We publish here some excerpts from this important interview with Kaniela Ing, national director of the Green New Deal Network and seventh-generation Kanaka Maoli, Native Hawaiian. The integral version can be listened here. Do not be paralyzed by prejudice that the interviewee is a young mainstream environmentalist. Go further, go deep.
Let’s concentrate only on the essentials about the Maui and Lahaina disaster in Hawaii. Leave your beliefs aside, along with your prejudices. Whether you are a liberal or a conservative, a conformist or a dissident, a believer or a skeptic, an American citizen or an anti-American rebel, you need to stop a moment to think. There are a few words you have to learn the meaning of: ecocidal capitalism, colonialism, centralism.
Understanding that capitalist exploitation has reached its limits will not change you into a socialist. Understanding the urgent need to end colonialism will not make you an anti-patriot, but it will reconnect you to an ancient anti-imperialist tradition that is among the noblest in American history. Understanding that Washington’s centralism (and that which dominates in many other nations) must be questioned will not transform you into a follower of retrograde, bigot, conspiracy thinking, but it will only open your mind to the blessing of self-government by everyone and everywhere. After this little, perhaps useless, sermon, here are the crucial contents of this conversation.
Mauro Vaiani, this blog's author
Excerpts from the transcript
KANIELA ING: ...I will preface by saying that I’ve been really busy, but when I’m not doing these interviews, I just tend to, like, break down. These are really somber times. I was born and raised in Maui. I’m Kānaka Maoli, Native Hawaiian, come from seven generations. And our island is on fire. Our most historic town was set ablaze by wildfires. Hundreds of people have been evacuated and hospitalized. The death toll is climbing, and people are searching for loved ones right now...
...what I am wondering, personally, is, once
the recovery efforts start to unfold and the cameras are gone, who’s
going to be left more powerful or less powerful? Are people still
going to be paying attention when the recovery work is going to last
for years? And is that going to make community members stronger, or
is it going to make the people who have mismanaged the land and water
and created the conditions for these fires to happen even more
powerful? And that’s what we’re focused on…
KANIELA ING: ...We’re a tropical island here on Maui. We’re not supposed to have wildfires. This came as a shock to everyone. There’s not enough firefighters here. We can’t ship them over from the next state. We’re an island. So, everyone right now is feeling a bit overwhelmed… Lahaina Town is actually — it’s often characterized as a tourist town, but the people who live there — which should be the focus — tend to be some of the most rooted Native Hawaiians that I’ve ever met. They… [are] really the keepers of the ancestral knowledge. And, you know, some of their — yeah, like, most of the folks that evacuated are, like, Kānaka Maoli or other immigrant folks. And my heart goes out to those families.
KANIELA ING: ...Lahaina town was a thriving center of Hawaii. It was like the heart of Hawaii before not just statehood, but before Hawaii was even a territory of the United States. So, if you start from one end of Front Street and walk to the other, it’s like a Disneyland ride through the colonial timeline of capitalism in Hawaii, starting from royalty, going to whaling, sandalwood, sugar and pineapple, tourism to luxury. And to me, the fire is a tragic symbol of this trajectory’s terminal point, like where it all ends up if you continue down this mode of extraction as a way to live. But… it also contains the most deep and durable relics of our history of resistance: the museums, the architecture, the infrastructure, the banyan tree — the oldest and largest in the United States, which has burned, 150 years old this year. Like, it includes all that, but also just the fact of how slow it was to develop is a testament to the people-powered, usually Native-led resistance that each industry faced along the way.
KANIELA ING: ...The National Weather Service says the cause of this fire was a downed power line, and the spread because of hurricane-force winds. And the spread was caused by dry vegetation and low humidity. …Corporate polluters… caused the conditions that led to this fire. In addition, there [was] mismanagement of land. ...They’ve been grabbing land and diverting water away from this area for a very long time now, for generations. And Lahaina was actually a wetland. ...[At] Waiola Church, you could have boats circulating the church back in the day. But, you know, because they needed water for their corporate ventures, like golf courses and hotels and monocropping, that has ended. So the natural form of Lahaina would have never caught on fire. These disasters are anything but natural. So, yes, colonial greed... and the gross mismanagement of our land and water… [We need] returning the stewardship of land and water to the people… And really, if community members and union members were to unite and had been organized years ago, we could have had a much different future. And that’s still something that I think we should continue working to build, is that labor and environmental unity.
KANIELA ING: ...[Some Hawaiian communities] were like, “Look, we don’t want to cooperate with this new extractive economy that [colonizers] created, so we’re going to live by ourselves in our own community on this beach. We’re going to govern ourselves.” And they’re quite organized, and they’re living in a way that’s subsistent and in harmony with nature. Now, it’s not to be glamorized. A lot of these folks face some really dire conditions not being a part of this capitalist system. But a lot of them are doing it based on really strong and sensible beliefs… Now… when a disaster hits, it’s going to impact these people first and worst, no doubt. And we need to make sure that both relief and recovery efforts, in the longer term, are prioritizing the low-income and Indigenous people that are some — some are still unaccounted for. Some don’t even have IDs. And, you know, they need to be front of mind with everything we do, from, you know, day zero, when the disaster breaks, to years out, when we’re recovering…
KANIELA ING: ...So, going into Lahaina, the people that actually lived there for generations are the keepers of some of the most profound Indigenous knowledge that I have ever met. They understood subsistence fishery, how native plants were buffers against, like, you know, disasters, how to create regenerative agricultural practices. And it’s that view of the world where, you know, our success isn’t determined by how much we hoard, but rather how much we produce for others and share, and where, like, our economy is not based on how well the rich are doing, but how many people, how many of us, can actually thrive. Like, it’s that — it’s not just Indigenous knowledge, but it’s that value system that really needs to be reestablished… Indigenous leaders also need to be resourced to build the good. They need to be the purveyors of and architects of the new green and, like, community-rooted world that’s still possible, even in these dire times.
KANIELA ING: ...there needs to be a longer focus on recovery, that these — that we can’t rebuild the community in a few weeks. It’s going to take years. And we need to do it intentionally, not just making sure — not just bringing us back to the status quo, because the status quo is what led us here, but making sure that we have more democratic and community-controlled institutions that come out of this. Unfortunately, the groups that are best poised to deploy direct aid, because of their institutional connections, are also the most likely to enable disaster capitalists from exploiting the situation. So, we need to create — we need to understand that, you know, as we’re, like, trying — as people want to help, that they’re resourcing groups that have an eye towards community organizations, to the organizers that will actually be there once the cameras leave, and will be rebuilding from the ground up over the course of the long run.
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