Cite as: 528 U. S. 495 (2000)
Stevens, J., dissenting
Even if one refuses to recognize the beneficiary status of OHA trustee voters entirely,15 it cannot be said that the ancestry-based voting qualification here simply stands in the
medicine, fishing and other forms of subsistence whereby the land and sea were efficiently used without waste or damage. Respect for the environment and for others formed the basis of their culture and tradition." App. E to Brief for Hawai'i Congressional Delegation as Amicus Curiae E-4. Legends and oral histories passed from one generation to another are reflected in artifacts such as carved images, colorful feathered capes, songs, and dances that survive today. For some, Pele, the God of Fire, still inhabits the crater of Kilauea, and the word of the Kahuna is still law. It is this culture, rather than the Polynesian race, that is uniquely Hawaiian and in need of protection.
15 Justice Breyer's even broader contention that "there is no 'trust' for native Hawaiians here," ante, at 525, appears to make the greater mistake of conflating the public trust established by Hawaii's Constitution and laws, see supra, at 537, with the "trust" relationship between the Federal Government and the indigenous peoples. According to Justice Breyer, the "analogy on which Hawaii's justification must depend," ante, at 527, is "destroy[ed]" in part by the fact that OHA is not a trust (in the former sense of a trust) for native Hawaiians alone. Rather than looking to the terms of the public trust itself for this proposition, Justice Breyer relies on the terms of the land conveyance to Hawaii in part of the Admissions Act. But the portion of the trust administered by OHA does not purport to contain in its corpus all 1.2 million acres of federal trust lands set aside for the benefit of all Hawaiians, including native Hawaiians. By its terms, only "[t]wenty per cent of all revenue derived from the public land trust shall be expended by the office for the betterment of the conditions of native Hawaiians." Haw. Rev. Stat. § 10-13.5 (1993). This portion appears to coincide precisely with the one-fifth described purpose of the Admissions Act trust lands to better the conditions of native Hawaiians. Admissions Act § 5(f), 73 Stat. 6. Neither the fact that native Hawaiians have a specific, beneficial interest in only 20% of trust revenues, nor the fact that the portion of the trust administered by OHA is supplemented to varying degrees by nontrust moneys, negates the existence of the trust itself.
Moreover, neither the particular terms of the State's public trust nor the particular source of OHA funding "destroys" the centrally relevant trust "analogy" on which Hawaii relies—that of the relationship between the Federal Government and indigenous Indians on this continent, as compared with the relationship between the Federal Government and indige-
543
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