Considering this is a blog whose identity is anchored in Maui, I feel obliged to share some thoughts on the tragedy suffered by the residents of Lahaina and other communities on the island. As with most topics discussed herein, the majority of people will disagree with the bulk of them. But then again, the plurality exists in a state of suspended disbelief, so it comes as no surprise that opinions about how Hawai’ians should manage their recovery are based in kayfabe.
First, a minor detour into history. Hawai’i was a sovereign kingdom until the United States of America, in its imperial wisdom, annexed it as a territory in 1898. United States Public Law 103-150 of 1993 formally apologized for this transgression, a perfunctory act of atonement that did little more than admit this confession of blatant larceny into the nation’s permanent record. This largely unknown Joint Resolution of the U.S. Congress “acknowledges that the Native Hawaiian people never directly relinquished to the United States their claims to their inherent sovereignty as a people over their national lands, either through the Kingdom of Hawaii or through a plebiscite or referendum”.
In other words, the island of Maui doesn’t belong to us. And right now, in the wake of this disaster, is the ideal time for Hawai’ians to assert that fact.
My saying that the citizens of Maui should appropriate all the real estate on the island will, among the vast multitude of haole, result in an immediate outcry. “You can’t just take people’s property,” I can hear the absentee owners howl in protest.
Uhm, I hate to break it to you, but, as evidenced by the very historical precedent of confiscation through which you yourself are claiming ownership, apparently you can.
Of course, what the island’s landed class of rentiers really mean is, now that we have appropriated it from you, you can’t just go appropriating it from us. We have laws against such barbarous behavior, even if those laws didn’t apply when we ourselves were arrogantly arrogating every square inch of the Earth. Never mind that it wouldn’t be expropriation, really, in the same way as when we haole did it. A more apt description for what I am suggesting would be emancipation.
“If we allow the Hawai’ians do it, what’s to stop anyone else?” one can imagine the argument continuing. “Where does it end?”
I’m going to leave off that question, for the moment, and turn my attention instead to what the Hawai’ians ought to do with the land once they again have control over it.
Most importantly, don’t rent it out to haole.
Like aboriginal peoples of the Americas, Kanaka ʻŌiwi and Kanaka Maoli inhabited the archipelago for centuries without any need of outside assistance. Considering the decimation of these native populations and the subsequent usurpation of their lands that engagement with haole wrought, further interplay hardly seems advisable. Case in point, the devastating fires on Maui can be directly attributed to European settlement of the island.
The fires that swept through Lahaina, while tragic, contain a silver lining. They are an early warning, more poignant than the sirens that failed to sound the impending disaster, of what is yet to come. The buildings of Lahaina Town, now razed to the ground, reveal a fork in the road. What path we choose in Maui will determine the fate of the world.
Not a single jet plane should ever touch down again in Kahului. The island’s original human settlers didn’t need one to get there, and neither should anyone else desiring to visit these islands. James Cook made the journey from England using little more than hemp, linen, pitch, and wood. It is the example of these intrepid voyagers that we must look to, rather than that of John Rodgers, who, in the end, was forced to resort to sail power himself.
What buildings remain on Maui should be occupied by local inhabitants, and any future construction can only be made from materials sourced from the island itself. Tourism, ideally as a concept but at least as an economic mainstay, must be abandoned. The economy of Maui must derive from the labor and the inherent capital that the island contains, in whatever form the product of those two resources may take. Just exactly what that is, only those who live there can divine. It is not for anyone else to decide.
These are bold words, I get that. But such is what this moment requires. We cannot continue in the way to which we have become accustomed, and we must model the future behavior that our children, owing to our own excesses, will surely be forced to adopt.