Battle for Red Hill O'ahu

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Native Hawaiians have been warning about the EXTREMELY high risk of a leak at Red Hill for several decades. More than 200 MILLION gallons of jet fuel are stored in the fuel tanks at the Navy’s Red Hill facility. The tanks are buried just 100 feet above the Red Hill well, which is the largest aquifer in O'ahu, and the facility has secretly been leaking fuel regularly for decades, with no attempts at prevention or remediation, and now jet fuel levels found in tap water are 350 times the "safe limit" - That's a 35,000% increase! Most people outside the U.S. military don't know that the Navy has more fighter jets in their military division than the Air Force. What the U.S. Navy is conveying through its actions is that keeping their fighter jets in the air is more valuable to them than providing clean drinking water to the citizens of O’ahu, even for the 400 military families who have been evacuated from the iconic military base at Pearl Harbor. Needless to say the tap water from the Red Hill well is undrinkable at the moment. 

More than 400,000 residents of O'ahu had their water from the Red Hill well cut off in December 2021, nearly one month after the initial jet fuel pipeline burst and spilled an estimated 21 THOUSAND gallons of jet fuel into an area of the Red Hill facility not equipped to contain a spill of such magnitude. According to the U.S. Navy, less than 2,000 gallons of jet fuel was actually cleaned up, and the first estimate of exactly how much jet fuel escaped was incredibly low compared to how much the investigation detected. Essentially the Navy has so much jet fuel that it doesn’t even know how much it actually has, so when 21,000 gallons of it went “missing” in May 2021, nobody actually noticed until the fuel pipe erupted six months later in November or that at least 20,000 gallons of jet fuel was unaccounted for, until water began running out of the taps at Pearl Harbor military base reeking of jet fuel after it had seeped into the water system. Instead of being in a State of Emergency, and immediately responding, Navy officials are dragging their feet and saying “we’ll get to it by the end of 2024”. Now in a state already experiencing below-average rainfall from the man-made climate disaster, the amount of water available to the ONE MILLION Kama'aina, the human beings, living in O’ahu has now been reduced to less than half of what it was before December 2021. Remember there were 400 THOUSAND Hawaiians in the Honolulu area who lost their drinking water from the Red Hill well to "unsafe" levels of jet fuel contamination, as if any amount of jet fuel in the water is “safe”, for a month before the well was shut down, but only the 400 military families unfortunately affected by the spill got minimal media attention, as the Pentagon did its best to keep the Red Hill disaster hush-hush. There are thousands of Native Hawaiians who need to haul their water, and they cannot afford bottled water, nor do they want to leave their Home, their Island, their 'Āina! The federal government should have already declared a State of Emergency, have the U.S. Navy delivering millions of gallons of fresh water to the residents of O’ahu, and urgently installing water desalination facilities in whatever coastal region of O’ahu has not yet been contaminated by the military.

The Hawaiian Islands are military-occupied colonies of the United States of America. Despite being added as the 50th state in 1959, Native Hawaiians never signed a treaty with the U.S. government, nor ceded their motherland 'Āina. Hawaiian islands, atolls, and the entire archipelago have been used for explosive, chemical, and nuclear weapons testing for many decades. In many ways the U.S. military has been carrying out genocidal warfare and against Native Hawaiian people since 1893. This war of attrition against Native Hawaiians, now in its second century, continues because of their refusal to surrender to the federal government and U.S. military. Native Hawaiians don’t want to become a "domestic dependent" nation and a ward of the U.S. Department of the Interior, with their sovereignty and territorial integrity compromised, reduced to so-called “reservations”, which are in reality Prisoner of War (P.O.W.) camps for Indigenous people, within the illegally-occupied continental United States - Native Hawaiians don’t even want to be American! An act of Congress may have legally recognized Native Hawaiian ‘homelands’, and granted a unique tribal sovereignty status, but they are just fancy words on a piece of paper.

Native Hawaiian ko’a or spiritual, physical, and mental power is strong, and they never actually lost a battle - Just ask Captain James Cook!  Not only that, but the market value of real estate properties within Hawai’i has skyrocketed, and since Native Hawaiians can’t seek federal recognition under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (B.I.A.), or funding from the federal government to house them, thousands of Native Hawaiians have been rendered homeless in O’ahu, forcing them to live in makeshift camps without electricity, running water, and proper sanitation. As if there weren't enough problems for Native Hawaiians related to the land theft by the U.S. government for private property, military bases, and bombing ranges, now a jet fuel spill of at LEAST 20,000 gallons by the U.S. Navy in November 2021 has poisoned the drinking water of 400,000 people on O’ahu, who relied on the Red Hill well until the water was cut off in December 2021.

A recently exposed U.S. Navy coverup found as many as 400 military families were poisoned by the jet fuel leak, but no research or environmental impact study by the Army Corps of Engineers has been done towards the negative public health effects of the jet fuel tanks on local residents, further shortening the life expectancy of Native Hawaiian communities living in their unique ‘homelands’, and how the tanks have always contaminated their water, culture, spirituality, sacred sites, and the Land or 'Āina - The lives of Native Hawaiian peoples and their neighbors clearly don't matter to the U.S. military nearly as much as conducting F-16 fighter jet exercises! Follow the money and you will find out who is getting paid over this complete disregard for hundreds of thousands of human lives for the progression of the U.S. “war-machine”, because there are too many in the industrial ruling class who are making a “killing” by keeping fighter jets in the air, and they will kill anyone who gets in their way. With the U.S. military constantly practicing to kill human beings more effectively, fat-cats at the Pentagon, Annapolis, and their contractors are exemplifying the horrible expression “kill for peace”! Nothing is sacred to the U.S. military industrial complex, not even themselves, and now almost five hundred military families are going to suffer from the after-effects of the 5,000 gallons of jet fuel that seeped into their water system at Pearl Harbor, not to mention the many thousands of residents of O’ahu who were also consuming water tainted with life-threateningly high levels of jet fuel for over a month! Who will pay for their medical treatment when they get sick? Certainly not the U.S. Navy.

The  U.S. military occupation of Hawai’i for the benefit of its Pacific Empire has been going on for so long and has become so normalized, there are many similarities between the colonization of Hawai'i, and the apartheid regime established by the Israeli Occupation Forces in the illegally-occupied Palestinian territories. Case in point, currently in Palestine the residents from the village of Masafer Yatta are being evicted from their homes and their school has been destroyed, so that it can be used by the Israeli occupation as a “bombing range”! Meanwhile nearly one quarter, or 150 square miles of O'ahu is currently occupied by the U.S. military to conduct war games that will keep them "battle-ready" for any hypothetical World War in the South Pacific, or to intimidate any smaller Southeast Asian nations who might be interested in siding with China, Russia, or North Korea against them. However instead of hiding behind the Holocaust, Judaism, and the Star of David like the Israeli occupatiom, U.S. imperialism hides behind the Stars & Stripes, warships, and the culturally-appropriated Hawaiian lei, lu'au, and hula dancers. 'Aloha' has become an empty greeting in the Hawaiian tourism industry, with all of the breath taken out of it, but the true meaning of Aloha is 'breath of life'. That is why when two Native Hawaiian men greet each other traditionally, they will clasp arms and press their foreheads against one another's, then take a deep inhale and exhale. This is how they recognize the 'being' part of human, which is their spiritual energy or mana, the universal life force that connects all living and nonliving beings.

Native Hawaiians are not and have never been treated fairly by the U.S government. U.S. citizenship, the national anthem, and pledge of allegiance have all been forced on Native Hawaiians against their will. American real estate developers have literally built their palatial military base and all-inclusive resorts on top of the palace of Queen Lili'uokalani. As with all Indigenous peoples, Native Hawaiians are incarcerated or killed by police at some of the highest rates in the country, and they have some of the highest rates of drug addiction, suicide, heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. This all has to do with Native Hawaiians having their homelands turned upside down, then into “sacrifice zones” to conduct military drills and test weapons, without any consideration to environmental crimes they were committing, because the islands are more valuable to the military occupation empty for target practice than they are populated! As far as the U.S. military is concerned, no matter what they may say in press conferences, Native Hawaiians just get in the way, and despite their patronage being essential to Hawaii's economy, they are dehumanized, commodified, and sold as a hypersexualized novelty plastic Native Hawaiian hula dancing woman to swing back and forth on their dashboards. Human life is not valued by the U.S. military chain-of-command, and people killed during their drills or by “unexploded ordinances”, or bombs that were dropped and didn’t explode, are referred to as “collateral damage” and treated with impunity just like in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Syria. Native Hawaiians never consented to anything the U.S. has done to them in the past, and without the constant resistance of Native Hawaiian people for well over one and a quarter centuries, there is a non-refundable deposit guarantee that nobody would be vacationing in Hawaii on spring break!

However now there have been consequences for the military itself because Pearl Harbor, "Crown Jewel" of the U.S. Pacific Empire, which was already a federal Superfund Site, has now become uninhabitable for military families due to jet fuel in the water, after already having been so contaminated that Pearl Harbor could no longer sustain human life outside of its military base. Now even the Pearl Harbor complex water system has become compromised with 5,000 gallons of jet fuel that leaked in from the Red Hill facility through the Navy's French drain in Pearl Harbor, and the base had to be evacuated by early 2022. The ignorance, incompetence, and complete lack of oversight by U.S. Navy officials led to the poisoning of their own military personnel and their families. The U.S. military is now suffering from the fall-out of their weapons testing, but embedded in the bedrock of the U.S. military complex is the fundamental notion that being able to kill ever more efficiently is more valuable than human life, even those of their own people! Not only is the Navy committing war crimes, conducting international human rights violations, and fits the legal definition of genocide against Native Hawaiian peoples, but they are now putting the lives of 400,000 residents of O'ahu at risk, just as they have many times before on different islands with smaller populations, pulverizing one at a time, before moving onto the next like a well-oiled, feuled-up war-machine. No doubt the head honchos at the Pentagon have applications up the wazoo for a transfer to the "calm port" of Honolulu, despite the Pearl Harbor base being closed indefinitely due to water contamination, now that all of the families are "safe" at hotels in the city. The motto of the U.S. Navy is apparently "Keep Calm and Carry On" full-steam ahead with its weapons testing, keep those jets in the air, and wait until the END of 2024 when the fuel tanks at Red Hill will finally be emptied pending yet another spill.

"We are NOT American!" has become the war-cry of Native Hawaiians resisting U.S. imperial occupation, which began in January 1893, leading to an illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian government. The struggle has continued for 130 years, and now the Native Hawaiian community in O'ahu is being forced to fight for their very existence, as they demand immediate action, urgent humanitarian assistance, along with an end to the military occupation and its leaky jet fuel tanks. O'ahu residents have surprised the U.S. Navy with their acts of civil disobedience. It's tear-jerking to see Native Hawaiian warriors dressed in traditional garb, building a spiritual altar or shrine out of stones called a ko'a, along with a statue of a deity carved from the wood of an Acacia koa tree, outside of the U.S. South Pacific Fleet Commander Headquarters, while singing Hawaiian prayer songs - Just to demand their right to exist as human beings! Ko'a has also become synonymous with 'warrior' for Native Hawaiian people over more than two centuries, since a time when King Kamehameha found a way to make weapons equal to the strength of European steel in the wood of the ko'a - Native Hawaiian warriors then applied shark-teeth to their ko’a to give them "bite" against the colonizers’ metal-plated armor, but as modern weapons technology developed into having the capacity to kill millions of people at a time, ko'a has mainly become a spiritual shield. Native Hawaiian protest is through honoring Hawaiian lands, peoples, and spiritual deities through chants, songs, and dances. In the past Native Hawaiian warriors fought with weapons of war, but now they fight non-violently through their culture, language, and songs in defense of their human existence. They sing joyfully through the pain, but the intergenerational and ongoing trauma, especially to the land and water, leads many Native Hawaiians to depression, addiction, and suicide, so these cultural expressions of resistance are also a way of strengthening their spirits. Standing up to the U.S. military, which Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. dubbed "the greatest purveyor of violence in the history of the world", takes a lot of guts.  Native Hawaiians are demanding that the U.S. Navy drain the jet fuel tanks immediately, stop the bombing, demilitarize their homelands, take full accountability and responsibility for repairing the damage, and most of all STOP desecrating their 'Āina!

There are secret meanings woven into the performance of Native Hawaiian thanksgiving rituals, such as acknowledging those who have been detrimental to their land, which is hidden in the way they sing and dance. The altar known in the Native Hawaiian language as ko'a will stand outside the Red Hill facility day and night, guarded by both male and female warriors, until such a time as the U.S. Navy removes all 200 million gallons of fuel from its tanks. Ahupua'a is the Hawaiian term for the traditional socioeconomic, geologic, and climactic make of land, watershed, and marine life in Hawai’i. The Red Hill watershed or Ahupua'a on O'ahu is the most directly affected by the U.S. Navy spill, and how much jet fuel has actually spilt has yet to be determined, but at least 20 THOUSAND gallons have leaked out! The decades-long U.S. Navy cover-up had an "up-to-date" figure of only 1,580 gallons of jet fuel contained before the scandal was exposed, but that is less than 10% of what has actually escaped! An investigation recently revealed that "shoddy management" and "human error" caused a fuel leak into Pearl Harbor's tap water in November 2021, poisoning thousands of people and forcing military families to evacuate their homes for hotels. Native Hawaiians living in the Red Hill community near Pearl Harbor cannot afford the luxury of renting five-star hotels in Honolulu with treasure-troves of bottled water. True to uniform, the U.S. Navy initially refused to comply with the findings of the investigation, and resisted until April 2022, when the military finally agreed to an order from the State of Hawaii to drain the fuel tanks and close the Red Hill facility, but not until December 2024. Not one drop of jet fuel has been removed from the Red Hill well, and no restitution or reparations are being made to the Indigenous residents of Hawai’i or their neighbors, despite the last of Pearl Harbor Ahupua'a and its aquifer being all but destroyed by the jet fuel spill!

The investigation report listed an "operator error" on May 6, 2021, when a pipe at the Red Hill facility ruptured and 21,000 gallons of fuel spilt when jet fuel was being transferred between the tanks. The fuel was spilled and went unnoticed, disregarded, or ignored into a "fire suppression line", where it sat unattended and ultimately forgotten by the Navy's fuel tank safety operators for over SIX months, causing the line to sag due to the force of gravity and the weight of the fuel, which the petroleum engineers in charge seem to have been blissfully unaware of in their daily operations, until November 20, 2021 "when a cart rammed into the sagging line and released 20 of the 21,000 gallons of fuel stored improperly in the fire suppression line". The area where the cart hit the line wasn't supposed to take on fuel, so officials who responded to the spill didn't have the right equipment to capture the liquid. "The team incorrectly assumes that all of the fuel has been sopped up," said Admiral Sam Paparo of the U.S. Navy, admitting to reporters that about 5,000 gallons wasn't recovered and entered the Navy water system at Pearl Harbor. "Meanwhile, over the course of eight days, that fuel enters into this French drain that is under the concrete and seeps slowly and quietly into the Red Hill well, and that fuel into the Red Hill well is then pumped into the navy [water] system." This revelation proves that the U.S. Navy not only poisoned the Pearl Harbor Ahupua'a, the Hawaiian community reliant on the Red Hill well, but also themselves! 'Slowly and quietly' have been emphasized, because that is exactly how genocide occurs, slowly and quietly over a long period of time until the imperialists, colonizers, and settlers eventually consume themselves with their greed, incompetence, and self-imposed impunity. Ultimately the Honolulu Board of Water Supply shut down a key well in December 2021, which supplies over 400 THOUSAND people drinking water, and the agency had already been asking residents to "conserve water" because of the unusually dry weather.

Adm Paparo's new tagline has become: "the U.S. Navy need to get real with ourselves and be honest about our deficiencies" - Then let's keep it really REAL Adm Paparo - U.S. Navy officials lied for over 6 months about the initial spill in May of 2021 that was swept under the rug and forgotten about, until it leaked down YOUR French drain! Not to make light of the situation, which came to light far too late and before anything could be done to prevent it, but talk about a bump in the carpet! U.S. Navy officials have tripped over themselves, and their fuel tank operators really mucked up the Red Hill well, polluting tap water for hundreds of thousands, if not half a million people or more, and what about the animals who need the freshwater springs to live? They can't drink bottled water. What about the marine life in Pearl Harbor? Will there ever be anything done to clean up the catastrophic damage to its ecosystem from the chemical weapons buried there, which has caused the cove to become completely unsustainable for human life, with no one in the Navy ever having taken any responsibility for the destruction of its natural resources, which are no longer healthy for human consumption, or having turned Pearl Harbor into a federal Superfund Site? What of the sacred sites, the waterfalls and lagoons, the lakes and rivers? They are all fed by the aquifer. The volcanic rock filters the saline water, but the aquifer is literally embedded in the bedrock, and if the jet fuel has already seeped into the aquifer, then it is only a matter of time before it leaks to the bottom of the sea, unless it can be stopped - There must be a way to clean it up!

"The lack of critical thinking, intellectual rigor, and self-assessment by key leaders at decisive moments", the report stated, "demonstrated a lack of professionalism that is demanded by the high consequence nature of fuel operations." That is a MILD way of putting it! The investigation highlighted a February 2021 decision by the commanding officer of Fleet Logistics Center Pearl Harbor to remove uniformed military oversight from day-to-day operations at the Red Hill facility, probably so they could get back to work on “target practice”, replacing them with civilian operators who were uninformed about military protocols, then about two months later the initial 21,000 gallon spill occurred, leading to the rupture in November 2021 which leaked approximately 20,000 gallons into the Red Hill well, with about 5,000 gallons entering the Navy's Pearl Harbor water system, polluting the drinking water distributed to more than 400 military families. For decades the U.S. Navy repeatedly stated Red Hill was a "vital" part of “national defense”, yet it was left for decades without proper oversight, exposing an absurd level of ignorance and incompetence in the Navy, a lack of leadership willing to take on any kind of responsibility for maintaining its Red Hill facility, and gross negligence for not investing in basic common sense safety measures. The damning report inarguably states that the fuel leaks at Red Hill were totally "preventable".

Despite insurmountable evidence of the urgent and immediate need for clean-up efforts, mitigation, and damage control, the U.S. Navy is now procrastinating, and proposing to take another TWO years until the end of 2024 to completely defuel the Red Hill tanks! Only a patsy wouldn't realize the Navy just wants to drain every last drop of what's left in the tanks into fighter jets before they close down the Red Hill facility, because jet fuel is expensive, and money is God to the U.S. military industrial complex. If this does not expose the legal immunity and impunity of the U.S. military for the environmental crimes they have committed against the Hawaiian 'Āina, especially the Native Hawaiian people who consider themselves to be an extension of the land, then nothing will. The U.S. military officials for committing "ecocide" against Mother Earth, which is the environmental equivalent of genocide, without any consequences. Native Hawaiian people and their neighbors in Red Hill and the entire Ahupua'a, which is in close proximity to Hawaii's most populous city Honolulu, are fighting for the continuation of their future generations and protecting everything their ancestors fought and died for. The U.S. government has already removed, relocated, and rendered many thousands of Native Hawaiians homeless in their own ‘homelands’, and now the Navy has planted a ticking time bomb above their aquifer, but they won't even put out the fuse on the bomb, let alone demilitarize the islands! The Native Hawaiian people are not planning to leave, or give up their 'Āina, the Native Hawaiian word for 'Land', or more accurately 'that which feeds, the being the land produces, as well as the sea, and all the things from it, which can be collected and harvested to sustain ourselves'. How are people supposed to sustain themselves without clean water? Indigenous peoples all around the world have seen their watersheds polluted by the toxic waste mining process, deforestation, resource extraction, industrial agriculture, and the military. As if there weren't enough environmental problems in Hawai'i with the fall-out from nuclear and chemical weapons tests, the bombing ranges, and GMO pesticides, which have already damaged Ahupua'a all throughout the Hawaiian 'Āina, now the Wai or water has been poisoned in O’ahu. The Red Hill well has been contaminated by the U.S. Navy with jet fuel levels 350 times higher than drinkable levels. They've even admitted to it, but the Navy is doing next to nothing to stop it, even though they've poisoned their own drinking water at Pearl Harbor! Perhaps that's because the U.S. Navy can afford to relocate 400 military families - After all the military gets more than two-thirds of the federal budget every year allocated for "Defense", but apparently protecting against environmental disasters, jet fuel leaks, and pipeline damage doesn't qualify as "National Security" in the eyes of the Pentagon.

The U.S. Navy has been implicated in environmental destruction all around the Hawaiian archipelago many times before. For instance on the island of Kaho'olawe there are still undetonated bombs, because no thorough demining was done on the relatively small island, so tourists must use EXTREME caution if visiting the white sand beaches of Koho’olawe, or else they might learn the hard way that “close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades”! The place had already been trashed by deforestation and ranching until its natural resources were completely exhausted, including its soil, so nobody in the U.S. Navy objected to dropping an innumerable amount of bombs on what they considered to be a worthless pile of sand sticking out of the ocean. Wherever there is military occupation in Hawai'i, there is going to be environmental degradation, and the military has already seized more than 22% percent of land on the island of O'ahu. The vast majority of occupied territory is what are defined as Federal Superfund Sites, or “super-polluted” places, and U.S. naval bases all around the world are common Superfund Sites. Pearl Harbor itself is a Superfund Site, and several years ago an investigation into the Navy found they had buried chemical weapons in the cove, and there are now WARNING signs posted all over Pearl Harbor by the Hawaii State Department of Health, a fish advisory for contaminated fish and shellfish which reads: "FOR YOUR HEALTH DO NOT EAT"! The military continues to bomb Native Hawaiian sacred sites, despite their protests, implying that Native Hawaiians have the right to protest the destruction of their 'Āina, but not to steward, heal, or sustain themselves in their own ‘homelands’, which have been stolen from them by the federal government for the imperial purposes of the U.S. military.

The need for the U.S. military to wage imperial war in the Pacific is obviously more important than clean drinking water in O'ahu, even to their own troops and their families, but especially to the Native Hawaiian people they occupy. The problem is that not only is the U.S. military committing environmental crimes against the Hawaiian 'Āina, but there are virtually no consequences, repercussions, or disciplinary action taken to ensure mistakes like this don't get repeated, and the naval officers responsible for the Red Hill spill are getting away with "negligent homicide"! Ahupua'a all around the 'Āina are being sacrificed to keep U.S. troops "action-ready", meaning prepared to defend U.S. imperial hegemony against the Chinese People's Liberation Army and its influence in the South China Sea, with the ever-present potential for military escalation between the U.S. and China. Nobody likes knowing that their homeland is being used as target practice for killing people. The U.S. Navy has always been willing to risk the lives of Native Hawaiians since their initial invasion in 1893, but now they have rendered their own base at Pearl Harbor completely uninhabitable, even for themselves. To be clear Pearl Harbor as an ecosystem was already a Superfund Site unable to sustain human life, but now the base itself has been compromised because of the jet fuel spill at Red Hill, and it has become a de facto "ghost-town".

In early 2022 O'ahu Water Protectors staged a "die-in", which is an act of civil disobedience where people lie prone on the ground, representing the bodies of those killed by the U.S. Navy. The protest was an effort to draw international attention to the Navy's heinous environmental crimes by contaminating the Wai underneath Red Hill. Ultimately the arms market has prevailed once again, as the price-tag on conducting military drills and burning jet fuel is much higher than the price of clean water, and the Navy could just ship tankers full of potable water for themselves from the contiguous U.S. if they wanted to, but they don’t. U.S. military personnel are temporary, and they can leave or transfer to another base, just like the absentee capitalists who invest in the weapons companies that exploit Hawaiians, vacation in Hawaii, then return to their mansions and penthouse suites. At worst the military families in Pearl Harbor have had to put up with living in hotels, but they will probably be experiencing long-term side-effects from exposure to such high levels of jet fuel in their drinking water, and will Veterans' Affairs pay for their cancer treatments? The U.S. federal government treats its vets almost as bad as it does its Indigenous peoples, which is ironic, because Native people serve in the military at the highest rate of any ethnic group, and American Indian 'code-talkers' won World War II - They were stationed right there in Pearl Harbor! Meanwhile the suffering of Native Hawaiians and their 'Āina is unimaginable, ongoing, and with no end in sight Native Hawaiians will continue to survive, and to fight back against military occupation by whatever non-violent means are available to them. Aloha is what non-Native Hawaiians often mistakenly think of as the word for 'hello' because it is used as a greeting, but its exact definition is the 'breath of life'. Aloha is used as a greeting because it recognizes the spirit of another human being. The U.S. military doesn't know anything about 'Aloha' way of life, because its sole purpose is to end the life of anyone who opposes U.S. imperialism, and how can an autonomous killing machine possibly respect the value of human life?  That is exactly what is happening in Hawai'i, and the American public doesn't want to acknowledge that their favorite tourist destination has been and continues to be turned into a "sacrifice zone" for the Navy, where people can’t even drink water out of the tap, or they have to boil it like they were living in a “third world country”. Native Hawaiians are all too familiar with this reality because they have always been treated as “third-class citizens” by colonial society. If the U.S. Navy continues with its military training exercises unchecked, someday soon tourists may not even be able to visit, let alone live on O’ahu because the entire island will become a Superfund Site!

Native Hawaiians from O'ahu have been garnering support from the broader local community, and if the Navy does not shut down the Red Hill facility immediately, they can expect the entire population of a MILLION people on O'ahu against them. Nobody can drink jet fuel, as the military has learned the hard way, but they may get away with their late 2024 timeline to drain the last of the fuel from the tanks at Red Hill. "Water is Life", "Demilitarize Hawaii", and "Stop Poisoning Our Water!" were common signs at the protest. One featured a painting of a little Native Hawaiian girl crying and saying: 'Mommy I Don't Feel Good'. This is heart-breaking, and the lack of urgency and accountability at Red Hill emphasizes just how heartless the U.S. military is at large, and how little they care about humanity as a whole, including military families. As if the situation were not dire enough, with 20,000 gallons of fuel leaking into the aquifer, further procrastination by the Navy will unavoidably lead to more residue from the tanks leeching into the aquifer. O'ahu residents will not accept anything less than a complete removal of jet fuel storage from Red Hill. The movement to "Demilitarize Hawaii" is gaining traction, as more non-Native Hawaiians realize they are negatively affected by the military occupation as well. Unless the entire U.S. Navy leaves Hawai'i, and they will never do so willingly and quite literally "over their dead bodies", as they proved when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, the environmental devastation on the 'Āina will continue to occur just as it has since 1893. The same U.S. Navy that overthrew the rightful Hawaiian government in 1893 with the crew of USS Boston continues to carry on its genocide, which is essentially the same as ecocide, because the 'Āina Mother Earth deserves to be legally recognized as a living being. However this is the U.S. where corporations may have human rights, but not its Indigenous peoples, and most certainly NOT the Earth! The U.S. government has been removing Native Hawaiians from their homelands for 130 years, mainly by destroying them with explosive, chemical, or nuclear weapons, and now through this disastrous failure at Red Hill!

In response to U.S. Navy commanders saying they are there to "protect" the people of Hawai'i, Native Hawaiians say: "Go Home. We didn't ask you to stay here, and you don't care for the land." Indigenous residents had been warning the military that the Red Hill tanks were going to leak for decades, but they were ignored in turn, until it was too late. 'We are Not American!' has been the long-time chant of Native Hawaiians to the U.S. federal government, but their protest has fallen on deaf ears, and only now that military families have been affected does the issue of water contamination in Pearl Harbor get minimal media attention. Pearl Harbor has enabled the U.S. to militarize the entire Pacific, and its potential as the quintessential strategic naval base in the Eastern Hemisphere was the main reason why they first began to occupy the island of O'ahu in 1893, then decided the Hawaiian islands would be great places to test all kinds of weapons far away from the continental states, with minimal "collateral damage" to U.S. citizens. Not only are Native Hawaiians treated as "less-than-American", with U.S. citizenship forced upon them because the federal government does not recognize their sovereignty or nationality and has made them into an “ethnic minority”, without admitting that Hawai'i is illegally occupied, and like all Indigenous peoples they are not even treated as human beings by the military.

Native Hawaiian people have compassion for the military families affected by the spill at Red Hill. "We feel for them - Join us - Aloha is for everyone and everything," said Dr. Kalehua Krug, principal of the Native Hawaiian Ka Waihona o Ka Na'auao Public Charter School. Native Hawaiian ancestral ways teach how everything both human and non-human has a place in the ecosystem, but the behavior of the U.S. Navy in Hawai'i has and will continue to be inhumane, and there is no biological purpose for them being there. Common sense dictates there is no greater threat in the world to the 'Āina than the U.S. Navy. The best way for the military to show their respect for the 'Āina is to recognize and observe the 'Aloha' way of life, and to protect sacred Wai by leaving in their warships, their submarines, and their fighter jets, and never coming back to Hawai'i. Native Hawaiians emphasize that their non-Native Kama'aina relatives are welcome, but the U.S. military must completely withdraw from the islands, otherwise nothing will change - Keep U.S. weapons off of Hawaiian soil! That is the only way all Hawaiian people, Native and non-Native alike, will be safe. Moana is the Native Hawaiian concept of spiritual balance within the 'Āina, symbolizing power, strength, and peace, but for now chaos rules. Mana is the spiritual energy of Native Hawaiians, which has been under attack since the U.S. Navy stormed the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893, and pointed a rifle at Her Majesty Queen Lili'uokalani. Despite the occupation, Native Hawaiians still recognize the humanity of military families, see them as ohana, which loosely means 'family' but more accurately 'human beings bound together by genuine compassion, culture, support, loyalty, and love for each other'. Native Hawaiians do not dehumanize those who oppress them, steal their land, and in turn dehumanize them. Aloha way of life does not allow for that. Native Hawaiians will continue to grow their ohana in support of Red Hill for however long it takes, until every last drop of jet fuel has been drained from the tanks, and such a time as the military occupation and ecocide against their 'Āina ends once and for all! 

* Photo via The Empire Files

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