There's a series of benefits - educational, health, etc. - that benefit Native Hawaiians. The revenues are starting to mount into the millions.

When I was first elected to the state House of Representatives in 1974, one of the committees I was assigned to was Land, Water and Hawaiian Homes.

Everybody got interested in ''How do I get mine?'' Which motivates, I think, 99 percent of the opposition to the bill.

At the same time there's a history in Hawaii of the emergence from pre-feudal separate islands into a kingdom, into a shotgun republic, into an annexed territory, and then into a state.

All Hawaii beaches are open to the public - there's no such thing as a private beach.

We made stabs in the legislature to try to relieve the state of both the burden and obligation of administering lands that otherwise were construed as belonging to Native Hawaiians historically.

When there wasn't any money involved, for all intents and purposes, nobody gave a damn. But now the land, supposedly worthless, is seen for what it really is: an incredibly valuable asset.

Western concepts of ownership and privatization came in and clashed with that. So land began to be exchanged.

A lot of the homelands turned out to be land where no water was readily available, no roads, no amenities. So you had your ceded lands of a couple million acres, and y Hawaiian homesteads of a couple hundred thousand acres.