Native Hawaiian Health and Indigenous Knowledge Resources

Hawai'i Legal Documents

• Paoakalani Declaration:

  The Paoakalani Declaration is a document adopted by the Native Hawaiian community in 2003 that outlines the rights of Native Hawaiians to their cultural property and intellectual property. The declaration was created at the Ka 'Aha Pono - Native Hawaiian Intellectual Property Rights Conference, which took place October 3–5, 2003. The declaration addresses issues such as:

  • Self-determination: The declaration asserts the Native Hawaiian right to self-determination and to protect their cultural works

  • Cultural property: The declaration condemns the commercial exploitation and biopiracy of Kanaka cultural property

  • Traditional knowledge: The declaration calls for new laws to respect Native Hawaiian traditional knowledge and other cultural property

  • Intellectual property: The declaration calls for changes to intellectual property laws to protect Native Hawaiian cultural integrity

• Native Hawaiian Rights Handbook

  • “The book is a beginning point for exploring rights issues along dual paths: the traditional and the contemporary, the native and the foreign, the self-determining and the assimilative, the legal and the moral…This text is properly a primer on self-determination, not a "how-to manual" for achieving the right to exist as a people. If Native Hawaiians require a guide to case law as it pertains to the native peoples in American society, they will find this handbook a valuable resource.” from Kanalupilikokoiāma’ihu’i (G. Terry Young). 1992. Review of Native Hawaiian Rights Handbook, edited by Melody Kapilialoha MacKenzie. Special issue, The Contemporary Pacific 4 (2): 446-47.

More Native Hawaiian legal resources, visit the Law Library at UH Mānoa, Ka Huli Ao Center for Excellence in Native Hawaiian Law, Punawaiola (database of digitized Hawaiian Kingdom historical and legal documents)

Other Documents

Indigenous Knowledges Zotero Library