In Hawaiʻi today, sovereignty often evokes images of flags, declarations, and the movement to restore the Hawaiian Kingdom overthrown in 1893. While these efforts remain vital expressions of resistance and historical truth, they have become mired in legalistic debates and divisions that stall immediate transformation. 

Hawaiʻi First offers a new path.

Living in sovereignty is not just about political status or international recognition. It is about radically transforming state government from within the existing system by rooting governance, policy-making, and daily life in aloha ʻāina – as legally required under Hawaiʻi’s Constitution and Public Trust Doctrine, and as spiritually required by our ancestors.

Living in Accord with Ancestral Governance

Living sovereignly means recognizing that land is not a commodity but an ancestor, and governance is not merely legislative procedure but an act of stewardship. For Hawaiʻi First, this means embedding ancestral governance principles into state policies: land use decisions guided by genealogy and ecology; education rooted in ʻike kupuna; economic development constrained by responsibilities to ʻāina and future generations.¹

Exercising Kuleana (Responsibility)

Sovereignty is responsibility in action. Practicing aloha ʻāina daily – tending loʻi, maintaining gathering practices, teaching ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi, honoring protocols – is governance. Hawaiʻi First seeks to normalize these practices in public life: integrating them into schools, agencies, and community programs so that the state itself practices kuleana rather than treating it as cultural garnish.²

Practicing Political and Cultural Autonomy within State Structures

Rather than seeking recognition from external powers, Hawaiʻi First asserts that the state already has a constitutional and fiduciary duty to aloha ʻāina.³ Living in sovereignty means holding agencies accountable to this duty, reframing policy not as corporate resource management but as the stewardship of living systems. It is reclaiming authority over cultural practices and land use decisions by insisting that existing legal frameworks – such as the Public Trust Doctrine – be interpreted through Indigenous knowledge and responsibility.

Reclaiming Economic Self-Sufficiency within State Policy

Hawaiʻi First envisions an economy that does not depend on extractive tourism and imported food systems but restores local abundance. This requires state policy to prioritize food sovereignty, cooperative economics, regenerative energy, and community land trusts. Living sovereignly is using existing state levers to shift wealth and resources back into local hands to care for ʻāina and feed people.⁴

Living with Pilina (Relational Intimacy)

At its heart, sovereignty is pilina – deep relational intimacy with land, ocean, ancestors, and community. Hawaiʻi First does not see this as private spirituality alone but as the foundation for public decision-making. Policies rooted in pilina require consultation with community knowledge holders, impact assessments based on ecological kinship, and decisions that uphold pono – balance and justice – over profit and expedience.⁵

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In Sum

For Hawaiʻi First, living in sovereignty is not about waiting for external recognition or restoring an idealized past state. It is about transforming government and society right now by rooting every decision, every policy, every budget allocation in aloha ʻāina. It is pragmatic and radical: pragmatic because it works within existing legal structures and radical because it re-centers Indigenous law and relationships as the basis for public life.

Living in sovereignty is not a distant dream. It is a daily practice of aloha ʻāina that compels us to transform state governance from within. It is freedom grounded in responsibility: the freedom to care for, protect, and thrive with land and people on our own terms, guided by ancestral values codified in law, rather than colonial systems imposed from above.

This is the vision of Hawaiʻi First: to live sovereignly by making the state itself practice aloha ʻāina – not as rhetoric, but as law, policy, and everyday life.

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Footnotes

1. Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio, Remembering Our Intimacies: Moʻolelo, Aloha ʻĀina, and Ea (University of Minnesota Press, 2021), 12–13.
2. Noelani Goodyear-Kaʻōpua, “The Enduring Power of Aloha ʻĀina,” TEDxManoa, October 29, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUd4KzRekoI.
3. D. Kapuaʻala Sproat and MJ Palau-McDonald, “The Duty to Aloha ʻĀina,” Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 57 (2022): 528–530.
4. Kamanamaikalani Beamer et al., “Reflections on Sustainability Concepts: Aloha ʻĀina and the Circular Economy,” Sustainability (March 9, 2021): 2–5.
5. Candace Fujikane, Mapping Abundance for a Planetary Future: Kānaka Maoli and Critical Settler Cartographies in Hawaiʻi (Duke University Press, 2021), 23–25.