The 1AC recognizes that the Model Minority was used to perpetuate Settler Systems - Interrogating the Model Minority is a pre-requisite – breaking down the systems in which White settlers have brought and coerced Asians here is key in creating genuine change – Hawai’i proves that current narratives are inherently colonial but the aff’s model is key – justifies the Perm

We can first trace Asian American critiques of US empire to the 1968–1969 Third World Strike at what was then San Francisco State College. The Third World Liberation Front (TWLF) brought together African American, Asian American, Latino/a, and American Indian campus groups demanding an autonomous ethnic studies program and community control over curricula and hiring, and the TWLF drew critical connections between domestic civil rights struggles in the United States and international human rights struggles in imperial wars being fought in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. As an historical event linking racism in the United States with US imperialism, the Third World Strike reminds us that ethnic studies was founded on conceptions of shared struggles on a global scale. There is another dimension to the Third World Strike that Asian American critical inquiry must consider. At the same time that the Third World Strike was taking place, American Indians were engaged in the second occupation of Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay. Asserting American Indian title to the federal facility by right of discovery, American Indian activists at Alcatraz initiated the Alcatraz-Red Power movement (ARPM) which led to 70 property takeovers in the following nine years (Johnson et al. 1997). Similarly, in 1976, Kanaka ‘Oiwi were engaged in struggles to reclaim Kaho ‘olawe, an island that had been used since the Second World War as a site for bombing target practice by the US military. These struggles illustrate that although American Indians and Kanaka ‘Oiwi were allied with people of color on civil rights issues and against US imperialism, their primary struggle was to reclaim their ancestral lands from the United States. Although Asian Americans, particularly Japanese Americans who were critical of the US political system after their internment during World War II, supported American Indians at Alcatraz and Hawaiians at Kaho‘olawe in important ways, they used a framework of race and class struggle that did not account for the uniqueness of indigenous land dispossession or their own positions in a settler colonial context (Johnson 1996: 118; Gidra 1970; Tanioka and Yamaguchi 1970; Kudaka 1970; Kotani 1985: 168–169).4 As I have argued elsewhere, Asian American studies as a discipline has also historically had a stake in claiming America in ways that are ideologically at odds with indigenous critiques of US settler colonialism (Fujikane 2005). Asian American studies has generally focused on Asian American civil rights and immigrant rights, histories of racial, ethnic, heteropatriarchal and class oppression and literary, cultural and political forms of resistance to those interlocking axes of oppression, interracial and interethnic conflicts and alliances, movements of people to and from the United States in terms of Asian American critique and Moana Nui 2011 193 immigration, diaspora, transnational mobility and the international divisions of labor, and multiple forms of imperialisms in Asia. In a multicultural ethnic studies framework, claiming America often inadvertently ends up reproducing the settler colonial claims to Native lands made in white settler historiography. Kanaka ‘Oiwi leader and scholar Haunani-Kay Trask first identified Asian Americans in Hawai‘i as settlers who benefit from the dispossession of Hawaiians. Trask writes, Our Native people and territories have been overrun by non-Natives, including Asians. Calling themselves ‘local’, the children of Asian settlers greatly outnumber us. They claim Hawai‘i as their own, denying indigenous history, their long collaboration in our continued dispossession, and the benefits therefrom. Part of this denial is the substitution of the term ‘local’ for ‘immigrant’, which is, itself, a particularly celebrated American gloss for ‘settler’. As on the continent, so in our island home. Settlers and their children recast the American tale of nationhood: Hawai‘i, like the continent, is naturalized as but another telling illustration of the uniqueness of America’s ‘nation of immigrants’. (Trask 2008: 46)5 Kanaka ‘Oiwi are genealogically connected to Hawai ‘i, their kulaiwi or ancestral lands, through Papahanaumoku, ‘She who births land’ (ho‘omanawanui 2008: 125; Kamahele 2008: 79; Trask 2008: 45). Under the US occupation of Hawai‘i, Asian Americans are settlers who do not have this genealogical relationship to land in Hawai‘i. As Trask points out, the failure to identify immigrants in settler states as settlers makes possible the teleological fantasy of settler states evolving into ‘multicultural’ nations (Trask 2008: 47). The effects of Asian American settler colonialism become even more visible when we examine indices that register political power in Hawai‘i, such as the ethnic breakdown of the 2009 Hawai‘i State Legislature (see Table 1). According to these figures, Japanese constitute only 21.9% of the population of Hawai‘i, but they are 40% of the Senate and 38% of the House of Representatives (Okinawans are included in statistics for ‘Japanese’, but separately they are about 4% of the population, 12% of the Senate and 6% of the House). Whites constitute 21.1% of the population, 16% of the Senate, and 20% of the House. By contrast, Hawaiians constitute 22.1% of the population compared with 16% of the Senate and 14% of the House. Overall, Asian Americans make up about 44% of the population, 64% of the Senate and 72% of the House. The conditions of Asian American settler colonialism are only made possible by the US settler state and its occupation of Hawai‘i. The United States has acknowledged that its military unlawfully invaded Hawai‘i and backed the overthrow of the Hawaiian government by a white American oligarchy on January 17, 1893. In 1993, President Bill Clinton signed US Public Law 103-150, apologizing for the United States’ role in the military invasion and overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom. In the Apology Resolution, the United States acknowledges that Kanaka ‘Oiwi have never relinquished their sovereignty: ‘The indigenous Hawaiian people never directly relinquished their inherent sovereignty as a people or over their national lands to the United States, either through their monarchy or through a plebiscite or referendum’. The document also acknowledges the illegal seizure of Hawaiian national lands: ‘The Republic of Hawaii also ceded 1,800,000 acres of crown, government and public lands of the Kingdom of Hawaii without the consent of or compensation to the Native Hawaiian people of Hawaii or their sovereign government’. The Apology Resolution has been cited to argue that the sovereign state of Hawai‘i continues to exist, and Kanaka ‘Oiwi can assert their claim to 1.8 million acres of crown and government lands called the ‘ceded’ lands, half of all land in Hawai‘i seized at the time of the overthrow and now administered by the State of Hawai‘i.6 During the week of the APEC meetings, Kanaka ‘Oiwi occupied ‘Iolani Palace to call international attention to the US occupation of Hawai‘i and increased settler state security regulations that closed ‘Iolani Palace to the public in preparation for the APEC meetings.