In Sara Kehaulani Goo’s ‘Kuleana,’ Culture and Capitalism Collide in Hawaii
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From KQED. From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal. Many Americans have become increasingly aware of the brutal dispossession that European colonizers visited upon indigenous people in what is now the United States.

But fewer are aware of the specific history of what happened in Hawaii, an independent nation that was overthrown by colonists. Fewer and fewer Native Hawaiians own land in their ancestral places. And in a new book, journalist Sarah Kahulani-Goo tells the story of her family's fight to hold on to their little piece of Maui. It's all coming up next, right after this news.

Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. What do we owe to our ancestors? In modern times, many people answer nothing. But Sarah Kehalani-Bgu's new book, Kuleana, describes the calling and commitment that she felt to hold on to her family's land in Hawaii or to follow the real pronunciation more closely, Hawaii.

She and many others in her family feel a duty to their ancestors that expresses itself as a duty to the land itself, a land that's now part of the regular old American property system with all its complications, taxes, and land use regulations. And Sarah Kehalani-Goo joins us this morning here in the studio. Welcome. Thank you so much for having me, Alexis. So let's just start with the land, right? The aina? That's the one. That's right. Yeah.

Tell us what it's like. I mean, where is it? What does it look like? Just kind of take us there a little bit. Sure. Yeah. Let's go to Maui. This land is at the very end of the famous Road to Hana. Many people have heard of this. I know in this area.

So it's remote, it's jungle rainforest, it's thick, full of hollow trees. It's on the rainforest coast, big black lava rocks, wild shore, wild ocean crashing into the shore. And this land, about 90 acres of it still exists in my family's hands. And it was given to my ancestor, if you can believe it or not, more than 175 years ago from King Kamehameha III.

And this land is a legacy that still is one of the rare Hawaiian lands in Hawaiian hands. When did you first get to know this piece of land? I was eight years old. I grew up in Southern California, not in Hawaii. But on a first family trip, we hiked through this jungle forest with my great uncle and

And my grandmother showed us this land and said, this was land from the king. And it's still part of our family today. It's our kuleana is the word she used to describe it, meaning responsibility to keep it in our family. And she said it once extended from the land to the sea.

And this is one of those stories, you know, that you hear in your family. You know, some of us have other stories where I was like, is this story really true? We're descended from the king. OK. Yeah. Sorry, mom. Yeah. So this was one of the stories I was like, I got to check this out to see if this is really true. It sounded great. But we were standing on the land. So I kind of believed her that we had a part of it. But the story about it, I didn't know.

It's one I always wanted to find out the truth about. And so part of this book was figuring out whether this was the truth. And I was amazed to find out it was. I mean, especially because adjacent to this land, right, in the kind of in the area, you

near your family's property, there is this Native Hawaiian temple, right? So tell us a little bit about that and how it played into your family story. Yeah, it felt like I was being let in on not just the story of the land, but a family secret. And this was in 1980. So imagine I'm an eight-year-old kid and I've just watched the movie Indiana Jones. And so we hiked through not only the land, but came upon this huge temple that was four stories tall,

stacked rocks as tall as the eye could see, and it kind of went back into the jungle and disappeared. And I thought, what is this huge edifice? Like, what is this huge tower? What was its purpose? It clearly looked old.

But I had nothing to explain to me what it was. All my great uncle told me was it was a secret and we were not supposed to talk about it and we were not supposed to tell anyone about it. We were not supposed to take anything from it. And so he told me it was a heiau or a temple. That's the Hawaiian word for temple.

And it was called the Pi'ilani Hale He'au. Pi'ilani is a name of an old Maui king, chief, who once ruled Maui. But again, its story had been never really written down. I couldn't find a book about it. I couldn't go to my public library and...

and check out a book about it. And as a kid, a lover of history, that also bothered me. So I knew that there were stories about people that I was from because I had been there, been seeing things. But I think even as a kid, I knew that there was more to the story that I needed to find out. And I wondered why people of Hawaii didn't have their own history somewhere.

So you mentioned you grew up in Southern California. So what was your relationship to Hawaii as you're growing up and your heritage? Well, like a lot of people in Hawaii or of Hawaiian heritage, it's not, you know, I'm many things. I'm a mixed plate, if you will. So for my dad, I'm Hawaiian, Chinese and Okinawan. And my mom's side is white and Caucasian. And she's, you know, I'm kind of East meets West.

And I love that. I grew up in Southern California where, of course, there's a mix of so many people from, you know, from Asia, from the Middle East, from, you know, all over. But I think that because I saw a few people who look like me, you know, and my story was so different, I didn't meet a lot of other kids like with my story.

So I didn't feel like I quite fit in either way. And then we went to Hawaii. I wasn't Hawaiian enough, you know, I was. And so I think that it was fitting in was was a little challenging. But I think that I I was always felt more Hawaiian than anything because that was the culture that my grandparents practiced. You know, they dance hula. That was the food we ate more than anything else.

And I think, you know, the land and the place, you know, called them back. So they did eventually. My grandparents moved back to Hawaii when I was in college. Hmm.

And really, your grandparents really are the kind of crucial connection to your heritage that you had, right? Right. And also your grandmother's brother. Right, right, yeah. Yeah, they kept the tradition alive. My grandmother in particular wanted to move back to Hana, wanted to move back to the place where the Hale wanted to build a home on her ancestral land. And fortunately, she never achieved that goal.

And she died before that could be constructed. So I think that the crux of this book was we found ourselves after she died with a huge property tax increase suddenly that had gone up like 500%. So we had to decide what to do with this property. She had never fulfilled her dream, but now what was our promise to her? And I think a lot of people end up with that kind of inheritance, if you will,

But this was obviously more than an inheritance. Yeah, I mean, because part of this that we need to get to is kind of the history of Hawaiian dispossession, right? I mean, I think people...

have some sense of Hawaiian history, but maybe not the specifics. Maybe you could just lay it out for us. Before colonization, how did Native Hawaiian society work? What were people doing in Hawaii? Right. Yeah, one of the reasons I wanted to write this book is I felt like Hawaii is the only part of the United States that used to be its own independent nation, and it wasn't that long ago that it was a colony, and yet we don't really know this part of its history yet.

But Hawaii, you know, was believed to be a population of about, you know, half a million to as many as 800,000 people living in this isolated community in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, sustaining themselves, feeding themselves, had a whole system, a whole society where they were living, fishing, growing their own crops. I mean, pretty amazing. Voyagers.

And now you look at where they are today, they're importing 90 percent of their food. They're importing, you know, nine million people visiting every year, unable to really house all the people, unable to really sustain a lot of middle class jobs. It's kind of a broken system. I think the capitalist system is not, you know, for the most part, working for a lot of working families there. Yeah.

So going back or kind of staying in the 19th century before, you know, in this kind of colonization period, I mean, how did the Hawaiian monarchy kind of respond to contact with these European colonists?

Yeah, so just what happened was how our family got land was what first happened was the Hawaiian people didn't initially believe in owning individual pieces of land. But they did finally allow the privatization of land only after the monarchy was convinced of that from after, you know, Christian missionaries came in the 1820s, after the

After business, people came, foreigners, convinced the monarchs that they should change their system and allow crops to be grown for exports soon after that. So the great Mehele of 1846 is what allowed King Kamehameha to divide his land and gave our family our property as part of that process. And it wasn't just our family. It was many, many other properties that were finally allowed to be privately owned. And once that happened...

A lot of Native Hawaiians lost a lot of their land because this foreign concept of ownership, they didn't understand. They didn't understand then what happened is you need to survey your land, what you need to claim your land, you needed to pay taxes on your land. All of those steps that followed were foreign concepts and the paperwork that followed was

So that dispossession quickly followed because the systems were foreign. Well, and you had mainland European Americans who, this is what they'd just done to the entire western part of the United States, right? I mean, just carved up a bunch of indigenous lands and arrive in Hawaii and do the exact same thing. Exactly. And it was, that brought in the sugar cane plantations. That is what brought in other systems that restricted resources, water resources, and

The sugarcane plantation owners then went to the top of the mountains and said, we're going to divert the water sources to feed our sugarcane plantations. That then affected everybody else's way of life. That then led to less irrigation for other native farmers. That then led to the climate to change in other parts of the island. So you see how

That immediately changes the way of life for everybody else. And the impacts of that are still being felt today. We're talking with Sarah Kehalani-Goo, who's a journalist and author. She's got a new book out. It's called Kuleana. And this book really explores her family's relationship to the ancestral land that they have in Hawaii amidst these kind of pressures of capitalism.

and displacement. She's doing an event tonight at Manny's in the Mission. It is at 6 p.m. And they're going to be talking about the book and there'll be a performance by a hula group as well. Yeah, I'm so excited. I'm going to be talking with Kumu Hula, Patrick Mukulkane, and his hula group will be doing a short performance. I'm so honored.

We also want to hear from you. Is there a piece of land or property that represents your family's legacy? Maybe you have had an experience with Hawaiian real estate or you've felt called by sense of duty in your own family legacy. You can give us a call. The number is 866-733-6786. That's

866-733-6786. The email address is forum at kqed.org. You can find us on social media, Blue Sky, Instagram, all of those things. We are KQED Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for more right after the break.

Support for Forum comes from the University of San Francisco School of Management. Celebrating 100 years of partnership with the Bay Area business community, the USF School of Management connects students to the city's vibrant culture, hands-on internships, and a wealth of career opportunities.

where AI and sustainability are integrated into every facet of business education, and where students bring innovation, ethics, and entrepreneurial leadership to a planet in need. The University of San Francisco School of Management. Change the world from here. Support for KQED Podcasts comes from Earthjustice. As a national legal nonprofit, Earthjustice has more than 200 full-time lawyers who fight for a healthy environment.

They wield the power of the law to protect people's health, preserve magnificent places and wildlife, and advance clean energy to combat climate change. Earthjustice fights in court because the Earth needs a good lawyer. Learn more about how you can get involved and become a supporter at earthjustice.org.

Welcome back to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. We're talking with Sarah Kehalani-Goo, who's a journalist and author, about her new book, Kuleana, which really traces her family's relationship to a piece of land that they have in Maui that was given to them by one of the last kings of the

of Hawaii. So let's talk a little bit about the family's land and sort of the series of discoveries that you were able to make. I mean, as a fellow journalist, there's a part in the book where you go to visit your great uncle and he pulls out a big old box filled with manila folders. And basically in there are most of the questions, most of the answers to questions that you have had for your whole life.

Yeah, I mean, it's amazing. For me, as a journalist, you know, we love the paper trail. We love to follow the paper trail to get answers to document, you know, what actually is the story? What are the answers that we're searching for?

And for me, this was the Holy Grail. It was, I had been searching for answers to what we talked about earlier, which is what's the story of this land? You know, the mountain to the sea, the land was vast from the king. And I knew that we had 90 acres in the family. My grandmother had 10 acres of this land left. What astounded me is I learned, Alexis, that this land was once 990 acres. It blew my mind. Right.

It really was from the mountain to the sea. And so the question was, where did all that land go from 175 years ago to today? And answers were in that box. And I went through and my uncle, thank goodness, he was a record keeper. He was like a bookkeeper at a local resort. Yes, his day job was the record. Yes.

I think many of us and our families have a record keeper who's like the genealogist. And thank goodness for these people in our lives. And thank goodness for my Uncle Tucky because he was the one in our family. But he had recorded and I went through this box and found decades of, you know, uncles and aunties who had sold, you know, 10 acres here, 50 acres here, leased land.

sold to the sugar plantation, later to the ranch, to the owners, the family members of the sugar plantation and the ranch that then bought the sugar plantation. And so just I realized in that moment that the story of my family's land was the story of Native Hawaiians' land and that my story was really their story. And that's why I wanted to tell this book, tell the story in this book.

is I realized the story hadn't really been told in this way.

And that the 990 acres might as well have been told in the story of the islands because now this ranch land today is up for sale. You look at it on Zillow. I mean, it's for sale for $77 million. And guess who's going to buy it? I mean, pick your bill, you know. Yes, exactly. I mean, that's who owns a lot of Hawaii's land today. Yeah.

is some of the biggest billionaires. So that's the story of Hawaii's land. Yeah. And it's really interesting. There's just a section in the book where you go through a series of these kind of land transactions, and you realize that it wasn't one big sweeping order. Your family wasn't swept off the land all at once. Right. It was kind of nibbled away at, nibbled away at, everything.

And all these different daily problems turning into a land sale here, a lease there, a mortgage there. Yeah. And I think that that's maybe why it hasn't been something that people have paid attention to even outside of Hawaii. It's been this slow boil. It's been this generational churn. And I think that even when I'm in Hawaii, I've told people I'm writing the story about how we've lost our land. And Hawaiian people I talk to are like, oh, yeah.

You know, that's not a new story because they all have had that happen to their family. They're like, oh, yeah, we lost our land. You know, like they that is a common story. It is not a new story, sadly. But they don't like outside of Hawaii. That is not something that people know. Right.

I mean, it does bring up for me a lot of connections to what has happened in traditionally black neighborhoods in the Bay Area where you have people who own homes, maybe take out a reverse mortgage here or maybe end up renting it out there and then there's a problem or end up selling it to somebody. I mean, what do you know about how your family might have benefited from some of these transactions over time? Do we know any of those things?

I don't know. I do know that a lot of them left this part of Hana, left Hana Maui. A lot of them left Maui altogether. It's a really rural area. It's not an area where, you know, it's easy to make a living. There's not a lot of jobs. A lot of them left for Honolulu. A lot of them left for the mainland. And that also is the story of Native Hawaiians. Now, you know, most recent census in 2020 shows

We now know that a majority of Native Hawaiians live outside of Hawaii. And often that's not by choice. So that's the story of an economic displacement that's happened.

That's not necessarily a land displacement, but it is about the cost of living. It is about how do we afford to live in the place where at the end of the day, people are competing against, in a finite place of real estate, they are competing with the world's richest people. I mean, how do you try and square the sort of spiritual aspect of this, which you talk about quite extensively in the book, with just kind of the...

you know, the Zillow-ness of it, I guess, you know? It's just like, it just feels like it's two totally different kind of registers in human experience. Yeah, I think that this book was about my, also about, you know, we talked about history and family and journalism and trying to uncover your own story, but I think that it was also a personal journey because the book is titled Kuliana, but you

but I think I had to kind of retrain my own brain about thinking in my own Western capitalist way

you know, way of thinking to a Hawaiian way of thinking about land, right? At one point I had even done, you know, the real estate editor at the Washington Post. So I understand real estate. I understand how that works. But I think that land in this case, you know, going back to the way Hawaiian people live, land aina means that which feeds, right? It is about that connection. And if Hawaiian people don't have that connection to the land, land,

They don't have, you know, that is part of their identity. It is part of who they are. It is what connects them to a place. And I think that is what called me back and that it was like the land, the solving this problem of keeping the land in our family was not about money. We had to figure it out using money, of course.

But it was more about this connection and how committed are we as a family to keep that going. I actually love that you show in the book that there wasn't there isn't one relationship that Hawaiians have to the land. Some of the family members didn't have a very deep connection. Others were willing to go out and, you know, work the land with their own hands. Right. I mean, there's a whole wide variety within the family of their kind of relationship to this place.

Yeah, it's not about blood quantum. It's not about where you live or where you grow up necessarily. And maybe that's controversial to say. But and that was part of my discovery as someone who today lives, you know, 5000 miles away from Hawaii, live in Washington, D.C. So I had to wrestle without myself is like, who am I to decide that I have agency or I have a place here? But I think at the end of the day, yeah.

the fact is that you know i i my grandmother is very meaningful to me as we have a special relationship and um i you know i'm she's my grandmother so yeah that that that's all right i feel like if some place if this calls you then you have to act on it it's not like there's an ancestry police who yeah come in and like designate you know give you a permit to uh and i feel like sometimes for people you know and i've talked to a lot of other hawaiians and other people like

who are of mixed race and they feel like, you know, am I, am I not? And I think like, you know, who are you waiting for to like tell you, you know, you have to act on this. This is something for you to decide. There's no, there's no one who's going to be policing this. Let's bring in a caller. Let's bring in Kimberly in Pacifica. Welcome.

Hi, thank you so much for taking my call. You know, Sarah, I just really wanted to thank you so much for this book. I am Native Hawaiian, and interestingly enough, my daughters are in their 20s, and we had...

just gotten back from a trip to the big island where we visited family went over family history aunties who were you know in their 90s giving us our roots and it's interesting we grew up in the bay area

I am made of Hawaiian, but your book and the way that you describe your relationship to Hawaii and really trying to find your roots, it's so resonated with me and my daughters. In fact, my daughter finished the book on her way home on the flight.

And what she sent me by text was, I'm in tears, Mom. This book was so impactful. And finding our Hawaiian heritage meant everything to me. So your story really mirrored so much what we were going through as a family. And I just want to thank you because it was so beautifully written. You know, while blood quantum doesn't mean a lot,

It does if you're trying to get into Kamehameha or you're in the island. That's true. You're, you know, you're Hapa and you're living on the mainland when you go. But Finding Your Roots, it was so beautifully written and how you share that, you know, you didn't always feel like you belonged. So I just wanted to thank you so much. I'm looking forward to seeing you at Manny's. Oh, thank you. This evening. Oh.

Mahalo. Mahalo nui for sharing that. That's so sweet. Yeah, thank you, Kimberly. Yeah, thank you. And I hope, you know, I think that I wanted to write a story to help, you know, the real story, really, actually, of Hawaiian people be seen and shared. I feel like, you know, Hawaii, you know, its narrative, I think, has been falsely kind of presented by Hollywood and tourist brochures for so long. And I felt like it, you know, like, well, the real Hawaii, you know, I experienced it.

I didn't see and I wanted one book on the shelf at least to be there. So that means a lot. Thank you so much. And I also feel like a lot of the things I'm writing about are not just unique to Hawaii. Like the things about what really matters in family, what we owe those who come before us and those after us, like you started with the show with Alexis are, I think a lot of through and true for many cultures. Yeah.

And there was also a period in many, an assimilation period in many cultures. And one of the things that's beautiful about this book is it's also your rediscovery kind of parallels the rediscovery of Hawaiian culture by Native Hawaiians. Like at one point you share in the book that the number of Native Hawaiian speakers was down to 2,000.

And we actually have a clip of your great-grandmother, Milaka, right, who's speaking on a local radio show in 1976. And the show's host had actually sought out native Hawaiian speakers to capture their sound since the language appeared to be, and we'll get to this, appeared to be dying out. So let's listen in to Sarah's great-grandmother, Milaka.

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Tell us a little bit more about this story of the Hawaiian language and your great-grandmother. Oh, my goodness. What a treat that, first of all, that your listeners got to hear that. I mean, listening to people speak Hawaiian. Yeah. Gosh. I wish I could actually translate that for you. I don't speak Hawaiian. I've started to take olelo, or Hawaiian language, classes. But it gave me the chills just now. Every time I hear it, it gets me in the chills.

But this is an amazing story. Most indigenous languages, as you know, it's a sad story and they're dying. But the Hawaiian language is a rare case where it's reviving and it's coming back. And now when you go to the airport and you see kids, you hear the language, even on the radio. So the story begins with the clip that you just played.

In the 70s, a man named Larry Kimura and some other students said, we don't want the language to die. They saw that all the people who are still speaking Hawaiian were older people. There were elderly people like my great grandmother from remote places where Hawaiian was still being spoken. He made it a point to record all of the people he could find who were still living in

She was one of them. He started a radio show in Honolulu and people heard it and they thought, this is amazing. I want to understand what they're saying. They advocated and lobbied the state legislature to bring back Hawaiian language into the schools, to teach children, to teach preschool, to teach it. It had been banned, you know, it had been banned with the overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom.

And they won. And it's amazing. So what did they do? They started at preschool. They said they have to start young when children can learn and absorb languages so much better than adults, as we know. They developed a preschool program. Then they developed a kindergarten program and so on. They kept building until they got through high school. Then they pushed for a college program at the University of Hawaii. Today...

you can earn a PhD. Just a few months ago, I was out at the Big Island at the University of Hawaii and I saw their building the language program, the University of Hawaii's Hawaiian Studies program. I mean, it was an amazing accomplishment that they have done this.

And now, you know, tens of thousands of people speak Hawaiian at home. I'm so jealous. I wish I were one of them. But you can learn on Duolingo. You can learn online. I have a tutor who learned and grew up in that program. It's amazing. I mean, it's nice to have a success story in indigenous language revitalization, you know? Yes. I think there's like a...

There are many other groups that are trying to get there, but this is one where the effort of this Hawaiian Renaissance really has worked and it's really paid off. It has. I think it's so inspiring. I'm inspired by it. I think others can be inspired by it, and I hope they keep going. They really do. Let's return to the land. I'm going to keep coming back to INAF, keep coming back to the land. Yeah.

Your family has had a difficult time kind of uniting around what to do, right? Because, you know, because this land goes back so far, there's just a lot of stakeholders, as we might call it. How have you tried to figure out what to do? Like, do you have a big Google Doc? Like, how does this work? Yeah.

Yeah, so when we got noticed that our family land property tax had gone up by 500%, we were like, this is, you know, we have to solve this immediately. Like a lot of Hawaiian families, our family is very big. My dad's one of eight siblings. And so this was not something that you just write a check. This was something that involved many siblings, grandchildren or children of those siblings,

who are all living everywhere from California to Massachusetts. And, you know, and then there are other properties adjacent to that one that we knew might get the same bill, right? Because we had gotten the bill. And those families that are my dad's cousins live on Oahu, live on Maui. So it became a very complex situation very quickly because

And not everybody knows everybody. Not everybody's very close. And so just imagine your own family and your own relationships and not everybody agrees. So we quickly had to figure out how do we quickly get on the same page? How do we quickly get organized? And this I really credit my father for doing this. But we quickly had to hatch a plan. And he really led a lot of those efforts. A lot of Zoom calls happened during COVID. Yeah.

But we did eventually, I think, get on the same page and quickly understand, like, at least how do we get this land? What are our options? And we hatched out some quick options for ourselves. We're talking with Sarah Keholani-Goo, who is a journalist and author about her new book, Kuleana, which explores her family's relationship to this ancestral land and Hawaiian culture amidst the pressures of, you know, capitalist development and displacement. We want to hear from you. What's coming up for you as you hear this story about...

about Hawaiian culture and land. The number is 866-733-6786. That's 866-733-6786. The email is [email protected]. And of course on social media, Blue Sky, Instagram, Discord, we're KQED Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Stay tuned for more right after the break.

Support for Forum comes from the University of San Francisco School of Management. Celebrating 100 years of partnership with the Bay Area business community, the USF School of Management connects students to the city's vibrant culture, hands-on internships, and a wealth of career opportunities. Where AI and sustainability are integrated into every facet of business education.

and where students bring innovation, ethics, and entrepreneurial leadership to a planet in need.

The University of San Francisco School of Management. Change the world from here. Support for KQED podcasts comes from Earthjustice. As a national legal nonprofit, Earthjustice has more than 200 full-time lawyers who fight for a healthy environment. They wield the power of the law to protect people's health, preserve magnificent places and wildlife, and advance clean energy to combat climate change. Earthjustice fights in court because the Earth needs a good lawyer.

Learn more about how you can get involved and become a supporter at earthjustice.org.

Welcome back to Forum. Alexis Madrigal here with Sarah Kahalani-Goo, who is a journalist and author. She's got a new book out. It's called Kuliana. She's going to be at Manny's tonight at 6 p.m. talking about the book. Before the break, we were talking about the kind of complexities of land that comes to you through the family. And Melanie in Santa Rosa, welcome. You've got a story like this. Yeah, hi. Thanks for having me. Oh, go ahead.

Oh, yeah. So, um, my father's Lebanese, who's born and raised in Lebanon, left during the Civil War of the 1980s. And, uh,

He has land that is passed down through his family in Lebanon, in the mountains of Lebanon. And lately we've been talking about how that will be passed on to us, the next generation, my siblings and I. There are seven of us siblings. We all grew up here in California. And, yeah, it's something that is a little bit tricky because, you know,

Honestly, we don't live in Lebanon. We do visit. We've seen the land. There are squatters on the land. In fact, when we went a couple years ago, part of the land had actually been given to a neighbor. If you're not there to manage it, weird things happen, right? And so we kind of have told him we would prefer...

to almost not really inherit the land. And we have cousins that grew up in Lebanon. My dad's swing, some of them stayed there. I'd almost rather it go to them. They're there, they're in person, they can manage it

And I know that upsets my dad a little bit because he sees it as a legacy and something he's passing on to his kids. And so just for me personally, I think it makes sense for it to stay with the people there that, you know, it should be managed by people there. Yeah. All this talk has that. It's such a, you know, Melanie, thanks. Thanks so much for that. What really strikes out for me is the way that inheritance is both,

It's an opportunity. It's a duty. It's a burden at times, right? It's hard for people to talk about that. But of course, when it gets this concrete form of the land and you got to do something with it, someone's got to manage it. Like, what are you going to push the squatters off the land from California? You know, there's all these things that are so complicated in this. And this obviously shows up in your book.

in a variety of ways. Yeah. I mean, I think that's an interesting question. And like, I think that this book that a lot of the themes are about this generational conversation and this generational duty, if you will. And let me talk a little bit about the meaning. We haven't talked about this, but the meaning of the word Kuleana. So I talked about, it doesn't mean responsibility, but a lot of Hawaiian words have multiple meanings. And so

The word, you know, responsibility in our Western brain means like what you just said, this thing I have to do, this thing on my checklist that we have running in our brains. It's like, I have to do this thing. But Kuleana to me actually means something quite different. It is actually a generational responsibility is how I've come to understand it in the context of this land, right?

I don't know if this is helpful to the caller or not, but it is really about honor and privilege responsibility. So think of it as something that it is chosen for you that your grandparents or your parents chose.

is passed down to you and will be passed down to your children. So it is more lasting in responsibility. And so the kuleana that you hear in Hawaii is more like about caring for your taro patch or caring for your fish pond or caring for your family's

You know, you're the irrigation or the stream that flows through your land or the land itself. It is more like the natural resources that help feed and care for the people who are who need it and that will need it going forward. So if you think about that is something that extends beyond you.

that is more of your honor and your privilege of your responsibility. It is not to apply for the daily tasks that we're talking about, but I think that that is how I've come to understand it. So the land in this is actually not about that kind of responsibility. It is more about the generational responsibility.

So how did that end up applying in your family's case? Like, what did you end up deciding to do with this land? Well, we decided that we would...

try to keep it in our hands no matter what. The point was not really to develop it. That kind of frees us from making real estate decisions, if you will. The point is, if our responsibility is to keep it in our family hands, because that is the promise that we have made for 175 years and we will make as part of our legacy to the Hawaiian kingdom and the Kahanu family,

then that is what we have honored to do and care for. And the heiau as well. So those two, that is our family's kuleana. And if we remain true to that, then that's what we're here for. Talk a little bit about what happened to the land near your families with this heiau and sort of how that has become part of the kind of longer and kind of broader legacy of your family there.

Well, I mean, luckily, you know, our family and our, you know, not just my grandmother, but her cousins and sort of extended family. Yeah. I mean, I think that some, you know, most of it is very, you know, raw and developed, just as it has been, you know, when the day when the king gave it to our ancestor. Yeah.

And I think that that's very appropriate. There's a dirt road that runs through it. It's along the coast. You can hike there. A lot of our, you know, my cousins go fishing there off the shore. You know, one of our family members has a house and lives there. But on either side, there are a few neighbors that have, you know, foreigners who come and have built homes, vacation homes there.

You know, it's not a place that attracts the typical wealthy billionaire, to be honest. Hana is a real chill, remote kind of place. It has attracted people who kind of want to escape from the world. So I think that it has remained, I think, you know, just as it has for a very long time. And I think it will be. It's not the kind of place that is, you know, a lot of tourists go, which is I think has its benefits. Yeah.

Some of our listeners want to talk about what's been happening in Hawaii more generally. Matthew writes, you know, I've spent a lot of time in Kauai where Mark Zuckerberg bought the old Terra plantation, took vast plots of land adjacent to his palatial estate and tried to block access to a wonderful nude beach.

Yeah, I mean, that's a very good point. And I think it kind of touches on what we talked about earlier. And truly, a lot of these...

You know, wealthy billionaires have literally bought the properties that the plantation owners used to own. Like Larry Ellison is quite number one. It's kind of strange. Yeah. I mean, imagine this. If you go to the island of Lanai, you know, that island, every single Hawaiian, every person who lives there is both an employee and a tenant of Larry Ellison. That is very strange situation. I don't know where else that exists in our country.

But I think what it is is and I think this is maybe a difficult conversation to have here. But like, I think there are places we need to think about responsible real estate investing. Because when you talk about Hawaii, where there's a real limited amount of real estate, every acre that a billionaire is buying up or even a person is buying a second home and it is sitting empty, that is really driving up the cost for everybody else who lives there.

And it is less housing for local people. And so on Maui, for example, which is dealing with the real impact of the fires two years ago, what you have is a situation where rental homes make up 20% of the housing stock. They sit empty for a majority, a lot of time.

And now it's not that people displaced by the fire, there isn't housing for them. It's just the housing that does exist is not affordable for them. And so it is a really difficult situation right now where, you know, homelessness has been driven up.

As a result, and prices have only increased, and the average home on Maui is $1.3 million. Well, and what that's meant, right, is that people are living in tents on beaches, right? I mean, it's like a situation many people here are familiar with. These are working homeless people who go live on the beach in a tent and then go work in a resort. Yeah, they're driving your bus from, you know, the airport shuttle. Yeah.

Let's bring in another caller here. Let's bring in David in Palo Alto. Welcome. Hey, how you doing? Thanks for taking my call. So this is reminding me, my dad just recently passed in January. I was going through some of his paperwork, and it turned out that my family, going back to Emancipation Proclamation, and what we just went through, GMP, that as a black family, we were probably one of the first families that inherited or was given some property back in the 1800s.

And I can see through his paperwork that had been slowly kind of whittled away here and there. Back in 1962, well before I was born and he even met my mother, he tried to sue to get some of the property back. And basically the government in Texas said, nope, you don't have a right to sue. So I can kind of see how this is a parallel. It's really interesting. Yeah, absolutely. David, this is fascinating. I mean, I remember reading some years ago about the dispossession of black farmers like throughout the South, right, as you mentioned.

You're up against a lot of forces, right? And this land can, you know, you gesture at it in your book. It's hard to tell when these lands are sold or mortgaged or whatever it is, where these actually are.

Did people really have a choice? And David, thanks for calling. Sorry about your dad as well. Yeah, thank you. And I think that what the paper trail shows you is there's all these systems that are set, the legal systems, the bureaucracy that is just set up that, at least for me, I found that my family was fighting every generation. And this...

property tax situation that we were fighting was just today's version of that, you know, but there was always something. And there will be something else, I'm sure, for me and my children. We will be ready for it. But that was the lesson that I saw in that trove of documents. And I think it's important to document your family's history, those record keepers we talked about, I think. Are you now the keeper of the box? I am, I think. I think I have no choice. Yeah.

You know, you wrote in the book that there's a difference between heritage and identity. How did this kind of struggle to figure out what to do with the land, think about the land, visit the land, how did that help you

answer that or that question between heritage and identity for yourself? I think that's a good question. I think that the land situation, I think I had to figure out, well, even if we solve this problem with the land, you know, like, so what, right? We may solve it today, but that doesn't mean that, you know, my kids will, I have to have faith that they'll understand it, you know, in 20, 40 years, right?

after I die, right? I needed to make sure that I was passed. If I didn't pass on the culture and the importance of that culture to them, that will have been for naught, right? And so my answer to my own identity and my cultural connection was it wasn't enough to just go to Hawaii. I needed to have a cultural practice. I turned to hula. And believe it or not, I found a hula halau or hula school in

In Washington, D.C., I brought my children with me and we were going to do, you know, practice our hula together. And that was so fulfilling. And I felt like, you know, this is a way for my children. When you do hula, when you dance, you have to know the language. You have to learn the language. You have to you're doing storytelling. It's truly the best way to practice your culture.

So that was one way to... Literally embodying culture. Exactly. Exactly. So that was one way to realize that I had to put some skin in the game. I had to really, truly, not just solve one problem, but I had to really look inside and I had to solve it for myself. I had to figure out as a parent, how do I keep this going? It goes back to what we were talking about earlier about Kuleana is like,

what does this mean going forward for this next generation? And I realized I had a generational responsibility. I think in our culture today, we're so focused on the me, the now, that we kind of lose sight of the bigger picture of what is happening next. You know, what am I really here for in the larger context? So that was my awakening. Let's bring in caller Dawn in Mountain View. Welcome, Dawn.

Good morning. Thanks for this interesting conversation. I'm a scientist. I'm a geologist. I'm a volcanologist. And I work with scientists at Hawaii Volcanoes Observatory. And I'm actually going to be looking at samples from Kilauea today in my lab. Oh, cool. Yeah, the scientists there in particular are very, very familiar with this concept of kuleana.

where they send me samples here in California, we analyze them, and they are returned back to Hawaii when we're finished. So I have like, I don't know, 20 or 30 samples I need to return, but they are eventually returned back to Hawaii

To close that circle of bringing the Kilauea Pele samples back to Hawaii, actually, you had just mentioned the kind of generational thing. I think you can kind of apply this scientifically. A lot of samples geologically are kept with one scientist and

Maybe they'll be passed on to follow-on scientists. But by returning these samples back to Hawaii, to Hawaii Volcanoes Observatory, this allows additional studies and additional learning from, you

you know, from these samples from Kilauea, if you want to speak to it that way. But there are people in this, well, at least the Hawaii Volcanoes Observatory and here at the USGS in Mountain View who are very familiar with this concept. So we support it and want to protect it as well. That's beautiful. Dawn, thank you so much. I do like just thinking about the ways that you think Kuleana can be applied

applied in other contexts, you know, not to just purely adopt a Native Hawaiian concept, but just as a way, a mode of thinking. Yeah, I love that. I didn't know that, Don, and that's really cool. But it doesn't surprise me, actually. And I feel like this concept is, it is Hawaiian, like you said, Alexis, but I do think it's something Hawaiians can teach the world. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

Kim writes in to say, as a non-Hawaiian who lived in Hawaii for 11 years, it was impossible to avoid the sadness which permeated any discussion of ancestral lands. The scars of the U.S. takeover of an independent monarchy live on in the psyche of the people. The only people who profited were the missionaries' descendants. Yeah.

What do you think? I mean, as someone who would travel to Hawaii, say, I mean, what's a way that they can be respectful of this legacy? Yeah, I mean, I get that question a lot. And I think that, you know, one of the reasons I wrote this book is really just to bring awareness. I think that

9 million people visit Hawaii every year, and I think so few people just even understand its history and its context. They understand aloha. They understand, you know, maybe they pick up a few words. Maybe they understand the language. But they – and I think Hawaii is doing a better job of making the culture an intentional part of the experience. Yeah.

Beyond the kind of performative part of it. They've been smart about putting Native Hawaiian leaders in charge of tourism, believe it or not, the last several years. But there's a lot more work to do. And I want to, you know, I wanted to help inform the curious traveler a bit more and more.

That's just a start. But I think also realize that when you're going there, like come with an open mind, understand the place you're entering. When I travel, I want to learn about a history and a place of everywhere I go. And I feel like, you know, there are a limited number of books about Hawaii that truly offer that. There are a lot, but there are a number of them. But I think that this was a way, you know, by telling my family story to tell a larger story. Yeah.

We have been talking with Sarah Kahalani-Goo, journalist and author about this new book, Kuliana, Exploring Her Family's Relationship to Their Ancestral Land. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you for having me. This is great. And again, you can catch Sarah in person tonight at Manny's in the Mission. It's going to be at 6 p.m. They're going to be talking about the book. And there is going to be a special performance from Hula Group members.

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