Kuleana: A Story of Family, Land, and Legacy in Old Hawai'i

by Sara Kehaulani Goo

Along the rugged shores of Maui’s east coast, bright blue waves crash into the black rock coastline that, from above, frames the rainforest like a postcard of paradise. A light breeze smells like the wild guava trees that grow abundantly on the island mixed with salty air whipped up from the ocean: a perfume found only here, in the middle of the Pacific. And around every bend in the winding road that weaves through here, a breathtaking waterfall spills from the cliffs above—sometimes into a natural swimming hole that tempts you to stop to take a cool dip.

More than ninety acres of this land, from the road to the sea, now worth many millions of dollars, are still owned by my family—the Kahanu family. This is just a fraction of the original, much larger landholding given to my ancestor by King Kamehameha III in 1848.

No matter, because having this land allows us to hold on to a small piece of the past. That past was a time before the United States of America existed and when Hawai‘i was not a vacation spot but an island nation with its own system of chiefs, gods, and kings, thriving and isolated by vast oceans on every side.

This land is not merely land, at least in the way Western eyes see it. The land is heritage. The land is evidence of our survival. The land—the ‘āina (aye-nah)—is our kuleana (koo-lee-ah-nah)—our responsibility.

In the ancestral tradition, families each had responsibility for some part of the place they lived, the food supply or cultural practice. For example, certain people had kuleana for growing taro or crops in a certain part of the island, or for taking care of a fishpond or teaching hula. In ancient Hawaiian society, each person had an assigned role that they learned, practiced, and perfected with pride.

In turn, society depended upon them to fulfill their role so that the larger society could function and become dependent upon one another for survival.

this way of life was essential for living on an island surrounded by a vast ocean as far as the eye could see with little contact to the outside world. Native Hawaiians had to develop a way to survive and thrive by making the most of what nature could provide on land and sea. Before Western contact, that meant developing a system by which each island was divided into a dozen or more pie-shap...

Responsibility, in the Western sense, often comes with a sigh, an obligation—a burden, even. But kuleana means a much deeper, prideful responsibility—a privilege, even. Kuleana, in the family sense, is passed down from one generation to another in a continuous line.

In Hawai‘i, I’m hapa (hah-pah), or part, a mix of those two. I’m a mainlander who lives a very different cultural and social reality from locals who live on the islands. Even if I look Hawaiian, in Hawai‘i, my mainland accent gives me away. I’m not a “local” who can talk pidgin beyond my “Eyy, howzit?!” But I also know enough and understand enough that they know I’m not a haole. I’ve always felt like a member of the Native Hawaiian tribe on the outside looking in, trying to fit in and learn, mouthing the words to the song but not confident enough to sing it loudly. Still, Hawai‘i and its cultural practices—the music, the hula, the food, even the language—stir something deep inside me that is hard to describe except to say that it feels part of me even as I’m still learning it. I feel connected to it, called to it deep in my soul. It feels like I belong, and I want more of it. But my ability to be present in it is never long enough, never quite fully immersed.

first land grab—from the sugarcane plantations where sons of American missionary families and European entrepreneurs pushed out Native Hawaiians and other residents from their homes to cultivate and export sugar. These

The second land grab came swiftly from the US government, which eyed Hawai‘i’s strategic location in the Pacific as an ideal military base—and later used one Hawaiian island, Kaho‘olawe, exclusively for bombing target practice.

Today’s land grab is from yet another powerful set that roughly tracks the world’s wealthiest on the Forbes list: Zuckerberg, Bezos, Ellison, just to name a few.

As of 2020, there are more people of Native Hawaiian ancestry living outside Hawai‘i than those who live on the islands.

Less than a third of local residents can afford to buy a condo, much less a single-family house, as prices have risen 2.5 to 8 times their value since 2000.

When the median home sells for over $1 million but the median salary is $50,000, the math is simple.

Four in ten people who are homeless in the state today are Native Hawaiians or Pacific Islanders.

What do we owe those who came before us and those who will come after?

Maui. I look Asian American, and I have a Chinese name, but in the white American world as well as the Chinese American world, I didn’t feel enough of either to feel that I fully identified.

As someone who is mixed race, I learned very early on that to others, I could pass as a lot of things if I kept my mouth shut.

The Native Hawaiian part spoke up the loudest inside me not just because it was the side that my parents and grandparents had made sure that I had a connection to, but because it was also reinforced by my peers as the unique part about me.

If Native Hawaiian history didn’t exist in a book, did that mean that there simply wasn’t anything known about Native Hawaiian people and their history? Did it mean that they didn’t leave enough of a mark on the world or that their stories didn’t count—weren’t important enough? Did it mean that no one cared? I was too young at the time to ask these bigger questions that I’d ask later on in life, when I managed to find some books about heiau published in the academic press. I just knew that, early on, this somehow meant that the world didn’t know their story because I couldn’t find their story.

That first trip to the heiau sparked so many broader questions that I’d think and wonder about—I knew there must be answers somewhere, but I couldn’t find them. For years after that first trip to the heiau, all my questions remained in a capsule without answers.

Looking back now, this experience—and the unanswered questions—planted the seed for me to become a journalist. That burning itch to find answers would lead me to return again and again to my family’s roots in Hawai‘i. I simply wasn’t satisfied with not knowing the answers.

Seizing an opportunity of the US’s Northern states’ inability to access sugar from the South during the Civil War, the Big Five profited from favorable export agreements to the US mainland via the West Coast—and gobbled up hundreds of acres of land on the islands to cultivate sugar.

Within a couple of decades of the Mahele in 1848, many Hawaiians found themselves without access to the ‘āina. Sugar plantations not only changed the Hawaiians’ way of life and locked out most from access to land—they had other downstream effects.

All told, these purchases mean that billionaires who don’t live in Hawai‘i own more and more of the land that is now unavailable for locals who can’t afford to buy, can’t afford to build their own equity. For those who do own a home, it drives up their property taxes.

From the moment I saw those two blue lines on the home test, I knew that I wanted to give our child a Hawaiian middle name, keeping with tradition in my family.

When we give our children those Hawaiian names, that ancestral spirit lives within the child and guides the child.”

Within fifty years of the Mahele becoming law, the landholdings by haoles far outnumbered the Native Hawaiians’ so that they quickly became landless in their own kingdom.

Native Hawaiian families have lost their undivided interests in land where ownership was never formally divided or never clarified in family wills or probate courts.

Heiau is often translated as “temple,” but heiau are not the kind of structures or buildings that you enter inside to pray.

The largest heiau, like Pi‘ilanihale, were thought to be symbols of the king’s power, which is similar to man’s desire to build “monumental architecture,” or large edifices over time to symbolize power.

This monument located on our family’s ancestral land was named for Pi‘ilani, a famous chief of the island of Maui, who ruled in the 1600s and was known for uniting the island’s east and west factions.

The site’s oldest carbon dating put its birth at around AD 1200, but some parts dated to centuries later, creating the theory that it wasn’t built all at once and sections had been added onto it over time.

Our family is kahu. I am kahu. I carry the kuleana as a guardian, like my dozens of cousins who still live in Hawai‘i, to ensure that this Hawaiian treasure—the heiau—is protected and honored forever.

One generation to the next. This is how we survive as a people, as a culture. I’ll never forget this day. And I hope to God she doesn’t either. It’s up to her to decide how much this moment means, to sear it into her memory. Hopefully it’s one of many memories I’ve given her to help show her who she is and those who came before. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that keeping a culture alive means learning it, living it, and passing it on.

My story is a story of land lost but also kept and honored; a culture nearly stamped out but fighting to endure. My story, and my Hawaiian family’s story, is also one of survival, struggle, and fulfillment. It’s about what you owe to those who come before you and those who come after you and coming to understand the privilege of that responsibility. Even if it’s hard to grasp in the modern world we live in, I believe kuleana is a part of Hawaiian culture that also has universal understanding that speaks to one’s larger, grounding purpose. At least, it is to me.