Davianna McGregor

I experienced that conversation as a distraction from ensuring the repatriation of land and water for Native Hawaiian stewardship to ensure the health and wellbeing for the people of Hawaii, including Native Hawaiians, as well as working class migrants from other parts of the Pacific or Asia, for that matter.

I started talking to my dear mentor and friend and colleague, Davianna McGregor, who was and still is very central to the demilitarization efforts and military land return at Kahoʻolawe.

And she too is very critical of the Asian settler colonialism framework because she sees that it does not do the work that it needs to do to ensure coalitional power for the protection and return of land and natural resources for the people of Hawaii, including Native Hawaiian people.

So together we decided to write an article critiquing this framework of Asian settler colonialism.

And Davianna McGregor is a historian of Hawaii, and something that she really brought into our article was the perspective that Asians for generations have held a responsibility and a political affinity to the nation of Hawaii.

A, a really key historical moment that we traced was the 1954 Democratic Revolution when labor unions in partnership with the Japanese community, they took over the Democratic Party in 1954, and this brought the descendants of Japanese to positions of political leadership in Hawaii.

So we can see this kind of political as well as economic prominence of Japanese and also Chinese in Hawaii for the last half a century and change, but this was not always the case.

...

Auntie Davianna McGregor, and just being able to talk story with them for extended periods of time, to spend days with them on the access to Kaho'olawe.

You hear the stories about George Helm.

You hear the stories about the early days, okay? So think about this, right? 1976 is when the first occupation happens of the Kaho'olawe Nine, and then from that point on, the 'Ohana started going to the island, uh, throughout the 1980s, throughout the early '90s.