Abstract
On 17 January 2007, a bill was re-introduced in the U.S. Senate to grant tribal sovereignty to Native Hawaiians as the indigenous people of Hawai`i, a similar status afforded Native American tribes on the continental United States. The difference, however, is that Native Hawaiians were citizens of an internationally recognized sovereign State, whereas Native Americans were a dependent nation within a sovereign State. Great Britain and France were the first to recognize Hawai`i's sovereignty in 1843 by proclamation and the United States in 1849 by treaty. This paper questions the historiography's assumptions about the history of law and politics in Hawai`i by providing an analysis and comparison between Hawaiian State sovereignty and Hawaiian Indigeneity and its use and practice in Hawai`i today.

Hawaiian State sovereignty, however, provides as an alternative view to the political and legal history of the Hawaiian Islands that has been otherwise subsumed within U.S. State sovereignty and the political movement of indigenous peoples. By comparing and contrasting between the two concepts of Hawaiian State sovereignty on one end and Hawaiian Indigeneity on the other, it is possible to see the inherent contradictions and its mutual exclusivesity in concept given the legal history of the Hawaiian Islands.

Hawaiian State Sovereignty vs.	Hawaiian Indigeneity
Self-governing	Non-self-governing
Independent	Dependent
Sovereignty Established	Sovereignty Sought
Citizenship (multi-ethnic)	Indigenous (mono-ethnic)
Occupation	Colonization
De-Occupation	De-Colonization

For the Hawaiian sovereignty movement, therefore, acceding to their identification as an indigenous people would be to implicitly accede not only to the reality, but also to the legitimacy, of occupation and political marginalization. All they might hope for at that level is formal recognition of their vulnerability and continued political marginalization rather than the status accorded under international law to a nation belligerently occupied.