Neil Abercrombie
Everybody got interested in ''How do I get mine?'' Which motivates, I think, 99 percent of the opposition to the bill.
At the same time there's a history in Hawaii of the emergence from pre-feudal separate islands into a kingdom, into a shotgun republic, into an annexed territory, and then into a state.
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.
All the land was held in common at one point in the feudal society of the kingdom on behalf of the people - with all the usual attendant tales of chicanery and stupidity and sometimes nobility and kind-heartedness and low-dealing and all the rest.
All Hawaii beaches are open to the public - there's no such thing as a private beach.
A lot of the homelands turned out to be land where no water was readily available, no roads, no amenities. So you had your ceded lands of a couple million acres, and y Hawaiian homesteads of a couple hundred thousand acres.
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 it.