538
Stevens, J., dissenting
The sole remaining question under Mancari and Yakima is thus whether the State's scheme "rationally further[s] the purpose identified by the State." Under this standard, as with the BIA preferences in Mancari, the OHA voting requirement is certainly reasonably designed to promote "self-government" by the descendants of the indigenous Hawaiians, and to make OHA "more responsive to the needs of its constituent groups." Mancari, 417 U. S., at 554. The OHA statute provides that the agency is to be held "separate" and "independent of the [State] executive branch," Haw. Rev. Stat. § 10-4 (1993); OHA executes a trust, which, by its very character, must be administered for the benefit of Hawaiians and native Hawaiians, §§ 10-2, 10-3(1), 10-13.5; and OHA is to be governed by a board of trustees that will reflect the interests of the trust's native Hawaiian beneficiaries, Haw. Const., Art. XII, § 5 (1993); Haw. Rev. Stat. § 13D-3(b) (1993). OHA is thus "directed to participation by the governed in the governing agency." Mancari, 417 U. S., at 554. In this respect among others, the requirement is "reasonably and directly related to a legitimate, nonracially based goal." Ibid.
The foregoing reasons are to me more than sufficient to justify the OHA trust system and trustee election provision under the Fourteenth Amendment.
III
Although the Fifteenth Amendment tests the OHA scheme by a different measure, it is equally clear to me that the trustee election provision violates neither the letter nor the spirit of that Amendment.12
12 Just as one cannot divorce the Indian law context of this case from an analysis of the OHA scheme under the Fourteenth Amendment, neither can one pretend that this law fits simply within our non-Indian cases under the Fifteenth Amendment. As the preceding discussion of Mancari and our other Indian law cases reveals, this Court has never understood laws relating to indigenous peoples simply as legal classifications defined by
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