IN FOCUS by Pat Sherman

If you were to go back and watch-in wide-screen format-that episode of The Brady Bunch where Mike, Carol and progeny traipse haplessly through Hawaii, you'd likely see activist and academic Haunani-Kai Trask at the periphery of the frame, protesting the presence of TV's most un-cool kin.

“Personally, I totally oppose tourism-especially the kind of tourism we have,” said Trask, a leader in the native Hawaiian sovereignty movement who lives on the island of Oahu. “We don't have little tours around the islands; we have a huge, mega-corporately based tourism industry. There are 30 tourists for every native Hawaiian.” (Oahu, with a population of about 750,000, bears the brunt of the 50th state's booming vacation business and is home to six military bases.)

Trask will be the keynote speaker of “Crossing Borders: Citizenship, Social Justice and the Crossroads of Culture,” this Friday and Saturday at UCSD. The conference is the second in an annual series organized by the ethnic studies departments at UCSD, UC Berkeley and the University of Southern California.

Structured largely around the dissertation work of graduate students at the sponsoring universities, the conference will address issues of citizenship, social justice and culture as they relate to physical and metaphorical border crossings amid today's shifting political and socioeconomic landscape.

One of the founders of the Ka Lahui nation, which has struggled in earnest since 1987 to become a federally recognized nation similar to American-Indian tribes, Trask will address the struggles of indigenous people in Hawaii and around the globe. A professor of Hawaiian studies at the University of Hawaii-Manoa, Trask has represented her fledgling nation at the United Nations in Geneva and at the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa.

“One of the problems with Hawaii is its international reputation as a paradise-this gorgeous tourist resort where you go and play golf with Tiger Woods and lounge on the beach with movies stars,” said the oft-controversial Trask in a phone interview. “That includes everybody in D.C. They come here as they're flying over to Asia on official missions. Our biggest problem in terms of raising people's consciousness about our conditions is that people who have been here-we have over 6.5 million tourists a year-cannot believe that there are problems in Hawaii because it is so beautiful and our people so warm and welcoming. That beauty and that cultural openness work against us.”

The last reigning monarch of the Hawaiian Islands, Queen Liliuokalani, was deposed in 1893, making way for the formation of a republic. Entrepreneurs such as pineapple and sugar cane mogul Sanford B. Dole and cohorts like William Owen Smith and B.F. Dillingham (a direct descendent of whom lives in San Diego and served as chief of staff to former Mayor Maureen O'Connor) were part of an oligarchy opposing the Hawaiian monarchy and plotting its overthrow.

Though President Clinton issued an apology on the centenary of the seizure of Hawaii, no returned land accompanied that formality. Under the current administration, Trask said she and her people are even less hopeful of receiving reparations.

“The condition of native people is totally off Bush's agenda,” she said. “He's not concerned at all with honoring treaties or recognizing unrecognized nations like ours.... Clinton laid out a step-by-step process for reconciliations, but we're nowhere closer to that process now than we were 10 year ago.”

The author of four books, Trask's writings and activism have often been characterized as angry and self-serving. Kirkus Reviews referred to her 1999 poetry collection, Light in the Crevice Never Seen as “extraordinarily angry... Polynesian agitprop.”

Trask, who comes across in conversation as an intelligent and reasoned woman, says her detractors are merely shooting the messenger.

“When I give a talk,” she said, “sometimes people will get very angry. They'll stand up in the audience and say, ‘I don't know what you're talking about! You're just a mean, unhappy person! I have a house in Hawaii and we don't know anybody like you.' I began to realize after five or 10 years of giving public talks on the continent that this is their defense mechanism. They don't want to acknowledge that they might be complicit in the diaspora of native persons.”

Among those who may have trouble viewing themselves as complicit in the oppression of native Hawaiians, says Trask, are those living in affluent areas of Hawaii with names like “Hollywood East”-Steven Spielberg and Oprah Winfrey, for example. “George Harrison has this huge estate where my mother grew up in a very small place called Hannah, which is now overrun by very wealthy people,” said Trask.

However, it is not Oprah's palatial slice of paradise that Trask and the Ka La Huai are after.

“The United States took 2 million acres of our land,” she said. “Since there are only 4 million [in Hawaii], that was a substantial loss.... Our claim is to those lands that would be our national patrimony. We make no claims against private property and that's something that's often confused in Hawaii, and which makes people very fearful who are not Hawaiian. They assume incorrectly that we want to lay claim to private lands.”

The question, said Trask, is which land-if any-the government might be willing to return. “Certainly we don't want lands that the military has bombed for 35 years,” she said. “They're not viable for anybody.”

Though Trask's mother grew up in Hawaii, she herself grew up in the San Francisco Bay area-a detail many have used to discredit her work on behalf of indigenous Hawaiians. “The place of birth is irrelevant,” Trask said. “What's important is genealogy.... After all, diaspora is a very common experience for people, whether they're indigenous or not. Right now, we're almost at the point where we have more Hawaiians living on the continent of the United States than we do living here... because of the economy.

“It's the same with American Indians,” she added. “If you look at a map of Indian lands, the reservations shrink every year. The native people on them leave, because there's no economic viability.... What we're trying to do is stop the outward migration, because Hawaii is so terribly expensive and the jobs are so poorly paid. They wind up being in the service industry, which is... the lowest paid industry in the state.”

Trask contends that the public education system in Hawaii has largely glossed over the overthrow of the land, while promoting tourism to young students. “The state of Hawaii has a tourism kit for fourth grade public school teachers to train young people who are 7 or 8 to think about a job in a tourist industry. They list all the jobs-waiter, dancer-but they never say owner.”

To add insult to injury, native entitlements-which largely subsidize higher education-are currently the victim of a multimillion-dollar ad campaign deeming them racist in nature. The argument used by one the campaign's major opponents, Ken Conclin, contends: “All who have helped make Hawaii what it is today are full partners, and not guests.”

“I once gave an interview to the local papers here and said, ‘These people are evil,' and they got very upset,” Trask recalled. “They're out there attacking Hawaiians, saying that we're racists [and that] there's no such thing as a native person. Ken Conclin's just the tip of the iceberg. His illustrious ancestor was one of the people that overthrew our queen. They feel emboldened to say that Hawaiians are racist and they are the bearers of democracy.”

Trask will speak following a dinner at the Radisson La Jolla Hotel Friday night, March 5. The event is free for those who pre-register. She'll also speak in a free public event at 7 p.m. Wednesday, March 3, in the Price Center Ballroom on the UCSD campus.

Among the many panelists is USC grad student Belinda Lum, who-from 1:30 to 3 p.m. on Saturday-will share her experience as part of the LA Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride. As part of her dissertation, Lum was on one of 18 busses that snaked along the U.S.-Mexico border and through 42 different states at the end of September. Patterned after the freedom rides of the African-American civil rights movement, the trip included nearly 1,000 immigrant workers who crossed the country to put immigration issues on the national political agenda and mobilize support for changes in immigration policy.

The focus of Lum's discussion will be how labor unions and immigrant workers are increasingly working together. She says the nationalist sentiment once pervasive in unions has faded in part due to the necessity of having to work with foreign-born labor to survive.

“Unions have sort of been the site of the backlash against immigrants,” she said, “because there's always been this idea that they're a threat to ‘American' jobs,” but unions are realizing that in the era of free trade, us-versus-them is an outdated concept.

“The unions that I think are doing it right, so to say, realize that in order for them to develop political power in the United States, they need to have immigrants become citizens so that they can vote,” Lum maintains.

On Friday, Irum Shiekh, a Pakistani-born, UC Berkeley graduate, will be sharing the results of her interviews with immigrants detained and arrested following the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11-including her own brother.

“I'm looking at the government's role in making them terrorists,” explained Shiekh of her topic: “Manufacturing Terrorists: Racial Formations and 9/11 Detentions.”

“I argue that it was primarily race which led to the detention of these males,” she said. “The enforcement officers used racial profiling.”

In the process of garnering her interviews, which include people from 20 different countries, Shiekh traveled to Pakistan, India and Egypt. “Their stories told me that none of these people had any connection with terrorism,” she said. “They had minor immigration violations....”

While in San Diego, Shiekh hopes to connect with Osama Awadallah, the former Grossmont College student who spent three months in federal detention before being freed.

The Crossing Borders conference and Friday night dinner are free of charge. All sessions will take place on the UCSD campus in the Great Hall and the Social Science Building. For a complete schedule of panel topics and times, visit ethnicstudies.ucsd. edu/crossingborders. To register, e-mail nagdav@cox.net.