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UnKau Inoa Is Back!http://FreeHawaiiTV.com - Did You Sign OHA's Kau Inoa & Wish You Hadn't? UnKau Inoa's The Way To Remove Your Name So There's No More Shame. Watch & We'll Show You How To UnKau Now.Kau Inoa Exposedhttp://FreeHawaiiTV.com - Will Kau Inoa Be Used To Support The Akaka Bill? How Do They Get Signatures? Who Has Access To The Database? Here's The Answers. But Be Prepared - It Isn't Pretty.
Hawaii court allows lawsuit over Kawaiahao Church gravesMediation urged in suit accusing church, state of violating burial lawsBy Gordon Y.K. Pang
Advertiser Staff WriterKawaiaha'o Church's plans for a new multipurpose building suffered a setback in state Circuit Court yesterday.Circuit Judge Karl Sakamoto denied motions by the church and the state seeking to dismiss a case that accuses the venerable church and state Department of Land and Natural Resources of fast-tracking the $17.5 million renovation project in violation of state burial laws.Often described as the "Westminster Abbey of the Pacific," Kawaiaha'o is one of the state's oldest and best-known churches. Many members of royalty are buried there, among them King William Charles Lunalilo.The project involves replacing the 69-year-old Likeke Hall, the church office building and an 18-stall parking lot with a two-story multipurpose building.Work began in January but was halted after burial remains were discovered.Campbell Estate heiress Abigail Kawananakoa, the niece of Queen Kapi'olani's great-grandniece, filed suit in July, claiming that the remains of her ancestors and others had been improperly disturbed and that the state allowed the church to bypass the scrutiny of the O'ahu Island Burial Council, as well as other regulations."My client wants (the church) to follow the procedures that are in place to protect not only her ancestors' graves, but to protect the public," said George Van Buren, Kawananakoa's attorney.Pointing out that dredging for the project already has resulted in the uncovering of 69 sets of human remains, Kawananakoa wants the church to gain approval from the O'ahu Island Burial Council, conduct an archaeological inventory survey and complete an environmental study before it proceeds.The cornerstone of the church's defense is that because the church maintains an active cemetery, it is outside the jurisdiction of the Public Trust Doctrine and therefore not subject to its more stringent regulations."Kawaiaha'o Church is a known, maintained and actively used cemetery that is not subject to the burial laws related to the prehistoric and historic burial sites," the church said in court documents, which also point out that remains were buried in the cemetery as recently as July.Sakamoto urged the two sides to seek mediation in the case, and attorneys for both sides said they are amenable to that.Van Buren said the judge "found that their reliance on an exception for actively maintained cemeteries was unavailing," striking a blow to the church's major argument.But Crystal Rose, an attorney for the church, said the only thing Sakamoto decided was to allow the case to proceed.While Sakamoto may have indicated that he now agrees with Kawananakoa's view that the church is not exempt from burial laws, "we welcome the opportunity to prove to the court that we are an actively maintained cemetery," Rose said.Deborah Ward, a DLNR spokeswoman, said the agency had not yet seen the decision and therefore could not comment.No trial date has been set.
Kauai agency to review permit process for home on burial groundsBy Michael Levine
The Garden IslandLIHUE — Almost two years after originally granting approval for Joseph Brescia to construct a controversial single-family home on burial grounds at Naue, the Kauai Planning Commission yesterday set a January hearing date to determine if terms of that permit have been followed.The approval was granted on the condition that Brescia "shall excavate the soil at the foundation locations and observe for any archaeological findings with a qualified archaeologist prior to actual construction of the proposed residence.""If any archaeological findings are discovered, the applicant shall cease construction immediately and contact the State Historic Preservation Division-DLNR and the County Planning Department to determine mitigative measures," the permit's Condition No. 5 states. "No building permit shall be issued until requirements of the State Historic Preservation Division and the Burial Council have been met."That condition was upheld last year when 5th Circuit Judge Kathleen Watanabe ruled that Brescia could continue with construction, provided that doing so caused no irreparable damage to the burials and did not prevent access to them.Watanabe also said the State Historic Preservation Division needed to go back to the start of its burial treatment plan process with the Kauai-Niihau Island Burial Council. The first time around, she said, SHPD did not properly follow the rules and laws pertaining to burials.In April 2008, the burial council said Brescia should preserve the burials in place and not move them. They have since been capped in concrete, much to the chagrin of the Native Hawaiian community and even some burial council members.To date, the burial council has not yet approved a burial treatment plan. It is scheduled to hold its first meeting in months next week, and it could discuss the 12th version of the plan. No agenda has yet been published.Watanabe's admonition to Brescia and the state could supply what attorneys refer to as the "law of the case," where a trial court's unappealed ruling stands as the law for a particular case unless different evidence is raised, a different view of the law is decided or the decision is clearly erroneous.In August, Native Hawaiian Legal Corporation Litigation Director Alan Murakami and attorney Camille Kalama filed, on behalf of self-described cultural practitioners Puanani Rogers and Jeffrey Chandler, a petition seeking a declaratory order announcing the commission's official position that Brescia's home is in non-compliance."There is good cause to modify the conditions of approval given the ongoing construction of a house on top of burial sites, the lack of an approved burial treatment plan, and the vote of the KNIBC to preserve the burial sites in place," the 12-page petition concludes.Despite objections from Walton Hong and Calvert Chipchase, two attorneys representing Brescia, that they had not been properly served documents and that the Planning Commission does not have the authority or jurisdiction to hear the case due to "procedural deficiencies," the commission set the contested case hearing for Jan. 12, 2010.Rogers said after the decision that she was "very relieved" because opponents of the construction have seemingly always lost in the past.The declaratory order could be issued pursuant to Chapter 10 of the commission's Rules of Practice and Procedure, but the petition also requests the revocation or modification of the approved permit, procedures that fall under Chapter 12 and were not discussed yesterday.Both the declaratory order and the potential revocation of the permit could prove to be too little, too late, at least for the Brescia property. Proponents and opponents of the development said yesterday that considerable construction has already occurred.Hong said he has not visited the property recently but it is his understanding that exterior walls are built, the roof is up, and many of the windows have been installed. He said the focus is currently on the interior walls.In July, Murakami said he expected construction to be finished before the end of 2009."The house is already complete, the burials are desecrated," Rogers said. However, she added that the case, no longer isolated, can set an important precedent because "the world is watching."Kalama said Monday that even if the house is allowed to stand, one of Native Hawaiian Legal Corporation's main goals is that the procedure of approving permits before the burial treatment plan is in place or cultural issues are addressed will not happen again."Even having a declaration from the county would prevent this from happening in the next round," Kalama said."The Planning Commission is under a magnifying glass," Rogers said. "We hope that they will do what is most fair to the iwi kupuna, to the kanaka maoli people and to our cultural rights and beliefs."
THE RETURN OF ???FIND OUT HERE TOMORROW!
http://www.truthout.org/1012091Shared via AddThis
The Myth of "America"
Monday 12 October 2009
by: Dahr Jamail and Jason Coppola, t r u t h o u t | Feature
The Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria lying in the North River, New York, in 1912. (Photo Illustration: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t)
May the spirit of adventure and discovery always be with you.
Wishing you a great Columbus Day
- Columbus Day greeting card
To mark Columbus Day In 2004, the Medieval and Renaissance Center in UCLA published the final volume of a compendium of Columbus-era documents. Its general editor, Geoffrey Symcox, leaves little room for ambivalence when he says, "This is not your grandfather's Columbus.... While giving the brilliant mariner his due, the collection portrays Columbus as an unrelenting social climber and self-promoter who stopped at nothing - not even exploitation, slavery, or twisting biblical scripture - to advance his ambitions.... Many of the unflattering documents have been known for the last century or more, but nobody paid much attention to them until recently. The fact that Columbus brought slavery, enormous exploitation or devastating diseases to the Americas used to be seen as a minor detail - if it was recognized at all - in light of his role as the great bringer of white man's civilization to the benighted idolatrous American continent. But to historians today this information is very important. It changes our whole view of the enterprise."
But does it?
***
"They ... brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks' bells," Christopher Columbus wrote in his logbook in 1495. "They willingly traded everything they owned.... They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features.... They do not bear arms, and do not know them, for I showed them a sword, they took it by the edge and cut themselves out of ignorance. They have no iron. Their spears are made of cane.... They would make fine servants.... With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want. Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold."
Catholic priest Bartolome de las Casas, in the multi-volume "History of the Indies" published in 1875, wrote, "... Slaves were the primary source of income for the Admiral (Columbus) with that income he intended to repay the money the Kings were spending in support of Spaniards on the Island. They provide profit and income to the Kings. (The Spaniards were driven by) insatiable greed ... killing, terrorizing, afflicting, and torturing the native peoples ... with the strangest and most varied new methods of cruelty."
This systematic violence was aimed at preventing "Indians from daring to think of themselves as human beings. (The Spaniards) thought nothing of knifing Indians by tens and twenties and of cutting slices off them to test the sharpness of their blades.... My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature, and now I tremble as I write."
Father Fray Antonio de Montesino, a Dominican preacher, in December 1511 said this in a sermon that implicated Christopher Columbus and the colonists in the genocide of the native peoples:
"Tell me by what right of justice do you hold these Indians in such a cruel and horrible servitude? On what authority have you waged such detestable wars against these people who dealt quietly and peacefully on their own lands? Wars in which you have destroyed such an infinite number of them by homicides and slaughters never heard of before ..."
In 1892, the National Council of Churches, the largest ecumenical body in the United States, is known to have exhorted Christians to refrain from celebrating the Columbus quincentennial, saying, "What represented newness of freedom, hope, and opportunity for some was the occasion for oppression, degradation and genocide for others."
Yet America continues to celebrate "Columbus Day."
That Americans do so in the face of all evidence that there is little in the Columbian legacy that merits applause makes it easier for them to avoid taking responsibility for their own actions, or the actions of their government. Perhaps there is good reason.
***
In "Columbus Day: A Clash of Myth and History," journalist and media critic Norman Solomon discusses how historians who deal with recorded evidence are frequently depicted as "politically correct" revisionists while the general populace is manipulated into holding onto myths that brazenly applaud inconceivable acts of violence of men against fellow humans.
For those of us who are willing to ask how it becomes possible to manipulate the population of a country into accepting atrocity, the answer is not hard to find. It requires normalizing the inconceivable and drumming it in via the socio-cultural environment until it is internalized and embedded in the individual and collective consciousness. The combined or singular deployment of the media, the entertainment industry, mainstream education or any other agency, can achieve the desired result of convincing people that wars can be just, and strikes can be surgical, as long as it is the US that is doing it.
Never has this process been as blatant and overt as in recent years when the time has come for America to legitimize the idea of global domination. A Department of Defense report titled Joint Vision 2020 calls for the US military to be capable of "full spectrum dominance" of the entire planet. That means total domination and control of all land, sea, air, space and information.
That's a lot of control.
How might this become accepted as "Policy" and remain unquestioned by almost an entire population?
The one word key to that is: Myths. The explanation is that the myths the United States is built upon have paved the way for the perpetuation of all manner of violations.
Among the first of these is that of Christopher Columbus. In school we were taught of his bravery, courage and perseverance. In a speech in 1989, George H.W. Bush proclaimed: "Christopher Columbus not only opened the door to a New World, but also set an example for us all by showing what monumental feats can be accomplished through perseverance and faith."
Never mind that the monumental feats mainly comprised part butchery, part exploitation and the largest part betrayal of host populations of the "New World."
***
On their second arrival in Hispaniola, Haiti, Columbus's crew took captive roughly two thousand local villagers who had arrived to greet them. Miguel Cuneo, a literate crew member, wrote, "When our caravels ... were to leave for Spain, we gathered ... one thousand six hundred male and female persons of those Indians, and these we embarked in our caravels on February 17, 1495.... For those who remained, we let it be known (to the Spaniards who manned the island's fort) in the vicinity that anyone who wanted to take some of them could do so, to the amount desired, which was done."
In 1500, Columbus wrote to a friend, "A hundred castellanoes (a Spanish coin) are as easily obtained for a woman as for a farm, and it is very general and there are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten (years old) are now in demand."
Such original "monumental feats" as were accomplished by our nation's heroes and role models were somewhat primitive. Local inhabitants who resisted Columbus and his crew had their ears or nose cut off, were attacked by dogs, skewered with pikes and shot. Reprisals were so severe that many of the natives committed mass suicide and women began practicing abortions in order not to leave children enslaved. The population of Haiti at the time of Columbus's arrival was between 1.5 million and 3 million. Sixty years later, every single native had been murdered.
Today, "perseverance and faith" allow us to accomplish much more and with far greater impunity. The US continues to liberate Iraq and Afghanistan with 2,000-pound bombs in civilian areas and purge Pakistan via drone attacks on weddings.
Neither case is of isolated whimsy. It was and remains policy.
In "A People's History of the United States," celebrated historian Howard Zinn describes how Arawak men and women emerged from their villages to greet their guests with food, water and gifts when Columbus landed at the Bahamas. But Columbus wanted something else. "Gold is most excellent; gold constitutes treasure; and he who has it does all he wants in the world, and can even lift souls up to Paradise," he wrote to the king and queen of Spain in 1503.
Rather than gold, however, Columbus only found slaves when he arrived on his second visit with seventeen ships and over 1,200 men. Ravaging various Caribbean islands, Columbus took natives as captives as he sailed. Of these he picked 500 of the best specimens and shipped them back to Spain. Two hundred of these died en route, while the survivors were put up for sale by the archdeacon of the town where they landed.
Columbus needed more than mere slaves to sell, and Zinn's account informs us, "... desperate to pay back dividends to those who had invested, (he) had to make good his promise to fill the ships with gold. In the province of Cicao on Haiti, where he and his men imagined huge gold fields to exist, they ordered all persons fourteen years or older to collect a certain quantity of gold every three months. When they brought it, they were given copper tokens to hang around their necks. Indians found without a copper token had their hands cut off and bled to death.
"The Indians had been given an impossible task. The only gold around was bits of dust garnered from the streams. So they fled, were hunted down with dogs, and were killed."
As a younger priest, the aforementioned De las Casas had participated in the conquest of Cuba and owned a plantation where natives worked as slaves before he found his conscience and gave it up. His first-person accounts reveal that the Spaniards "thought nothing of knifing Indians by tens and twenties and of cutting slices off them to test the sharpness of their blades. They forced their way into native settlements, slaughtering everyone they found there, including small children, old men, pregnant women, and even women who had just given birth. They hacked them to pieces, slicing open their bellies with their swords as though they were sheep herded into a pen. They even laid wagers on whether they could manage to slice a man in two at a stroke, or cut an individual's head from his body, or disembowel him with a single blow of their axes. They grabbed suckling infants by the feet and, ripping them from their mothers' breasts, dashed them headlong against the rocks. Others, laughing and joking all the while, threw them over their shoulders into a river, shouting: 'Wriggle, you litle perisher.' They slaughtered anyone on their path ..."
***
Full Spectrum Dominance
In a letter to the Spanish court dated February 15, 1492, Columbus presented his version of full spectrum dominance: "to conquer the world, spread the Christian faith and regain the Holy Land and the Temple Mount."
With this radical ideology, Las Casas records, "They spared no one, erecting especially wide gibbets on which they could string their victims up with their feet just off the ground and then burned them alive thirteen at a time, in honour of our Saviour and the twelve Apostles."
About incorporating these accounts in his book, Zinn explained to Truthout, "My point is not to grieve for the victims and denounce the executioners. Those tears, that anger, cast into the past, deplete our moral energy for the present ... but I do remember a statement I once read: The cry of the poor is not always just, but if you don't listen to it, you will never know what justice is."
****
Author journalist Chris Hedges believes that glorification of (the atrocities of) Columbus is one of several myths that sustain the illusions that justify the imperial visions of the United States.
In conversation with Truthout, he said, "It's really easy to build a holocaust museum that condemns Germans. It's another issue to build a museum that confronts our own genocide, the genocide that was perpetrated by our own ancestors towards Native Americans or towards African-Americans. I am all for documenting and remembering the [World War II] Holocaust, but the disparity between the reality of the [World War II] Holocaust or the reality of the genocide as illustrated in the [World War II] Holocaust museum and the utter historical amnesia in the Native American museum in Washington is really frightening and shows a complete inability in a public arena for us to examine who we are and what we've done."
Noam Chomsky holds a similar view. "We have [World War II] Holocaust museums all over the place about what the Germans did," Chomsky told Truthout. "Do we have one about what we did? I mean about slavery, about the Native American population? It's not that the people involved didn't know about it. John Quincy Adams, a great grand strategist, who had a major role in these atrocities, in his later years when he reflected on them, referred to that hapless race of North Americans, which we are exterminating with such insidious cruelty. They knew exactly what they were doing. But it doesn't matter. It's us."
Explaining how the mythology of a country becomes its historic reality, Chomsky stated, "If you are well-educated, you can internalize that and it. That's part of what a good education is about, enabling people to live with those contradictions. And you see it very consistently. In the case of, say, the Iraq war, try to find somebody who had a principled objection. Actually you can, occasionally, but it's suppressed."
Historical revisionism and amnesia are critical for nation-building, opines Paul Woodward, the writer and author of the blog "War In Context". He elaborates, "Every nation is subject to its own particular form of historical amnesia. Likewise, imperial powers have their own grandiose revisionist tendencies. Yet there is another form of historical denial particular to recently invented nations whose myth-making efforts are inextricably bound together with the process of the nation's birth ...
"Whereas older nations are by and large populated by people whose ancestral roots penetrated that land well before it took on the clear definition of a nation state, the majority of the people in an invented nation - such as the United States or Israel - have ancestry that inevitably leads elsewhere. This exposes the ephemeral link between the peoples' history and the nation's history. Add to that the fact that such nations came into being through grotesque acts of dispossession and it is clear that a psychological drive to hold aloft an atemporal exceptionalism becomes an existential necessity. National security requires that the past be erased."
Robert Jensen is an author and teaches media law, ethics and politics at the University of Texas. In an essay where he justifies his decision to not celebrate Thanksgiving as a holiday, he says, "Imagine that Germany won World War II and that a Nazi regime endured for some decades, eventually giving way to a more liberal state with a softer version of German-supremacist ideology. Imagine that a century later Germans celebrated a holiday offering a whitewashed version of German/Jewish history that ignored that holocaust and the deep anti-Semitism of the culture. Imagine that the holiday provided a welcomed time for families and friends to gather and enjoy food and conversation. Imagine that businesses, schools and government offices closed on this day. What would we say about such a holiday? Would we not question the distortions woven into such a celebration? Would we not demand a more accurate historical account? Would we not, in fact, denounce such a holiday as grotesque?"
Of course we would.
But our story is different, and once again this year, on October 12, we will once again "Hail Columbus."
---------
Bhaswati Sengupta contributed to this report.
»
Dahr Jamail, an independent journalist, is the author of "The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan," (Haymarket Books, 2009), and "Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq," (Haymarket Books, 2007). Jamail reported from occupied Iraq for nine months as well as from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Turkey over the last five years.Jason Coppola is the director and producer of the documentary film "Justify My War," which explores the rationalization of war in American culture, comparing the siege of Fallujah with the massacre at Wounded Knee. Coppola has worked in Iraq as well as on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.
COMMENTS
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Columbus had a map.... TheMon, 10/12/2009 - 14:21 — Anonymous (not verified)
Columbus had a map.... The Chinese circumnavigated the earth almost a hundred years before Columbus. A great read is 1421: The Year China Discovered America by: Gavin Mendzies
Why even have a ColumbusMon, 10/12/2009 - 15:39 — sharonsj (not verified)
Why even have a Columbus day? He did not discover America, he only rediscovered it, after the Church said the world was flat but the religious nobility were more interested in finding wealth. Columbus opened the way for a disaster in the Americas, with anywhere from 5 to 35 million natives killed--nobody knows the exact number because Indians weren't considered human beings. In any case, all sorts of people came to America before Columbus--the Vikings, the Phoenicians, the Africans, the Asians, possibly the Romans--the list is endless.
They still sing songs inMon, 10/12/2009 - 17:08 — EH (not verified)
They still sing songs in music class about him. My 7 year old stood up and raised his hand and told them that the song was a lie, and then preceded to tell the teacher that Columbus was worse than Hitler. Good times :)
Has Spain ever evenMon, 10/12/2009 - 17:39 — Anonymous (not verified)
Has Spain ever even apologized for the rape of the Americas?
Since both Cherokee andMon, 10/12/2009 - 17:47 — Jeff Key (not verified)
Since both Cherokee and European blood flow in my veins, I use this day each year to commemorate in sad reverence the genocidal and racist horrors visited upon the indigenous peoples of the American continent. I never call it by its popular name. To me, it will always be Bloody Conquistador Day.
Besides Columbus's brutalMon, 10/12/2009 - 18:22 — drosera (not verified)
Besides Columbus's brutal approach, another way the strong control the weak is by making them dependent. In my part of the country (Great Lakes) Indians were bought off with payments given twice or so a year. Indian men went into debt while waiting for the payments and, upon receiving them, spent the largess on liquor. I understand the Comanchee of Texas did not accept the "buy-out" of their lands and fought the invaders. They preserved their culture longer and retained some measure of dignity. Whether by torturing, killing, infecting with disease or by offering paltry money for lands taken, the result is the same: people
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