542
Stevens, J., dissenting
While that may or may not be true depending upon the construction of the terms of the trust, there is surely nothing racially invidious about a decision to enlarge the class of eligible voters to include "any descendant" of a 1778 resident of the Islands. The broader category of eligible voters serves quite practically to ensure that, regardless how "dilute" the race of native Hawaiians becomes—a phenomenon also described in the majority's lavish historical summary, ante, at 506-507—there will remain a voting interest whose ancestors were a part of a political, cultural community, and who have inherited through participation and memory the set of traditions the trust seeks to protect. The putative mismatch only underscores the reality that it cannot be purely a racial interest that either the trust or the election provision seeks to secure; the political and cultural interests served are—unlike racial survival—shared by both native Hawaiians and Hawaiians.14
14 Of course, the majority's concern about the absence of alignment becomes salient only if one assumes that something other than a Mancari-like political classification is at stake. As this Court has approached cases involving the relationship among the Federal Government, its delegates, and the indigenous peoples—including countless federal definitions of "classes" of Indians determined by blood quantum, see n. 7, supra—any "racial" aspect of the voting qualification here is eclipsed by the political significance of membership in a once-sovereign indigenous class.
Beyond even this, the majority's own historical account makes clear that the inhabitants of the Hawaiian Islands whose descendants constitute the instant class are identified and remain significant as much because of culture as because of race. By the time of Cook's arrival, "the Hawaiian people had developed, over the preceding 1,000 years or so, a cultural and political structure . . . well-established traditions and customs and . . . a polytheistic religion." Ante, at 500. Prior to 1778, although there "was no private ownership of land," Hawaii Housing Authority v. Midkiff, 467 U. S. 229, 232 (1984), the native Hawaiians "lived in a highly organized, self-sufficient, subsistence social system based on communal land tenure with a sophisticated language, culture, and religion," 42 U. S. C. § 11701(4). According to Senator Akaka, their society "was steeped in science [and they] honored their 'aina (land) and environment, and therefore developed methods of irrigation, agriculture, aquaculture, navigation,
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