so what I see is actually a lot of opportunities for surplus us military assets, lands, our land to be returned to our people for us to use for our own relaxation and our own wellness our own housing needs. So I think that’s a big that’s a big kind of project on our plate is to get lands returned.

[00:25:33] But the geopolitical piece is that I think we need to think of the Pacific as the key unit. And I think it’s in the interests of certainly everyone within the Pacific, all of our fellow Islanders to to try to achieve a essentially a neutrality for this entire ocean, because we are all hurt by the process of our lands and our peoples and our water and our, air being used for militarism.

[00:26:04] It’s in everyone’s interest for this entire area to be a neutral zone essentially between these large empires. 

[00:26:11] William Lawrence: Yeah. 

[00:26:13] Ikaika Hussey: And that’s something That has been something that Pacific peoples have worked on for decades. There’s the nuclear free independent Pacific movement, NFIP, that a lot of my mentors in the Hawaiian sovereignty movement are part of, or have been part of.

[00:26:28] And it’s been Something that’ll, all of the grassroots movements are working on and thinking about. Yeah. 

[00:26:35] Sound on Tape: Hi there, this is Caden, the publisher of Convergence and the host of our weekly news magazine, Block and Build. If you’re enjoying this show, I’d love to invite you to join me every Friday for a breakdown of the headlines with the kind of insight and analysis you’ve come to expect from Convergence magazine.

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[00:27:27] Thanks for listening.

[00:27:34] William Lawrence: I’m curious. To just hear more of your thinking about, I guess it’s a question about time and the amount of times that things take flipping the bit on the U S empire requires a certain orientation towards time achieving sovereignty for Hawaii. It requires a certain orientation. Maybe patience is the orientation to put a name to it.

[00:28:00] Patience and persistence working to get clean water for people who don’t have it otherwise requires a different orientation towards time, urgency finding housing for people who need it is maybe somewhere in between water and sovereignty. But definitely urgent as well. And, then it draws you into different arena, like the sovereignty work, my, my impression, requires lots of cultural organizing and spreading, maintaining the culture, spreading the idea of independence, popularizing this over the long horizon, but then it does come into the legal arena when you have these opportunities to push back or renegotiate these leases or things of this nature.

[00:28:42] And then of course. The housing politics, the labor politics, the other stuff you’ve been involved in. That’s just like in the day to day of politics as usual. Yeah, I’m curious to hear your reflections on, juggling these different commitments as part of a community, different orientations towards time and the need to be patient and urgent at the same time.

[00:29:02] Ikaika Hussey: I think you said it really well. The one thing that I feel like I need to add. Is that, I’ve also I’ve also used the phrase sovereignty movement. My sense being here in Hawaii is that, we’ve been Hawaiian. We’ve been here and we’ve been the people of this place for thousands of years, a very long time.

[00:29:22] And I actually think of Americanism as the political movement here. There’s a lot of. anxiety about wanting, wanting to make Hawaii American and for instance, to change the names of places to put up flags everywhere. 

[00:29:42] William Lawrence: Yeah, 

[00:29:42] Ikaika Hussey: Like Jefferson 

[00:29:43] William Lawrence: street or Trump 

[00:29:45] Ikaika Hussey: street we absolutely have We don’t have a Trump street, but we do have several of our schools that are named for American presidents and not the good ones.

[00:29:54] We have a Roosevelt, but it’s not an FDR. It’s a Teddy Roosevelt school. And to me that’s all evidence of a desire to make Hawaii into something that it has not been before. And it’s a desire to change Hawaii and. What I like to remind everyone is that we’re really old, like we’re much older than the United States.

[00:30:16] We’ve had a deeper democracy in some ways than the United States for longer. Like the legislature, which which I’m running for right now was established in 1841. And. In the original 1841 legislature that was convened by Kamehameha III, it had female leaders in the legislature. I don’t know when, at what point the United States had women in Congress, but yeah, one of the, one of the trigger points that led to the overthrow of Queen Luluokalani in 1893 was she wanted to establish universal suffrage.

[00:30:51] She wanted everyone to be able to vote, and that was a very scary idea for the oligarchs that wanted to seize Hawaii for sugar interests, plantation interests. So like that to me is really the long story. It’s the American story in Hawaii is a very new phenomenon. 

[00:31:11] William Lawrence: One way of expressing the tension between the social democracy and anti imperialism that I see operating here on the mainland, and I don’t know if it also operates in Hawaii or not.

[00:31:22] And so I’ll ask you this is it seems as if the price of entry to mainstream politics is to forswear one’s most radical commitments. So if I were to be going around saying, I actually think that the U. S. Constitution should be, like, totally thrown out and rewritten, and I consider myself a revolutionary and this and that.

[00:31:54] But I was also in the community. And then there came a time that I wanted to run for office. I might be allowed to, and I might even be allowed to win if I was a good job, serving the community on the community issues, but I would be basically asked never to talk about that other stuff. Ever again, or to outright for swear.

[00:32:16] There’s a long tradition of people, basically distancing themselves from their radical history or their radical connections. Barack Obama with Jeremiah Wright being maybe the most famous example of this. And so I think in some quite literal way, selling out on the revolutionary aspirations is the price of entry to the table of governance.

[00:32:40] And. There may be some extraordinary people who can leap around that, but I haven’t seen hardly many at all to what extent does that exist among the Hawaiian, political class also as the price of entry. 

[00:32:56] Ikaika Hussey: Yeah, that’s a good question. What I was thinking about while you’re asking the question is I have always been a very public.

[00:33:05] Voice for sovereignty and independence. And one of the funny things about the way the world works in 2024 is that things published online in the late nineties don’t really show up as much on Google searches as they probably should 

[00:33:20] William Lawrence: because Google is broken. They broke it. 

[00:33:22] Ikaika Hussey: Google is broken, right?

[00:33:23] Yeah, exactly. So I don’t know for myself personally, that’s the only way that I can answer this is I’ve been very consistent. I’ve never changed the way that I think about or talk about these issues. And when I think about The specific needs of my community in Kalihi.

[00:33:40] I’m running to represent a very working class community in a district called Kalihi Valley. This is a group of people that really need things to change. They really need a real step change in how resources are allocated publicly. We need the budgets of of defense, for instance, to be, to become the budget for healthcare, we absolutely need that.

[00:34:05] My neighbors need that. And so for me, there is actually a strong connection between social democratic. Ideals and goals and the lived experiences and and requirements that working people have, and for me, one of the best things that I did just for myself to understand all of this work is is I went to go become an organizer with unite here in Hawaii and our local is local number five.

[00:34:35] So we, we call it local five. It’s an incredibly progressive union. And. I would see local five show up at, or at things that I was organizing that were like Hawaiian community actions and rallies, et cetera. And I was always amazed when I would see that the members from local five show up.

[00:34:56] Because. They would come in huge numbers, huge quantities. And in 2018 they were about to go on strike for what was a historic, what would become a historic 51 day strike of the major hotels in Waikiki. And I wanted to be part of that. I wanted to understand what it was like to be inside a labor organization, to understand that.

[00:35:17] Approach to organizing. And so I’m incredibly grateful to the union for allowing me to just come in. It’s almost like an intern, like a, 40 year old intern. Because what I learned there has really changed the way that I think about almost everything, and one of the key things is that the core building block for a social movement is.

[00:35:38] It’s people, it is groups of people coming together who are primarily friends, their loved ones. They are, they’re the folks who, they take their lunch breaks together. It’s the people who are organizing the, we call them the baby luau, it’s the first birthday parties those kinds of people, those leaders and the groups of people that they organize with, that they organize socially with.

[00:36:01] That’s the basis for strong unions. And I think that’s the basis for strong communities and for strong movements. And it gives me a lot of kind of hope and optimism. When you see that at the end of the day, what a, what an amazing union is, it’s just it’s regular people who are organizing well, to me, that gives me hope that we can actually build amazing movements that are going to be incredibly powerful and potent at much larger scales.

[00:36:26] Yeah. So I really enjoyed. The your podcast about cadre organizations, because what I heard in in, in the, the folks talking about cadre is that’s building committee within a union. That’s this, it’s the same process of having a group, developing your group, increasing your analysis and your political consciousness.

[00:36:47] Yeah, so it’s, that’s the fundamental piece. 

[00:36:48] William Lawrence: And when you build and then you know that you can really count on people, man, it’s a great feeling. Yeah. It’s a great feeling. It really is. I love that story about how you went in there at 40, because that’s the discipline that I still haven’t fully studied myself.

[00:37:02] I’ve studied, but not practiced, is to be in be inside of the world. The very serious, very militant labor union. And when I was like 21, I was like, should I go salt actually, with some of my friends were doing and join a rank and file struggle. And I didn’t do it at that time.

[00:37:18] And I said, there’s going to come a time when I’m going to rue not having the. The discipline, the craft that is held there in these very militant unions around how to move people into action and build the majority unions. Obviously it’s not at all too late, but that’s just to say kudos for investing in your own development so that you can be a triple threat as a, as an organizer, mobilizer, journalist, and, maybe some more besides.

[00:37:43] But just to ask one more question about your You run for office. I’m curious what’s your, like, why now? Why this seat? What are you hoping to accomplish on any of these issues? Obviously one legislator can only do so much. It’s important to understand what your angle is.

[00:37:59] What are you really hoping to move on? Should you be elected this November? 

[00:38:04] Ikaika Hussey: So there’s a bunch of policy things that I’m interested in working on Hawaii like most places right now, it’s has a neoliberal turn and I think there’s some, there’s a, there’s some important work that we need to do on for instance, tax policy the legislature.

[00:38:20] Let’s see if a few months ago in the past, in this last session passed a large tax cut, which is a good thing. It helps a lot of working in middle class folks, but it was, it’s going to require substantial cuts to the operating budget in, in the next five or six years. And to me, I see that as frankly, as an opportunity for us to fill those budget gaps by finding how do we.

[00:38:42] How do we tax the ultra rich that are coming to Hawaii? And they really are seeing it as their paradise. Mark Zuckerberg just bought 600 acres on the Island of Kauai. Larry Ellison bought an entire Island. He bought the entire Island of Lanai. And when he bought that Island, he paid 0 in conveyance taxes.

[00:39:02] To me, that’s, those are all big problems, but it also means that everyone, that all of the working and middle class folks in Hawaii who are not billionaires are actually paying more where we’re we’re subsidizing Larry Ellison. So those are policy changes that I’m interested. I was asked to run this time around By grassroots community leaders, primarily in our local Filipino community here in, in my district.

[00:39:26] There was an opening and they wanted new leadership. And so they asked me to run. So that’s why I decided to do it this time. 

[00:39:34] William Lawrence: And what do you see like you said, you’ve been outspoken. You’ve held various roles. You could speak about yourself or some broader principle, but what do you think ought to be the role of seated elected officials in alliance with, and as a part of social movements, not to mention unions and all the rest.

[00:39:56] Ikaika Hussey: So your question is a really good one because it’s come to a head recently. Our nurses union was recently on strike. In a year long negotiation and what they needed is for political leaders to, to really side with them to decide to not be neutral. And that, that’s something that resonates with me very much because what I think what we need to push against is the neoliberal tendency to treat government As just a a sideshow while capitalism continues a pace, that’s the American default.

[00:40:31] And I think that’s a real problem. I think that government needs to assertively say that we’re going to stand with working people. And so if that means. Showing up at an action that the unions are calling for or passing legislation, in our official capacities, we absolutely need to do that government needs to be, it needs to actually be democratic, it needs to be something that is an advocate for the interests and of our people.

[00:41:00] William Lawrence: And good luck with good luck with your race. And I want to ask one more question about the prospect of becoming a, becoming an elected official. I’ve been moved before by viewing the clip from the native Hawaiian sovereignty Leader organizer, how Nani K. Trask who proclaimed back in 1993 at a rally.

[00:41:20] And I’m sure she said this many other times, but I’ve seen the famous clip from 93. She said, we are not Americans and she’s on the dais and she says it again and again, she says, we are not Americans. And she’s really calling on the crowd, to take that to heart, to feel how it feels to be Hawaiian and not American.

[00:41:42] And of course, that’s a key principle for the movement. And I wonder what it means to you to hear those words, to feel those words, and then to contemplate swearing an oath of office as a I would say a U S American elected official, although you already pointed out the continuity of the Hawaiian legislature dating back to to pre the conquest.

[00:42:03] So maybe that’s part of it, but I’m curious how you sit with that tension. 

[00:42:08] Ikaika Hussey: Yeah. The for me, tying back the legislature to the kingdom of Hawaii is a very important thing for me and realizing that all things are temporary, right? Political structures, they evolve they change, they fracture they re harden.

[00:42:24] So all of these things are subject to evolution and that’s how I understand politics, just in our own, just in the last few decades in Hawaii, we’ve had, we’ve been a kingdom. We’ve had a very non democratic republic. We’ve had a provisional government. We’ve had a territory and we’ve had a state in just a few generations.

[00:42:44] I think all things are fluid. And I’m very comfortable with that. But what is the questions? What are the things that are constant? And that’s our relationship to this place. It’s our relationships with each other are the actual love that we feel, to our families and our communities.

[00:42:59] And the other thing, which I think is really important for Americans to understand is that U. S. law. There’s a, there was a law passed in 1993, which officially apologized to the Hawaiian people for the overthrow of our government. And it’s a law which says that among other things, there needs to be reconciliation.

[00:43:22] And for me, that means there needs to be some sort of conclusion, an actual kind of reparation and a repair to that historical injustice. That has not happened yet. So for me, I can absolutely swear an oath because as far as I’m concerned, u. S. law includes the understanding that there needs to be a repair to the United States relationship with Hawaii.

[00:43:47] So for me, it is, there is that consistency. And there are also things about the But the American political tradition and culture, which I absolutely love and resonate with the first amendment is a real big one. It’s a good one. Yeah, it’s a good one. And, I don’t want to belittle anything.

[00:44:05] The ideals of equality are really important and, but also I would remind people that Hawaii Has a much longer actual like democratic history. So I know that these things are all like things that I think about a lot, it’s a very, it is complex and it requires requires a lot of, uh, reflection and 

[00:44:27] William Lawrence: Yeah.

[00:44:28] Yeah. There’s a lot of richness in your answer that I’d, I’d love to, to draw out more in the future, but some of what you said about everything is temporary and actually political forms are fracturing, refactoring, being wrong. There’s always something. Always something new emerging. And there’s always something old, which is a remnant of the prior thing.

[00:44:51] And then there’s always a preview of the next thing. And that’s all embedded in the current moment, right? And I think that there’s we’re still burdened by certain mechanical visions of historical development, which informed certain versions of left strategy, which say Okay. We just have to keep it all on the one righteous path, which leads inevitably.

[00:45:14] And this is when you get into problems when you start saying that anything inevitably leads towards some historical conclusion that has already been predetermined, be it the rapture or the dictatorship of the proletariat or whatever else. Because in reality, it’s like time. Time just keeps on moving.

[00:45:32] And the reality is, It’s not that there are not any laws or we can’t study social science and politics and economics and learn how things work and how power is wielded, but it’s not going to be reducible to one factor or one grand narrative. 

[00:45:46] Ikaika Hussey: one thing that I think is really useful is not to assume a teleological approach, that it’s not going to inevitably end up.

[00:45:55] In any one place, what I find really instructive is there is a book that the Emanuel Wallerstein wrote actually before 9, 11 it’s called the decline of American power. Have you read that book? William? 

[00:46:08] William Lawrence: I haven’t read that Wallerstein. I haven’t done my real Wallerstein deep dive, but I have read extensively from Giovanni who was also in that sort of world systems theory tendency.

[00:46:19] And so Yeah, carry on and I don’t 

[00:46:21] Ikaika Hussey: know the Wallerstein book and I don’t know Riggi. So we’re, we’ll have to do a 

[00:46:26] William Lawrence: re reading book swap, 

[00:46:27] Ikaika Hussey: right? But one of the points that Wallerstein raises is that that we are right now, like in, in this current moment, living in a time of. I think he used the term rupture.

[00:46:39] It’s a moment where the older systems are in a where they’re there, there’s a 

[00:46:45] William Lawrence: reproduction crisis the things that they’ve been doing to stay strong, they can’t do anymore and stay as strong. So they have to find a new way. 

[00:46:53] Ikaika Hussey: And new systems are emerging. And I think I speak for a lot of people when I’m, when I say that I’m really worried about the new systems that I see emerging, it really concerns me that essentially all of the surplus value created on earth is now being used to make rocket ships to go to Mars for a few billionaires.

[00:47:10] That’s a. It’s a huge problem. 

[00:47:12] And we, meanwhile, we have this incredible ecological crisis and, just a few days ago there was the hurricane Helene and, there’s going to be it’s going to be a large death count for because of that. It’s terrible.

[00:47:27] It’s terrible. And there will be more. The thing is that we, we know because of what we understand about climate science, that there will just be more of those incidences. So you know we are unfortunately living through incredibly trying and difficult times. But to me, I derive some hope because it’s also a rare moment in history where small actions can have higher, reverberations, they are, our work can in some ways be more impactful because things are in flux, things are changing right now.

[00:48:03] And So to me, that, that makes me want to work hard and it makes me want to work on a bunch of different things, both at the grassroots level and politics and economics and et cetera because I think that we can actually be impactful. I have a, actually a lot of hope for the work that we can all do.

[00:48:24] William Lawrence: I agree. Yeah. When it’s operating at the local level or at the state, when it starts with the people that you actually know and love and who need things and then ask, how can we get the things that people need in the conditions that we’re facing, which are highly volatile and require all kinds of making demands of people and winning things and some state power wouldn’t hurt.

[00:48:46] So it’s good that you’re going after that. And there are people that are going after that, but I know you see it as continuous with the rest of your work. So it’s just one more One more tool in the toolbox. Yeah, that’s my interpretation. I hope I’m not putting words in your mouth. 

[00:49:00] Ikaika Hussey: No. That’s right.

[00:49:00] State power absolutely needs to be on our side. It needs to be on the side of the people. That’s a fundamental choice that I think, elected officials need to make is, 

[00:49:10] William Lawrence: No, 

[00:49:10] Ikaika Hussey: we’re not going to be like, to do a false equivalency sort of thing where Elon Musk gets the same vote as one of your constituents.

[00:49:17] No, we have to side with the people. 

[00:49:20] William Lawrence: So just as we land the plane here you shared with me an article before we spoke that I read that was from, 15 years ago but it was an open letter to the US left from the Hawaiian sovereignty movement. So this was in the context of an issue that you were fighting, trying to fight back some some change it’s for the worse and how it, Native Hawaiian status was conceptualized and administered.

[00:49:43] But in that context, you wrote this letter, said an open letter to the U. S. left from the Hawaiian sovereignty movement. So by way of conclusion, I wonder if there are any messages that you want to repeat or reinforce or add for those of us over here in the mainland and what we all need to do to have your back, to, In the fights you’re waging for sovereignty and a good life for people in Hawaii, 

[00:50:09] Ikaika Hussey: I would say, I would say the same thing that I tell my folks here, which is don’t give up.

[00:50:13] We absolutely need to keep moving forward on, on our principles and our goals and our vision. Um, this is hard work and we are fighting some of the biggest forces that. Anyone has ever had to deal with, like in human history. Don’t feel bad when it’s difficult and when we find that we’re not successful, but absolutely, keep working, keep going.

[00:50:39] William Lawrence: Thank you. I will. Ikai Kahasi, this was really excellent. Thank you for your work. Good luck with your election this November. And I just really look forward to seeing where it all goes and continuing to be in relationship. 

[00:50:53] Ikaika Hussey: Thank you, William. It’s a pleasure.

[00:50:58] William Lawrence: This podcast is written and hosted by me, William Lawrence. Our producer is Josh Elstro, and it is published by Convergence, a magazine for radical insights. You can help support this show and others like it by becoming a subscriber of Convergence at convergencemag. com slash donate. Standard subscriptions start at 10 and really help support the sustainabilities of shows like this one.

[00:51:21] One time donations of any amount are welcome there as well. You can find a direct link to donate or subscribe in the show notes. This has been The Hegemonicon. Thanks for listening and let’s talk again soon.