LAS VEGAS — Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu was ready to talk about the elephants in the ballroom on the opening morning of the Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement’s convention in Las Vegas.

“First of all, Las Vegas is not the ninth island,” Wong-Kalu said Monday. “That was a campaign deployed by those in the tourism industry to promote (Las Vegas) back home (in Hawaii.) It made it seem as if Las Vegas was just a hop, skip and a jump.”

“We have a ninth island in Hawaii: Nihoa,” she explained. Nihoa is northwest of Kauai.

Wong-Kalu said that like many from Hawaii who traveled to Las Vegas for the conference, the decision to accept the reality that more Native Hawaiians lived outside of Hawaii than inside was tough.

“As the cultural ambassador for the Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement, I initially sat with it and wrestled with it because I’m always for the kanaka (Hawaiians) in the homeland,” she said. “I don’t love our kanaka here any less, but my focus is always on the homeland. But coming here is good because we can help to remind our people to come home, remember the way home, and remind our people that if you are proud to be Hawaiian, then know that you’re in a foreign land. It’s not your land.” 

As Wong-Kalu taught two workshops on an oli (song) she wrote titled “Ha’akei Nā Mauna o Hawai’inuiākea,” she offered a hearty dose of political commentary along with the chant about Na Kai Ewalu, the eight seas of Hawaii.

Wong-Kalu criticized Native Hawaiians for not sending money back to Hawaii the way other Polynesian societies do.

“If they’re not going to stay, then they leave behind their votes for political office,” she said. “They pay taxes in other states. But they don’t remit money like the rest of the Polynesians do to all of their ancestral homelands. Tongans and everybody else, they go out across the world and they go to work and they send money back home. Hawaiians come over here to the U.S., they send shit home.”

She also didn’t relent on the role of Hawaiians moving to Las Vegas. “People want to come here for gambling. But it’s not our land, and we shouldn’t be just so quick to try and assume a position of prominence here because somebody did a promotional campaign and made Las Vegas appealing to our people,” she said.

“Hawaii is our home. We shouldn’t have to beg at somebody else’s trough for what’s rightfully ours. We shouldn’t have to continue to look outside for all of the solutions for our social and economic and political woes,” she added. “We should be able to govern our affairs in a manner and format that is appropriate for us. And that people who come to a Hawaii should learn to be with us. But we can’t do that because our current political status is what it is.”

She also challenged her class with the question: “Why did you come?”

The responders from Las Vegas, Montana and Michigan strived to establish their desire to connect with Hawaii and Native Hawaiians. Sandi Brown, a Las Vegas resident who grew up on Kauai, emotionally described her efforts to stay connected to Hawaii despite having left for the mainland in the late 1980s. 

“I came to be in the presence of those that are connected to the homeland and that speak out in a powerful way,” said Brown.

Pomaika’i Gaui from Utah answered, “I try to keep that connection strong. Not only for me but for my children. They come home to Utah to connect. So I have to keep myself grounded.”

Three of Gaui’s Utah-raised children have moved to Hawaii and though he’s active in Hawaiian Civic Clubs, this was his first CNHA conference.

“I want to keep carrying the torch for future generations of Hawaiians. We have melded into all these other cultures. It’s easy to go with the flow, that’s the Hawaiian way, but we need to keep going.” 

Wong-Kalu is not a fan of Las Vegas: “No offense to our ohana here, but how can you live in an aina wela (hot land)!” 

“If you love living up here great, aole pilikia (no problem), maikai, but don’t forget where the homeland is,” she said. “We are responsible for our culture, our values, our perspectives for them to survive into the next century. And it is up to us, it is nobody else’s kuleana (responsibility) but ours.”