There was a queen that was overthrown here. So I was affected by all of that and felt profoundly grateful for the opportunity to live in Hawaii, and I set out at once to try...

Are the Native Hawaiians going to be able to control their own land and their own money? When the land was seen as worthless, nobody gave a damn.

When there wasn’t any money involved, for all intents and purposes, nobody gave a damn. But now the land, supposedly worthless, is seen for what it really is: an incredibly valuable asset.

There’s a series of benefits – educational, health, etc. – that benefit Native Hawaiians. The revenues are starting to mount into the millions.

Land in Hawaii is money. What I’m talking about here is ceded land – land that belonged to the kingdom and was ceded to the republic and then to the state when we achieved statehood.

When I was first elected to the state House of Representatives in 1974, one of the committees I was assigned to was Land, Water and Hawaiian Homes.

So as soon as the land was worth something and there was money in the bank, all of a sudden everybody got interested in non-discrimination, in who’s really going to administer this stuff.

You’re talking serious money already in the bank, and millions of dollars coming in every year.

He formed Democracy for America, which took what was the foundation — the Internet foundation — and the enthusiasm, reaching out to the grassroots for his campaign and made it a national campaign,

Western concepts of ownership and privatization came in and clashed with that. So land began to be exchanged.

With troops in combat, the Congress has a non-negotiable obligation to weigh in heavily on the side of immediate and near-term needs of the military, particularly the Army. In some cases, this means cutting funds...

A good portion of the airport is on ceded lands, and lease money was paid for that. So the state’s collecting lease money because all of a sudden ‘worthless’ land now has an airport on...

The best time to achieve solutions is before a crisis, … The next time a drought comes, it may be too late to act.

I remember saying to the chairman after serving the first year, ‘Why are we doing this? Why don’t the Hawaiians have control?’ ‘Well, we have no mechanism to do it,’ I was told.

We are talking about the survival of this country.

Land began to be seen as something to be owned privately and exploited for private interests, and never was entirely reconciled with the old ideas that land should be utilized in common for the good...

We believe there is not going to be any undermining of the environment.

So there’s always been this clash between what is the public good – that which belongs to all of us in common – and what can be exploited for a private interest.

Once Howard Dean lost the Iowa primary, there was no licking of wounds; there was no baying at the moon. There was, let’s move to another stage now. We’ve got the right idea here.