2018-07-02 Game Management Advisory Commission Minutes

Home

Hawaii Game Management Advisory Commission Meeting Minutes – July 2, 2018 JO: You asked if it was appropriate for our group to join in a suit against the DLNR. Have you explored this with other… JM: Yes, let me bring this – it just came to me that if we get all enough cultural subsistence practitioners and hunters to agree that what the State is doing is wrong- we can file a class action suit against them. I’ve been working with the Native Hawaiian \[Legal\] Corporation and basically what we need is more people behind the concept. JO: Right. Well a group like this – Game Management Advisory Commission – would have standing with the State Commission as well – I think it’s worth exploring. JM: Yeah, because I’m also intending on going to the other neighbor islands and talking to the brothers on Molokai, Maui and Kauai and maybe even Lanai because we have people there that also depend on the resources. JO: We feel like we’re on the wrong side of a one-sided battle and the DLNR’s - the one that has all the tools and lawyers and they adopt whatever the U.S. Fish & Wildlife says – they’ve got to do with this and they say they’re powerless to change. JM: \[Unclear\] all the eradication meetings that they had in Honolulu and, you know, they’re really they’re not looking at that – what they’re looking at – and that’s the problem – every island we’re gonna have – you see, in order to be successful in having hiking clubs and biking tours in the mountain you cannot have us in there and you cannot have the game there because if you have the game there then they will run into the hikers, they’ll run into the bikers, whether they be our dogs or the animals so I, I and, you know, every time when I’ve attended the meetings there are a lot of groups that are doing this now – they are forming hiking clubs and bicycling clubs so that they can bicycle and hike in all of our mountains and that’s what concerns me because like I said – they would have to eradicate the animals and so... NP: Or have a schedule. People can take turns. JM: We hunt by opportunity a lot of times. There are times when we leave 3:00 in the morning to go on Oahu to go to on the other side of the island maybe to hunt and then we come – we get this rule over there – first come, first served – so if you’re there waiting for the animals that’s before them – so you can go into the mountain – normally they would go somewhere else out of, you know, courtesy, yeah, so, you know, so I’m just concerned, you know, how we can prevent these people from taking over our mountain and taking the food out of our mouths. TN: James, may I have your contact number please? 17