Hawaiians, overall, have a much lower per-capita income. Yes, there are rich Hawaiians and poor Hawaiians, but overall, this group just doesn't get its fair share of the pie.

The poverty rate for Hawaiians is higher than the overall state average. But the "staggering" figure is that, among the people considered to be in poverty in the Islands, fully 27 percent of them are Native Hawaiians.

Put another way: Naya points out that nearly a third of all people who earn less than $10,000 are Native Hawaiians versus about 19 percent for non-Native Hawaiians. It works the other way as well: A smaller percentage of those in the high-income group are Native Hawaiians as compared with non-Hawaiians.

Naya notes another sad fact. The only category in which Hawaiians out-earn the rest of the state is in public assistance.

Now, there are lots of reasons for these discrepancies, including the fact that Hawaiians tend to be younger (less wealth accumulation), come from larger families, are somewhat less-well-educated and have fewer people in high-income fields.

Those are structural, factual things that have nothing to do with the genetic makeup of an individual and everything to do with the economic opportunities they face.

Naya's conclusion is that most of these factors are long-term problems that demand long-term solutions.

What can be done in the short term?

He recommends, among other things, that OHA invest in micro-loans, small amounts of money to small start-up companies that don't have the collateral to win full-scale business loans. It is an approach that has worked well in India and in many third-world countries.

Is that the answer? Who knows? But what seems to be obvious is that the answer to Hawaiian poverty and lack of financial success is not going to come from pretending it does not exist.