A Nation Rising Quotes

“During our interview, he chuckled and asked, “What happened to the sugar and pineapple plantations?” and then went on to forecast that the new Big Five biotech corporations will meet the same demise as the old Big Five sugar companies. When oil prices soar and it becomes too expensive to ship their chemicals and seeds in and out of Hawai‘i, they will leave because they have no vested interest here. “It's really bad, short-term economic forecasting to think they are going to be here forever.” So it will be “up to this generation to create the building blocks for a food system to grow farms, farmers, and the system of a localized food economy.”
― Noelani Goodyear-Ka'opua, A Nation Rising: Hawaiian Movements for Life, Land, and Sovereignty

“Kamuela Enos of MA‘O Organic Farms comments, “To me, the GMO piece is the corporatization of food. [This is] taking away the ability of communities to articulate their own food destiny and putting it in the hands of some remote boardroom.” He further explains, “The food sovereignty piece is about creating a vibrant food system that allows us to be resilient on islands. It pushes us toward the kind of system our kūpuna were able to create uninterrupted for thousands of years.”
― Noelani Goodyear-Ka'opua, A Nation Rising: Hawaiian Movements for Life, Land, and Sovereignty

“Through our experience with protecting Hāloa and kalo, it is clear that a fundamental conflict of interest exists between the biotechnology industry and Kanaka Maoli. The biotech industry demands manipulation and ownership of sacred things. Although kalo rallied us, this issue goes beyond kalo. There will be other plants, animals, fish, and microorganisms that the industry will seek to patent or manipulate.”
― Noelani Goodyear-Ka'opua, A Nation Rising: Hawaiian Movements for Life, Land, and Sovereignty

“Biodiversity prospecting, or bioprospecting for short, is “the exploration, extraction and screening of biological diversity and Indigenous knowledge for commercially valuable genetic and biochemical resources.”17 Bioprospecting involves genetic screening and isolation of interesting genes that could be used in pharmaceutical, agricultural, chemical, or industrial products. Bioprospectors often use traditional knowledge of Indigenous peoples as a lead to identify plants with medicinal or other potentially useful compounds, often without their prior informed consent. This misappropriation of knowledge and resulting commercial benefit has come to be known as “biopiracy.”
― Noelani Goodyear-Ka'opua, A Nation Rising: Hawaiian Movements for Life, Land, and Sovereignty

“Indigenous peoples' DNA is seen as a resource for use in medical, behavioral, anthropological, and genetic variation studies. Kanaka Maoli DNA has been sought for research at UH. For example, Dr. Charles Boyd, who was a researcher at UH's Pacific Biomedical Research Center, drafted a proposal for a Hawaiian Genome Project seeking $5–10 million to produce an annotated map of the entire genetic makeup of the Hawaiian people. Boyd stated, “There are many communities now with their own unique genetic history imprinted into their genomes and these include Asians, Europeans and the peoples of Oceania. The Hawaiian genome represents an important example of one of these communities of the Oceania people.”12 Boyd was hoping to target residents of the Hawaiian Homestead communities because they are seen as being the most purebred native Hawaiians. He hoped to find a genetic basis for the high rate of obesity, diabetes, renal disease, and hypertension in Kanaka Maoli.13 This type of research essentializes the role of genes, while devaluing key environmental and lifestyle factors, including the role dispossession of land has had in traditional diet and activities.”
― Noelani Goodyear-Ka'opua, A Nation Rising: Hawaiian Movements for Life, Land, and Sovereignty

“As Andrew Kimbrell has noted, “When scientists James Watson and Francis Crick first described the double helix of DNA in 1953 it was considered a historic ‘discovery,’ which has been called ‘the greatest achievement of science in the twentieth century’ and ‘one of the epic discoveries in the history of scientific thought.’”4 From a critical Indigenous perspective, Watson and Crick were to genes what Columbus was to the Americas or Captain Cook was to Hawai‘i. Once Westerners discover and name a creation of akua, whether it be land or genes, they begin to utilize and develop it, and eventually they must devise ways to legally claim it as their own property.”
― Noelani Goodyear-Ka'opua, A Nation Rising: Hawaiian Movements for Life, Land, and Sovereignty

“Lehua Lopez Cultural appropriation and cultural cannibalism may be defined as the buying, the selling and the consuming of other peoples' cultural artifacts, images, values and beliefs as well as sacred sites without permission of the culture being used. Cultural cannibalism is an insidious and hideous part of colonialism as it is part of the process of assimilation, what I would call a deliberate attempt to eradicate those beliefs, values, attitudes, behaviors, language, religion and practices of a [native] culture that are in contradiction or in conflict with the dominant [society].”
― Noelani Goodyear-Ka'opua, A Nation Rising: Hawaiian Movements for Life, Land, and Sovereignty

“The Hawaiian language campaign lasted for about one year and was the longest, most successful of Make‘e’s student-initiated actions. Hawaiian language and politics finally became a regular part of the Ka Leo O Hawai‘i student newspaper. Later, Make‘e worked with Hawaiian language advocates to successfully encourage the Honolulu Advertiser, a daily statewide newspaper, to incorporate Hawaiian standardized diacritical marks in their text.”
― Noelani Goodyear-Ka'opua, A Nation Rising: Hawaiian Movements for Life, Land, and Sovereignty

“Make‘e emphasized ‘ōlelo in our functions and pushed for stronger language revitalization efforts at the university. Make‘e’s language campaign started with the university's student-run newspaper, Ka Leo O Hawai‘i. The goal was simple: provide a venue for the weekly use and exploration of ideas in Hawaiian through heavily accessed print media. Make‘e believed language revitalization required normalized use in everyday social settings like the newspaper. Exposing language enthusiasts and nonspeakers to the written word would create awareness and generate curiosity to pursue Hawaiian language. The public printing and display of Hawaiian would also provide a more functional space for its use and practice. Such an arena would help release the Hawaiian language from its less active classroom role and eliminate the stigma that Hawaiian is a novel, cute, yet dying language.”
― Noelani Goodyear-Ka'opua, A Nation Rising: Hawaiian Movements for Life, Land, and Sovereignty

“Standing Rock Sioux scholar Vine Deloria Jr. explains further: “Sacred places are the foundation of all other beliefs and practices because they represent the presence of the sacred in our lives. They properly inform us that we are not larger than nature and that we have responsibilities to the rest of the natural world that transcend our own personal desires and wishes. This lesson must be learned by each generation; unfortunately the technology of industrial society always leads us in the other direction. Yet it is certain that as we permanently foul our planetary nest, we shall have to learn a most bitter lesson.”
― Noelani Goodyear-Ka'opua, A Nation Rising: Hawaiian Movements for Life, Land, and Sovereignty

“Because of these lengthy and protracted court battles, it is important for Kanaka Maoli farmers to remember to assert their rights in the real world. Not only does this punctuate the legal battles taking place in the courts, but actively asserting your rights sheds light on the injustice that is happening to the Kanaka Maoli. In the end, our rights are undeniable, and the actions taken by the brave taro farmers in the face of the Goliath corporation EMI, as well as the state of Hawai‘i, serve as a reminder that we have rights to our ‘āina, our resources.”
― Noelani Goodyear-Ka'opua, A Nation Rising: Hawaiian Movements for Life, Land, and Sovereignty

“What “opened people's eyes,” she said, was the synergy of ostensibly purely cultural initiatives, like the Hōkūle‘a’s voyages, with movements viewed from the outside as simply political, such as the PKO. Both”
― Noelani Goodyear-Ka'opua, A Nation Rising: Hawaiian Movements for Life, Land, and Sovereignty

“More than just a successful scientific experiment or an exercise in cultural wayfinding, Hōkūle‘a became an icon for the renewal of Indigenous Oceanic pride and faith in ancestral knowledges. For Kanaka ‘Ōiwi, the canoe's success was an in-your-face redemption against dominant narratives framing Hawaiians as incapable and inconsequential.”
― Noelani Goodyear-Ka'opua, A Nation Rising: Hawaiian Movements for Life, Land, and Sovereignty

“As Anne Keala Kelly's portrait of two houseless Hawaiian women warriors that opens this collection reminds us, in no uncertain terms: an Indigenous movement without a class analysis can be vapid in terms of its ability to produce meaningful change. Culture”
― Noelani Goodyear-Ka'opua, A Nation Rising: Hawaiian Movements for Life, Land, and Sovereignty

“In post-1959 Hawai‘i, hotels and resorts were becoming the new plantations.”
― Noelani Goodyear-Ka'opua, A Nation Rising: Hawaiian Movements for Life, Land, and Sovereignty

“Let's strive to keep our nation alive, let's strive Let's strive to keep our language alive, let's strive Let's strive to preserve the good of the islands so that righteousness may continue to be with us all that's good in the islands14”
― Noelani Goodyear-Ka'opua, A Nation Rising: Hawaiian Movements for Life, Land, and Sovereignty

“A shared characteristic in each of these translations is that ea is an active state of being. Like breathing, ea cannot be achieved or possessed; it requires constant action day after day, generation after generation. Unlike”
― Noelani Goodyear-Ka'opua, A Nation Rising: Hawaiian Movements for Life, Land, and Sovereignty

“Unlike Euro-American philosophical notions of sovereignty, ea is based on the experiences of people on the land, relationships forged through the process of remembering and caring for wahi pana, storied places.5 In that vein, the essays in this book trace a genealogy of the contemporary Hawaiian sovereignty movement through the vigorous efforts of people trying to maintain or restore their relationships with specific lands.”
― Noelani Goodyear-Ka'opua, A Nation Rising: Hawaiian Movements for Life, Land, and Sovereignty