How Hawaii pushed out native Hawaiians

Sara Kehaulani Goo was 8 years old when she learned a secret. Deep in a swath of her family's ancestral land on the isolated eastern tip of Maui stood a 13th-century temple known as a heiau, perhaps the largest anywhere in Polynesia. Even as a girl, she understood the spiritual weight of this Hawaiian place of worship. At first sight, she was astonished by the 'tidal wave of black' before her eyes.
Some of the heiau's walls were 50 feet high. Terraces facing north and southeast rose to a central platform measuring 3¼ acres. The people who built it, starting some seven centuries earlier, had carried each chunk of basalt to its final resting place, rock by rock, hand to hand, in a human chain. They used no mortar or bonding or cement. Visiting it, both as a child and then again as an adult, she felt herself in the presence of something sacred — 'mana' in the Hawaiian language.
'Kuleana: A Story of Family, Land, and Legacy in Old Hawai'i,' Goo's new book, is nominally about the 90-acre family property on which the heiau stands — and the fight to save it from the forces that have expelled Hawaiians from their land since first contact with Europeans. Yet it is the heiau, and her first experience of it, that is the central force of the story. It 'planted the seed for me to become a journalist,' Goo (who was previously a reporter and editor at The Washington Post) writes. 'This is where my curiosity was born.' It also started her on a quest to understand her family's history and to write this very book. The heiau, and its mana, would shape her entire life.
The story begins with the Great Mahele, a land redistribution edict carried out by King Kamehameha III in 1848. Its intent was to give chiefs and commoners access to resources during the upheaval wrought upon Hawaii by disease, capitalism and the rise of American influence in the islands.
Goo's ancestor, a man named Kahanu with links to area chiefs, was the recipient of 990 acres of land on the eastern end of Maui. Upon his death, Kahanu, who had no heirs, left the land in equal parts to his two brothers and an aunt, Goo's direct forebear.
Within 20 years of the Mahele, Kahanu's successors had sold much of the property to sugar planters. The remaining acreage was divided into ever smaller fractions, generation by generation. Today, Goo's extended family possesses 'more than ninety acres' of the original allotment. Goo's close relatives own 10 of those acres.
'Kuleana' is structured around a threat to that land. In 2019, Maui County increased the family's property taxes by almost 600 percent. Though the Goos explored several options — including planting a small farm on the land so that it could be rezoned for agriculture — no solution seemed plausible or permanent. The pressure to sell grew heavy.
Yet this storyline makes up but a thin slice of 'Kuleana,' and the book is better for it. Goo's explorations of the problems Hawaii faces raise the stakes. The state already has the highest housing costs in the nation, and on Maui, nonresidents own a significant portion of homes. Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg snapped up 1,400 acres on Kauai, then sued Hawaiians who held claims to some of these lands (he later dropped the suits). Before that, Oracle founder Larry Ellison purchased 98 percent of the 90,500-acre island of Lanai. For native Hawaiians, land displacement is present and ongoing: More than half of all native Hawaiians have left the islands. This might be the essential message in 'Kuleana.'
Goo's motherly distress about raising her children in Washington, so far from their familial home, also feels vital. Even among her Hawaiian relatives, she writes, the fact that she grew up on the mainland has marked her for life. 'We were mainlanders who had plane tickets, not Native Hawaiians with residency.'
Her prose is light and pithy, styled and structured like that of a newspaper reporter. This usually works in her favor. Yet her occasional reliance on cliché and tendency to use the same words repeatedly — often in a single paragraph, sometimes in a single sentence — slacken what could have been a tauter narrative. Small historical blemishes also appear in the book now and again. Goo writes, for instance, that Hawaiians killed Captain James Cook once they discovered he wasn't a god. This simplifies a more complex historical record.
Misgivings aside, for too long most readers have looked to two or three titles to learn about the Hawaiian Islands. To this day, bookstores on the islands display gleaming stacks of James A. Michener's novel 'Hawaii,' 66 years after its publication and woefully out of date.
To people with ties to Hawaii, Goo's story will already be familiar. But if just a fraction of the millions of annual visitors read 'Kuleana' and get a more subtle, more accurate understanding of these singular islands, it will be a cause for celebration. A serious book by a Hawaiian journalist, from a major publishing house, is a most welcome arrival.
Makana Eyre is the author of 'Sing, Memory.' He was born and raised on the island of Oahu.
A Story of Family, Land, and Legacy in Old Hawai'i
By Sara Kehaulani Goo
Flatiron. 351 pp. $29.99

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