'The Akaka bill seeks to apply the model of American Indian tribes' formal sovereignty to people of native Hawaiian ancestry."

Congress moved along related lines in 1990 when it passed, and Pres. George H.W. Bush signed, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act which applies not only to American Indian lineal descendants and tribes but Alaska Native villages and corporations, as Native Hawaiian organizations.

"Even if there had been a kind of collective ethnic sovereignty exercised by native Hawaiians, that sovereignty has long been extinguished: Sovereignty is a political fact, not a racial fact. The United States cannot enter into a relationship with the Hawaiian sovereign because no such sovereign exists. And it would take an odd and overgenerous reading of the Interstate Commerce Clause to imagine that Congress has the power to create a sovereign foreign nation through a legislative act."

I don't understand why HI would even want this bill passed?

Self-determination?

Ah, treating indigenous Hawaiians the same as other native Americans. Yeah, that's discrimination all right.