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document.write('<li class="rss-item"><a class="rss-item" href="https://www.civilbeat.org/2020/05/coronavirus-daily-news-hawaii/" target="_self">VIRUS TRACKER — MAY 25: No New COVID-19 Cases In Hawaii — Again</a><br />');
document.write('<span class="rss-date">Mon, 25 May 2020 21:40:01 +0000</span><br />');
document.write('For the second day in a row, there were no new cases of COVID-19 reported in Hawaii on Monday. To date, 643 people have been diagnosed with COVID-19 in the islands, according to numbers released daily by the Hawaii Department of Health. More than 90% of people diagnosed have been “released from isolation”, meaning they’ve gone at least three days without a fever and muscle pain, or at least 10 days have passed since the onset of symptoms. State and county officials are continuing to move toward reopening businesses and other social institutions, including churches, but Mike McCartney, Hawaii’s top economic official, warned in a press release Monday that the economic downturn will continue to be significant this year. The Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism projects economic growth to fall by 12.1% in 2020. There have been more than 280,000 unemployment claims filed since mid-March when Hawaii began shutting down businesses and workplaces. For more information, check the Hawaii Department of Health COVID-19 site and the Hawaii Data Collaborative COVID-19 Tracking site. Cases, Deaths and COVID-19 Testing in Hawaii 643 COVID-19 Cases 17 Deaths 50,371 Tests administered Source: Hawaii Department of Health Hawaii COVID-19 Cases By County !function(){\"use strict\";window.addEventListener(\"message\",(function(a){if(void 0!==a.data[\"datawrapper-height\"])for(var e in a.data[\"datawrapper-height\"]){var t=document.getElementById(\"datawrapper-chart-\"+e)||document.querySelector(\"iframe[src*=\'\"+e+\"\']\");t&&(t.style.height=a.data[\"datawrapper-height\"][e]+\"px\")}}))}(); @media screen and (max-width:500px) { #graph2 { height: 300px !important; } } Daily New COVID-19 Cases @media screen and (max-width:500px) { #graph1 { height: 400px !important; } } Number Of Confirmed COVID–19 Cases In U.S. !function(){\"use strict\";window.addEventListener(\"message\",(function(a){if(void 0!==a.data[\"datawrapper-height\"])for(var e in a.data[\"datawrapper-height\"]){var t=document.getElementById(\"datawrapper-chart-\"+e)||document.querySelector(\"iframe[src*=\'\"+e+\"\']\");t&&(t.style.height=a.data[\"datawrapper-height\"][e]+\"px\")}}))}(); @media screen and (max-width:500px) { #graph3 { height: 300px !important; } } COVID-19 Cases Worldwide !function(){\"use strict\";window.addEventListener(\"message\",(function(a){if(void 0!==a.data[\"datawrapper-height\"])for(var e in a.data[\"datawrapper-height\"]){var t=document.getElementById(\"datawrapper-chart-\"+e)||document.querySelector(\"iframe[src*=\'\"+e+\"\']\");t&&(t.style.height=a.data[\"datawrapper-height\"][e]+\"px\")}}))}(); @media screen and (max-width:500px) { #graph4 { height: 300px !important; } } Want more information on COVID-19 in Hawaii? You can read all of Civil Beat’s coronavirus coverage, find answers to frequently asked questions or sign up for email newsletter updates — all for free. And check out pictures of how community groups and volunteers have been helping out in our Community Scrapbook. The post VIRUS TRACKER — MAY 25: No New COVID-19 Cases In Hawaii — Again appeared first on Honolulu Civil Beat.');
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document.write('<li class="rss-item"><a class="rss-item" href="https://www.civilbeat.org/2020/05/hawaii-schools-under-pressure-to-provide-more-data-about-its-remote-learning/" target="_self">Hawaii Schools Under Pressure To Provide More Data About Remote Learning</a><br />');
document.write('<span class="rss-date">Sun, 24 May 2020 10:01:55 +0000</span><br />');
document.write('Since the Hawaii Department of Education closed schools in March and switched to distance learning to stem the spread of coronavirus, it has struggled to answer two critical questions: how many students are participating in online learning, and how many don’t have the tools or technology to access it? It’s a question that’s been raised by Hawaii’s congressional delegation, by state lawmakers, by nonprofits and education advocates and by the DOE’s policy-making body, the state Board of Education. The answer is still unknown. Superintendent Christina Kishimoto has only provided generalities up to now, such as 80% to 95% of Hawaii’s 179,000 public school students receiving “consistent access to educational material.” Hawaii’s DOE has distributed 12,000 loaner tech devices during the fourth quarter of the school year. But the total need for the system’s 179,000 students is not clear.Ku’u Kauanoe/Civil Beat But it’s not clear exactly what that means. The DOE’s own Frequently Asked Questions document says “exact numbers of students participating in enrichment activities are not currently available.” Education advocates say it’s crucial to collect hard data to be able to have some point of reference to determine if the department is making any progress in reaching underserved kids, such as low-income kids or those in rural areas who aren’t outfitted with the same technology facilities. “Data is an objective criteria. Without that, we don’t know where we’re starting from and we don’t know where we’re going,” said Cheri Nakamura, director of He’e Coalition, a group of stakeholders that advocates on behalf of public education. The DOE has shared some general numbers: that 12,000 “loaner” digital devices were provided in the fourth academic quarter and that 10,000 such devices will be offered in the summer, “to help make such connectivity universal,” as it was phrased in a recent newsletter to DOE employees. New Efforts To Collect Data In recent days, the DOE has taken more proactive steps to collect statewide data. For instance, it began polling teachers on Monday about their hardware and software needs and their ease so far in delivering instruction online. Another survey went out Tuesday directed at students — with those who fill it out entered into a drawing to win a free Chromebook. Another survey will go out to parents early next month. But this effort comes nearly two months after groups like Parents for Public Schools Hawaii first began surveying families’ needs, collecting more than 220 responses as of last week, and just days before enhanced summer learning is set to begin. During her year-end evaluation Thursday, Kishimoto told board members results from all three recipient groups would be compiled by the first week of July, when summer schooling is well underway. Hawaii Superintendent Christina Kishimoto has left individual schools in charge of handing out devices to students, saying there is no way that can be centralized by DOE.Cory Lum/Civil Beat School districts all over the country are experiencing similar challenges with the sudden disruption to the regular school year. The Center on Reinventing Public Education, a national education policy group, recently published a report analyzing 82 school districts’ transition to distance learning in the two months since coronavirus took hold. At least one-third of those districts had not set consistent expectations for teachers on how to deliver “meaningful” remote instruction, while nearly half of such districts aren’t requiring teachers to provide feedback to students, the authors said in their May 15 analysis. They hypothesized that some school districts have been slower to adapt to remote instruction due to “unclear expectations and mixed signals.” Success Stories From The Mainland Some of the country’s major school districts have had success laying some groundwork during the pandemic. Miami-Dade County Public Schools, home to 345,000 students and 392 schools, went into triage mode from the start. It set up six mobile device distribution centers, open daily, so parents could pick up a mobile device or swap a malfunctioning device with another. Parents could also call a telephone line to schedule a pick-up appointment. Sacramento City Unified School District, home to 43,000 students, also posted a list of locations where students could pick up a computer and when. As of late April, the district said it handed out 25,000 devices and that “each Sac City Unified K-12 student who needed a computer will have been issued one.” Minneapolis Public Schools, which serves 35,700 students, determined which students needed devices via survey. They also delivered mobile hotspots to families without reliable connectivity starting mid-April. After the initial rounds, the school system could report that 94% of students needing a digital device had received one. The Hawaii DOE, the nation’s only statewide single-district school system, has left it largely up to the schools to coordinate device handout. Kishimoto has stated publicly that such efforts must start at the school level. “There’s no way to execute that from a centralized place. Schools are the ones putting in place the device distribution,” she told reporters during an April 2 call. During a May 7 Board of Education meeting, the superintendent reiterated that one of her earliest leadership moves was to leave this effort up to principals, to “make sure those students not connecting, that there were approaches used in each school to go after those students,” whether those were phone calls, door-to-door calls or catching kids at DOE grab-and-go meal delivery sites. Other school districts have been quick to outfit school buses with Wi-Fi connectivity so students in underserved areas without reliable internet could get a signal in order to complete assignments. The Austin Independent School District deployed more than 100 school buses with Wi-Fi and sent them out to rural communities. The South Carolina Department of Education has gone a step further by creating a map showing exactly where all the free Wi-Fi hot spots around the state are located, including at school buildings or on school buses. Hawaii could soon see Wi-Fi outfitted on buses and other vehicles to bring connectivity to kids in rural areas.Cory Lum/Civil Beat Hawaii could soon see something similar. A joint effort led by a coalition of Hawaii teachers and the nonprofit HawaiiKidsCAN are working to bring a transient “mobile hotspot” program to the Leeward Coast of Oahu and Big Island, known as “Wifi on Wheels.” The Hawaii DOE is also planning to deploy “mobile learning labs” in four rural areas of the state. Other school districts are making technology data public, tracking how many more students need to be connected and being transparent about their methodology. Highline Public Schools in Washington state, home to about 17,500 students, has mapped out the number of devices handed out by the district and where they are in use. The school district’s chief technology officer replied in a tweet the visualization was tied to devices and assignments, using a geo-visual analytic software used for school districts known as GuideK12. Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest school district in the country that counts 734,600 students, published charts broken down by grade level showing the progression of kids who have been connected since March 20. The district is also documenting how many kids are logging in daily or weekly and how many assignments they’ve completed on a weekly basis. Tracking Attendance Is A Key Challenge Making sure kids who have the capability to log on to their classes are doing so has been a mixed bag around the country. The education news site Chalkbeat has reported that many districts are not formally tracking student attendance or lack any formal policy. There are exceptions. Starting April 6, Miami-Dade schools required every student to log into a portal to be marked “present.” Those who don’t log in get an automated phone call home by noon the next day, so parents know their child was marked “absent.” New York City public schools are using a centralized system to track student attendance, based on a “daily meaningful interaction,” like submission of an assignment, participation in an online forum or a student or parent phone call or email with a teacher. In Hawaii, there is no unified guidance coming from DOE in this regard. At an April 2 board of education meeting, the school superintendent was asked how she was going to ensure students would still participate in voluntary enrichment activities, which are lessons that aren’t graded. “There’s still accountability students have,” Kishimoto responded, including “keeping in touch with your teacher and submitting whatever the teacher has designed as an instructional model to remain in good standing.” Some people want to see more guidance. “Data around how many students we are reaching or not reaching would be extremely helpful to inform decisions moving forward,” wrote Ryan Kusumoto, president & CEO of Parents And Children Together, in recent testimony to the education board. “Our DOE, our teachers, are our biggest and broadest line of communication to the keiki and families across our state and can serve as a critical lifeline during these trying times.” Want more information on COVID-19 in Hawaii? You can read all of Civil Beat’s coronavirus coverage, find answers to frequently asked questions or sign up for email newsletter updates — all for free. And check out pictures of how community groups and volunteers have been helping out in our Community Scrapbook. The post Hawaii Schools Under Pressure To Provide More Data About Remote Learning appeared first on Honolulu Civil Beat.');
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document.write('<li class="rss-item"><a class="rss-item" href="https://www.civilbeat.org/2020/05/tom-yamachika-why-does-the-state-have-so-much-untapped-cash/" target="_self">Tom Yamachika: Why Does The State Have So Much Untapped Cash?</a><br />');
document.write('<span class="rss-date">Sun, 24 May 2020 10:01:42 +0000</span><br />');
document.write('During this period of emergency and with our state facing revenue shortfalls of Brobdingnagian proportions, the Hawaii State Auditor has been busy at work trying to find options for legislators to consider for getting the state budget back on track. In Report No. 20-07, the auditor focuses on three special funds. One of them is related to a program known to almost everyone: the deposit beverage container program, or HI-5 as it is sometimes called. Previous auditor’s reports, some of which we commented on in this space, complained of irregularities. Even after all of that, however, the program’s special fund has been steadily swelling over the years, to the tune of around $5 million each year. It now holds nearly $49 million. What is that money now doing? The report also mentioned the state Department of Land and Natural Resource’s Special Land Development Fund, which is fed by, among other things, ceded land revenues. In the three years covered in the auditor’s report, the fund collected $47 million in revenues, paid 20% of them to OHA as the statute requires, and then kept more than half of the rest. State Auditor Les Kondo at a press conference in 2019. His office has recently reported on unused special funds.Cory Lum/Civil Beat The auditor and DLNR then got into a big dispute (see Report No. 19-12) about whether DLNR was allowed to spend that money for its own purposes, thereby bypassing the appropriation process. The fund now has $36 million in it. The third fund was also from DLNR, this time its Land Conservation Fund. This fund is primarily fed by a conveyance tax earmark that is limited to $6.8 million per year. However, its expenses are capped at $5.1 million per year. The fund now has $33 million in it, of which $16.6 million had not been set aside for projects or program expenses — sitting idle, in other words. And by the way, many of the projects backed by that fund took multiple years to complete. Four projects now in the pipeline had been pending for five years or more. Simple Mechanical Tests In Report No. 20-06, the auditor performed simple mechanical tests on all the funds in the state’s accounting system. First, it found that 64 accounts had no deposits or withdrawals in five years. Most of them are small, but four collectively hold $73 million. No attempt was made to ask the agencies holding those funds why they still exist; the auditor left that part up to any legislators who may be interested. Second, it focused on accounts with average balances for the past three fiscal years that were more than double the amount of the outflows (expenditures and transfers out). The idea was to figure out which funds had cushions in them. Again, no attempt was made to ask the agencies holding those funds why the cushion was there. Can some or all those millions be redirected to other areas of need? Out of 1,877 special and revolving fund accounts reviewed, 257 — collectively with $2.28 billion — met the criteria. Some examples are the Department of Budget and Finance’s rainy day fund, with $325.9 million and average cash out of zero; DBEDT’s dwelling unit revolving fund, with $154.9 million and average cash out of $17.2 million; DBEDT’s rental housing revolving fund, with $362.7 million and average cash out of $61.7 million; a Department of Transportation account related to Kapalama Military Reservation improvements, with $109.9 million and average cash out of zero; and its Passenger Facility Charge special fund, with $211.7 million and average cash out of $17.1 million. These are the five biggest ones, but there are plenty more where they came from. Can some or all those millions be redirected to other areas of need? If they cannot, should those funds be paying for things that other, less restricted funds (such as general fund monies) are now paying for? These questions need to be asked and answered before we consider more painful revenue raisers like tax hikes. The post Tom Yamachika: Why Does The State Have So Much Untapped Cash? appeared first on Honolulu Civil Beat.');
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document.write('<li class="rss-item"><a class="rss-item" href="https://www.civilbeat.org/2020/05/memorial-day-why-veterans-are-particularly-vulnerable-to-the-coronavirus/" target="_self">Memorial Day: Why Veterans Are Particularly Vulnerable To The Coronavirus</a><br />');
document.write('<span class="rss-date">Sun, 24 May 2020 10:01:34 +0000</span><br />');
document.write('As the nation takes a day to memorialize its military dead, those who are living are facing a deadly risk that has nothing to do with war or conflict: the coronavirus. Different groups face different degrees of danger from the pandemic, from the elderly who are experiencing deadly outbreaks in nursing homes to communities of color with higher infection and death rates. Veterans are among the most hard-hit, with heightened health and economic threats from the pandemic. These veterans face homelessness, lack of health care, delays in receiving financial support and even death. I have spent the past four years studying veterans with substance use and mental health disorders who are in the criminal justice system. This work revealed gaps in health care and financial support for veterans, even though they have the best publicly funded benefits in the country. Veterans face a heightened threat from the pandemic due to age, poor health care and conditions in care homes.Cory Lum/Civil Beat Here are eight ways the pandemic threatens veterans: 1. Age and other vulnerabilities In 2017, veterans’ median age was 64, their average age was 58 and 91% were male. The largest group served in the Vietnam era, where 2.8 million veterans were exposed to Agent Orange, a chemical defoliant linked to cancer. Younger veterans deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan were exposed to dust storms, oil fires and burn pits with numerous toxins, and perhaps as a consequence have high rates of asthma and other respiratory illnesses. Age and respiratory illnesses are both risk factors for COVID-19 mortality. As of May 22, there have been 12,979 people under Veterans Administration care with COVID-19, of whom 1,100 have died. 2. Dangerous residential facilities Veterans needing end-of-life care, those with cognitive disabilities or those needing substance use treatment often live in crowded VA or state-funded residential facilities. State-funded “soldiers’ homes” are notoriously starved for money and staff. The horrific situation at the soldiers’ home in Holyoke, Massachusetts, where more than 79 veteran residents have died from a COVID-19 outbreak, illustrates the risk facing the veterans in residential homes. 3. Benefits unfairly denied When a person transitions from active military service to become a veteran, they receive a Certificate of Discharge or Release. This certificate provides information about the circumstances of the discharge or release. It includes characterizations such as “honorable,” “other than honorable,” “bad conduct” or “dishonorable.” These are crucial distinctions, because that status determines whether the Veterans Administration will give them benefits. Research shows that some veterans with discharges that limit their benefits have PTSD symptoms, military sexual trauma or other behaviors related to military stress. Veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan have disproportionately more of these negative discharges than veterans from other eras, for reasons still unclear. The U.S. Navy honor guard performs a graveside ceremony at Punchbowl, the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific.Cory Lum/Civil Beat The Veterans Administration frequently and perhaps unlawfully denies benefits to veterans with “other than honorable” discharges. Many veterans have requested upgrades to their discharge status. There is a significant backlog of these upgrade requests, and the pandemic will add to it, further delaying access to health care and other benefits. 4. Diminished access to health care Dental surgery, routine visits and elective surgeries at Veterans Administration medical centers have been postponed since mid-March. VA hospitals are understaffed – just before the pandemic, the VA reported 43,000 staff vacancies out of more than 400,000 health care staff positions. Access to health care will be even more difficult when those medical centers finally reopen because they may have far fewer workers than they need. As of May 4, 2,250 VA health care workers have tested positive for COVID-19, and thousands of health care workers are under quarantine. The VA is asking doctors and nurses to come out of retirement to help already understaffed hospitals. 5. Mental health may get worse An average of 20 veterans die by suicide every day. A national task force is currently addressing this scourge. But many outpatient mental health programs are on hold or being held virtually. Some residential mental health facilities have closed. Under these conditions, the suicide rate for veterans may grow. Suicide hotline calls by veterans were up by 12% on March 22, just a few weeks into the crisis. 6. Complications for homeless veterans and those in the justice system An estimated 45,000 veterans are homeless on any given night, and 181,500 veterans are in prison or jail. Thousands more are under court-supervised substance use and mental health treatment in veterans treatment courts. More than half of veterans involved with the justice system have either mental health problems or substance use disorders. As residential facilities close to new participants, many veterans eligible to leave prison or jail have nowhere to go. They may stay incarcerated or become homeless. Courts have moved online or ceased formal operations altogether, meaning no veteran charged with a crime can be referred to a treatment court. It is unclear whether those who were already participating in a treatment program will face delays graduating from court-supervised treatments. Further, some veterans treatment courts still require participants to take drug tests. With COVID-19 circulating, those participants must put their health at risk to travel to licensed testing facilities. Hawaii has a large number of veterans as well as homeless vets who can find services.Cory Lum/Civil Beat 7. Disability benefits delayed In the pandemic’s epicenter in New York, tens of thousands of veterans should have access to VA benefits because of their low income – but don’t, so far. The pandemic has exacerbated existing delays in finding veterans in need, filing their paperwork and waiting for decisions. Ryan Foley, an attorney in New York’s Legal Assistance Group, a nonprofit legal services organization, noted in a personal communication that these benefits are worth “tens of millions of dollars to veterans and their families” in the midst of a health and economic disaster. All 56 regional Veterans Administration offices are closed to encourage social distancing. Compensation and disability evaluations, which determine how much money veterans can get, are usually done in person. Now, they must be done electronically, via telehealth services in which the veteran communicates with a health care provider via computer. But getting telehealth up and running is taking time, adding to the longstanding VA backlog. Currently, more than 100,000 veterans wait more than 125 days for a decision. (That is what the VA defines as a backlog – anything less than 125 days is not considered a delay on benefit claims.) 8. Economic catastrophe There are 1.2 million veteran employees in the five industries most severely affected by the economic fallout of the coronavirus. A disproportionately high number of post-9/11 veterans live in some of the hardest-hit communities that depend on these industries. Veterans returning from overseas will face a dire economic landscape, with far fewer opportunities to integrate into civilian life with financial security. In addition, severely disabled veterans living off of VA benefits were initially required to file a tax return to get stimulus checks. This initial filing requirement delayed benefits for severely disabled veterans by at least a month. The IRS finally changed the requirements after public outcry, given that many older and severely disabled veterans do not have access to computers or the technological skills to file electronically. There are many social groups to pay attention to, all with their own problems to face during the pandemic. With veterans, many of the problems they face now existed long before the coronavirus arrived on U.S. shores. But with the challenges posed by the situation today, veterans who were already lacking adequate benefits and resources are now in deeper trouble, and it will be harder to answer their needs. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article. The post Memorial Day: Why Veterans Are Particularly Vulnerable To The Coronavirus appeared first on Honolulu Civil Beat.');
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document.write('<li class="rss-item"><a class="rss-item" href="https://www.civilbeat.org/2020/05/tracing-californias-lost-tribe-of-hawaiians/" target="_self">Tracing California’s ‘Lost Tribe’ Of Hawaiians</a><br />');
document.write('<span class="rss-date">Sun, 24 May 2020 10:01:20 +0000</span><br />');
document.write('In northern California, about 35 miles from Sacramento, is a small casino with a surprising — and controversial — link to Hawaii. The Shingle Springs Band of Miwok Indians operates the Red Hawk Casino on land set aside for it more than 100 years ago by the federal government. But for nearly two decades now, people who have a beef with the tribe — county officials and residents who opposed the casino, family members engaged in a custody battle with tribal members — have unsuccessfully argued that the tribe doesn’t belong in the area. They say the tribe isn’t really Miwok. It’s Hawaiian. The Shingle Springs Band of Miwok Indians opened a casino in California in 2008.Jessica Terrell/Civil Beat “They were known as the lost tribe of kanakas,” Marilyn Ferguson, who runs a small historical museum in the nearby town of Placerville, told Civil Beat last summer. “They are not our Indians. They’re not local.” Offshore Season 4: Far From Home Offshore Season 4: Far From Home focuses on the Hawaiian diaspora. Host Kuʻu Kauanoe takes a hard look at why Hawaiians are leaving the islands today and tells surprising stories from history about Hawaiians who left long ago. From now until June 18, we’ll be posting weekly episodes, along with written articles. The stories running on Civil Beat’s site will accompany — but not mirror — the audio stories, so be sure to check out both. The story of the tribe — whose members have both Native American and Native Hawaiian ancestors — is a fairly well-documented, though often overlooked, part of California and Hawaiian history. We traveled to California last summer to talk to the tribe about its Hawaiian heritage for Offshore, our serialized storytelling podcast. But a spokeswoman for the tribe canceled an interview with tribal elders and declined all requests for comment after we asked questions about lawsuits involving the tribe. So how did the descendants of a group of Hawaiians end up owning a casino in California? To get an answer, we dug through court records, social media posts, current and historic newspaper articles, and talked to several historians. Here’s what we found. Conquering The West In 1839, a Swiss businessman named John Sutter recruited a small group of Hawaiians to travel with him to what was then the Mexican colony of Alta California. The Hawaiians who worked for Sutter are the most well-known Hawaiian laborers to travel to the west coast in the 19th century. But by the mid-1800s, there were hundreds of Hawaiians in what is now Canada and California. In 1847, Hawaiians made up 10% of San Francisco’s tiny but growing population. The presence of Hawaiians helped white settlers dominate a world where they were vastly outnumbered by indigenous tribes. It was a tough spot to be in. On the one hand, Hawaiians were helping with the conquest of the West. On the other hand, they were also second-class citizens who had a lot in common with the Native Americans they encountered. “Hawaiians first of all fought against American Indians,” says historian and author Gary Okihiro. “But Hawaiians also formed alliances with American Indians. And I think largely because they were both racialized in the same way, that is as non-white people.” Hawaiians helped Sutter build a fort near present-day Sacramento. Then came the Gold Rush. “Gold was a disaster because it created the gold rush, which created this onslaught of colonialism and it broke the whole world,” says David Chang, a Native Hawaiian historian at the University of Minnesota. Though Hawaiians were likely the first outsiders to see gold sparkling in the bottom of a stream at Coloma, California, they were quickly pushed out of the goldfields. In the aftermath of the gold rush, many Hawaiians stayed in California. And as they settled in California, a number of Hawaiian men married local indigenous women. Which, it turns out, was a common occurrence up and down the West Coast. “It’s true in the goldfields. It’s true in the fur trade. Why is that true? Why did that happen so much?” Chang asks. “White supremacy was creating common spaces, if you will, as all brown-skinned people — Asian people, American Indian people, Mexican people, Native Hawaiian people — were pushed out.” A Hawaiian Village In California In 1862, a newspaper reporter who had spent time living in Hawaii, was surprised to stumble upon a small fishing village near what is now Verona, California. He counted 24 Hawaiians, mostly men, and a number of Indian women who  — though from California and not Hawaii — were fluent in Hawaiian. It was an impoverished community. But Chang says, it was also a worldly and multicultural community. “These children are growing up in a mixed community. They’re probably trilingual,” Chang says. “They’re going to know the food ways of their mothers. They’re going to know the adapted food ways of their fathers. They’re going to know this culture.” Over the next 50 years, occasional references to the community near Verona popped up in newspapers. In 1911, a newspaper reporter for the San Francisco Sunday Call visited the “Hawaiian Village” near Verona, California. Then in 1916, an agent with the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs traveled to California looking for landless and destitute Indians. The agent recorded a number of Miwok families living in the Placerville area and called those people the El Dorado Band. Then he visited the group near Verona — about 50 miles away. According to letters from the time, the group at that point was mostly made up of extended family members. A few Hawaiian men and their wives — local Miwok and Maidu and one white woman. The spit of land they lived on was small. It nearly disappeared when the river swelled from rain. They lived on fish and marsh birds. Bought meager food supplies from town by delivering fish to markets and individual houses nearby. The agent dubbed this group of Indians the Sacramento-Verona Band of Homeless Indians and suggested buying land for them. “They seemed open to banding together,” he wrote. And would be excellent candidates for the federal government’s plan to “colonize and civilize Indians” in California. There was a bit of government pushback from the BIA, which didn’t want to purchase land for a group that included Hawaiians. Eventually, they decided they would purchase the land for the Native Americans in the group, but that admission to the tribe for Native Hawaiians would have to be decided on a case-by-case basis. Land in Sacramento was deemed too expensive, so the government purchased 160 acres in El Dorado county, right next to an 80-acre parcel meant for the El Dorado Miwok Indians. But the Sacramento-Verona tribe didn’t move to the 160-acre parcel. For decades the land sat fallow and unused. Then in 1970, the BIA reached out to the descendants of the group dubbed the Sacramento-Verona tribe to see if they wanted to sell the uninhabited land that had been set aside for their families. They opted to keep the land. And then something remarkable happened. They came together as a tribe. Built homes on the land. A church. A community center. Negotiated with the state to get highway access to the land. They renamed themselves the Shingle Springs Band of Miwok Indians. And they started making plans to open a casino. That’s when things got heated. Do They Belong Here? Not everyone wanted the Shingle Springs Band to open a casino in the area. Before the casino opened in 2008, residents in the area argued it would have undue traffic and environmental impacts. At one point, the county filed a lawsuit to try and block casino construction, arguing that the tribe should never have been given federal recognition. That they were Hawaiian, not Native American. The case was dismissed, in part because the statute of limitations for contesting federal recognition had passed. The Miwok families that the Bureau dubbed the El Dorado Tribe in 1916 lost their land decades ago. Now, some of their descendants say it’s unfair for the Shingle Springs Band to have taken Miwok as part of its name.  Unjust — and perhaps a misinterpretation of the law — for them to have tribal land in the area. However complicated their origins, the tribe’s sovereignty has been upheld repeatedly in court. There’s nothing visibly Hawaiian at the Red Hawk Casino in Shingle Springs, but the tribe has stayed connected to its Hawaiian roots.Jessica Terrell/Civil Beat And through it all — from the ancestors who eked out a meager living on the riverbank to their descendants who moved into towns and lived with friends on other reservations — the band has maintained a connection to its Hawaiian culture and heritage. According to newspaper articles, the tribe celebrated the opening of its casino with a mixture of Native American dances and Hawaiian songs. Today, there’s nothing visibly Hawaiian at the casino. But the tribe’s connections to Hawaii are clear in other ways. There are social media posts celebrating their Hawaiian and Miwok and Nissenan connections. Stories in local newspapers about supporting Hawaiian sovereignty from abroad. Posts about building Hawaiian-style canoes out of trees native to California. Pictures of home decorations bearing indigenous American and Hawaiian words. Rick Adams, a tribal elder we were supposed to meet in July, traces his origins back to those original 10 Hawaiians who went to California in 1839 with John Sutter. Adams told the Sacramento Bee in 2009, that his Native American ancestors survived the gold rush because of the protection they received by marrying Native Hawaiians — a group that, though marginalized, had far more rights than Native Americans did at the time. But it was his Native American ancestors that gave the group something Native Hawaiians do not have: Sovereignty. The post Tracing California’s ‘Lost Tribe’ Of Hawaiians appeared first on Honolulu Civil Beat.');
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