Crown Lands | Royal Family Hawaii

Mahele

Crown Lands

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In 1848, as a result of the Mahele, all land in the Hawaiian Kingdom was placed in three categories: The Lands of His Majesty King Kamehameha III which became the Crown Lands (for the preservation of the crown), the lands of the Chiefs and Konohiki, and the Government Lands. Later in 1850, awards were given to Hoaʻaina

(native Hawaiians who cultivated the land they live on) known as Kuleana Lands.

The Crown Lands constitute a trust created by King Kamehameha III out of his personal and individual estate of nearly one million acres to maintain the state and dignity of the crown. The income is used for the sole prerogative of the reigning sovereign and has never belonged to the Hawaiian government.

It was the intention of His Majesty King Kamehameha III to protect the lands which he reserved to himself out of the domain which had been acquired by his family through the prowess and skill of his father, King Kamehameha the Great, the conqueror, from the danger of being treated as public domain or government property. It was also his intention to provide that those lands should descend to his heirs and successors, the future wearers of the crown which the conqueror had won.

The 1865 law noted that the Crown Lands “shall be henceforth inalienable, and shall descend

to the heirs and successors of the Hawaiian Crown forever”.

Following the illegal overthrow on January 17, 1893 and fraudulent annexation by the United States, the Crown Lands were illegally seized. Without a ruling monarch, the purpose of the Crown Land Trust serves no more and is held in abeyance, until sovereignty can be restored to the legitimate dynastic descendants of the royal house, until then, the Crown Lands still legally remains as the private estate of His Majesty King Kamehameha III in trust for the ruling sovereign. International laws (the Hague and Geneva Conventions) require that governance and legal matters within the occupied territory of the Hawaiian Islands must be administered by the application of the laws of the occupied state of the Hawaiian Kingdom, not the domestic laws of the occupier, the United States. Therefore, the adjudication of land transactions in the Hawaiian Islands would likewise be a matter of Hawaiian Kingdom law and international law, not domestic U.S. law.

To help save the Crown Lands from being plundered and lost during the fraudulent annexation, a legitimate dynastic member of the royal house, the High Chiefess Princess Elizabeth Kekaʻaniau protests against confiscating the Crown Lands and for the protection of her rights as a relative of H.M. King Kamehameha III who had made Princess Elizabeth Kekaʻaniau Pre-emptive to the Throne and an Eligible Ruler. Princess Elizabeth protests: "whereby her rights in the premises should not be ignored or prejudiced under an act of injustice by the United States and leading to disastrous consequences as a loss of county and independence". Princess Elizabeth's husband, the Honorable Frank Seaver Pratt, Consul- General of the Hawaiian Kingdom protests on her behalf on February 28, 1893 against alienation of the Crown Lands.

According to the United Nation's Independent Expert, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, Dr. Alfred M. deZayas stated on February 28, 2018, that "the lawful political status of the Hawaiian Islands is that of a sovereign nation-state in continuity; but a nation-state that is under a strange form of occupation by the United States resulting from an illegal military occupation and a fraudulent annexation". Also, "the U.S. courts have to take international law and customary international law into account in property disputes. The State of Hawaii courts should not lend themselves to a flagrant violation of the rights of the land title holders and in consequence of pertinent international norms. Therefore, the courts of the State of Hawaii must not enable or collude in the wrongful taking of private lands, bearing in mind that the right to property is recognized not only in U.S. law but also in Article 17 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted under the leadership of Eleanor Roosevelt".