Seeking a Way Forward on Ceded Lands

In 2018, when the Hawai‘i Supreme Court allowed construction on the Thirty Meter Telescope to begin, Native Hawaiians responded with a fierce and forceful protest. They blocked the road and interrupted the groundbreaking, physical acts that represented a deep-seated resentment for what they saw as the state’s failure to, once again, preserve the integrity of the land, a fundamental pillar of the Hawaiian system of values.

Images of the standoff harkened back to the peaceful demonstrations at Kaho‘olawe, Sand Island and Mākua Valley, and reawakened the highly contentious and unresolved fight over Hawai‘i’s ceded lands.

The ceded lands of Hawai‘i comprise about 1.8 million acres that belonged to the Hawaiian Kingdom before the illegal overthrow of 1893. This land was ceded to the U.S. in 1898 by a joint resolution of Congress, and 1.4 million of these acres were transferred back to Hawai‘i in 1959 as a public trust to benefit the people of Hawai‘i and Native Hawaiians, as spelled out in that year’s Admission Act, which granted statehood to Hawai‘i. Some 374,000 acres were retained by the federal government for military bases, national parks and other public purposes.

Since then, as awareness of repeated transgressions has grown, so too has intolerance for the mismanagement of ceded lands.

“As people started to engage on social media, in the community and probably at the dinner table, more of these issues – the atrocities the state has committed against Hawaiians – started to bubble up,” says Kamana‘opono Crabbe, who was CEO of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs during the Maunakea protests. “It opened up a wound regarding the overthrow of the kingdom, colonization, the occupation of Hawai‘i by the United States and the right to self-determination.”

What was happening on Maunakea also sparked discussions among executives at the Hawai‘i Executive Collaborative, a group of CEOs and decision-makers in business, government, labor, education and the nonprofit sector. Future scenarios envisioned by the collaborative included ones that put Hawai‘i on a culturally misguided, economically undesirable and environmentally unsustainable path, so in 2019 they launched an initiative called Rediscovering Hawai‘i’s Soul to redirect toward a better future.

Ideas on important topics like ceded lands (now also known as Kingdom lands) are shared at gatherings under the umbrella of the initiative called Rediscovering Hawai’i’s soul. | Photo credit: Brad Goda

RHS comprises a diverse network that includes Native Hawaiian and non-Native Hawaiian leaders from more than 100 organizations. Their aim is to find common ground on some of Hawai‘i’s most intractable problems: climate change, workforce diversification, universal housing and more.

Among the RHS working groups is a subcommittee on ceded lands, which it calls Kingdom Lands; it’s headed by First Hawaiian Bank CEO Bob Harrison. “This topic underpins so much of the issues that we face today. It’s a fairness issue, it’s an understanding of where we’re at today versus where we started all those years ago, (and) it’s a transition of power issue,” Harrison says. “You can’t make the past go away, but how can we find a path forward?”

Māhele, Cession and Transfer of Lands

Jonathan Osorio, a historian and Dean of the Hawai’inuiākea School of Hawaiian Knowledge at UH Mānoa, says, “in our stories, ‘āina is thought of as an older relative. … you don’t own your ancestors. You take care of them.”

According to the Kumulipo, the Hawaiian creation chant, the land and Hawaiians are elements of divine creation connected through genealogy. “In our stories, ‘āina is thought of as an older relative – kupuna – an ancestor of ours,” explains Jonathan Osorio, a historian and dean of the Hawai‘inuiākea School of Hawaiian Knowledge at UH Mānoa. “You don’t own your ancestors. You take care of them.”

Taking care of the land has always been an incontrovertible Hawaiian practice and was the foundation of a highly organized subsistence economy that enabled early Hawaiians to sustain their population for more than a thousand years. With Western contact, the life of the land changed, literally and figuratively. Invasive plants and animals refashioned the landscape, urban development shifted streams and suffocated fishponds, and bullets and bombs desecrated hallowed land.

The 19th century also saw what Native Hawaiian rights advocate and constitutional law professor Jon Van Dyke called “an orgy of national enslavement,” during which every Pacific Island community succumbed to Western rule. The threat of imperial conquest in Hawai‘i was very real considering what was happening at that time: As the population collapsed, from half a million people in 1778 to 84,000 in 1850, the ability to operate their sophisticated subsistence economy was lost. “The people were diseased and the land was suffering as a result,” Osorio says. “So the kingdom’s response was, how do we protect this place from being seized by another country?”

This was the impetus for King Kamehameha III to establish Hawai‘i as an independent nation under a constitutional monarchy that was recognized by Western superpowers of the time, including Britain, France, and the United States. He also initiated the Māhele (which means “to share”) in 1848, assigning property rights to Native Hawaiians that could be protected by law.

“The hardest thing to do is to explain how you translate a land system in which no one owned the land, not even the highest-ranking chief,” says Osorio. “Setting up the Māhele was essentially a conversation that was taking place between King Kamehameha III, a few dozen major ali‘i nui (high chiefs) who ran the government, and the ali‘i advisors over how to best end the strain and struggle between newcomers and their claims to the land, land that Hawaiians had occupied and utilized for millennia. The Māhele was designed to identify the Kānaka Maoli (Indigenous) stakeholders in terms of possession of land.”

The system they devised mimicked Western ways of defining properties using geographic boundaries but also preserved the relationship that Native Hawaiians have to land, which includes access to resources like forests and streams that can’t be divided up by drawing lines around them on paper.

The Māhele was intended to satisfy both Western and Hawaiian sensibilities – that is, ensure that the land would be kept in Hawaiian hands by the assignment of property rights. And it would do so while maintaining the traditional system of land management that thrived under kingdom rule, whereby three entities – the overall sovereign, the chiefs who assumed the role of landlords, and the people who assumed the role of tenants – collectively “owned” each square acre of land in Hawai‘i. (“Ownership” was a foreign concept in Old Hawai‘i, where land values were derived through the fruits of well stewarded lands, not through ownership.)

Over a period of two to three years, Osorio explains, King Kamehameha III and the 256 ali‘i separated their interests in lands that could be validated through their genealogy. The king claimed about 1 million acres as crown lands, which would descend to each succeeding monarch, and assigned another 1.5 million acres as government lands. The ali‘i collectively claimed the rest, about 1.6 million acres. From these lands, maka‘āinana, or commoners, were to apply for their own kuleana lands, where they lived or farmed.

Being given title to land required a massive paradigm shift for maka‘āinana, who were suddenly both tenants and landlords. They could no longer rely on the chief to provide protection, to make sure that water flowed through, or to allow grazing rights on adjacent lands. “By doing this, they were entirely on their own,” Osorio says, explaining the confusion and hesitation that set in. At the time of the Māhele, there were 84,000 Native Hawaiians, according to the 1850 census; yet only 14,000 claims were made and only 8,700 claims were approved, totaling 27,000 acres.

The lands held by ali‘i were not fee simple – they reverted to the kingdom when they died; however, ali‘i could opt to pay the value of one-third of their land or return one-third of their land to the government. If they did either of those things, they would receive royal patent grants for the remaining two-thirds, which they would then own in perpetuity. By 1852, thousands of acres of prime Hawaiian land had been sold to foreigners, notes law professor Neil M. Levy in his 1975 journal article titled Native Hawaiian Land Rights: “More importantly Western property concepts were imposed on the legal structure and would facilitate the rapid, steady takeover of Hawaiian-owned lands during the next several decades.” The critical thing to understand, Osorio emphasizes, is that by 1893, all of these lands had become property.

“When those people overthrow the government of the queen in 1893, they are taking the property of the kingdom. Moreover, when they take the queen’s property, which is the crown lands, they’re taking the property of an individual,” he says. “When they put that together and say, this is now all ours – that’s the legal and ethical problem that lies at the root of our conflict with the American government.”

After deposing Queen Lili‘uokalani, the self-proclaimed Republic of Hawai‘i merged government lands with crown lands under the single umbrella of “public lands” and, through the 1895 Land Act, instituted ways of selling and leasing them. When the Treaty of Annexation failed to pass the U.S. Senate, Congress instead accepted the 1898 Newlands Resolution, by which 1.8 million acres of public lands in Hawai‘i were handed over to the federal government, giving origin to the term “ceded lands.” Ultimately, the takeover resulted in Hawaiians losing access to the lands that had always sustained them. “The impoverishment of our people comes as a direct result of the theft of close to 2 million acres of land,” Osorio says.

This political collapse unfolded against a backdrop of social upheaval for Native Hawaiians. Their ancient religion had yielded to Christian beliefs, and disease had reduced the Native population to 37,000 by 1900. Today, in retrospect, we see the injustices that Hawaiians weren’t able to see for themselves as they were occurring, explains Crabbe, the executive lead for Rediscovering Hawai‘i’s Soul and a member of its core committee. Pointing to the snuffing out of language and culture, he says, “You begin to see this insidious process of political disempowerment.”

Photo credit: Brad Goda

In 1921, Congress addressed the need to assist “landless and dying” Native Hawaiians by passing the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act of 1920, which set aside 200,000 acres for homesteads. Prince Jonah Kūhiō Kalaniana‘ole, who championed the measure, wrote to U.S. senators, “After extensive investigation … it was found that the only method in which to rehabilitate the race was to place them back on the soil.” Native Hawaiians who can prove at least 50% blood quantum are eligible to apply for 99-year leases at one dollar a year. Today, 29,300 applicants remain on the waitlist to receive lots and, despite passage of the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act, more than 2,000 have died waiting.

From the lands that were ceded to the U.S., the military set up bases on thousands of acres on O‘ahu, on what is now all or part of Fort Shafter, Schofield Barracks, Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, and Marine Corps Base Hawaii at Kāne‘ohe Bay. Installations were also built at Bellows and Lualualei on previously designated Hawaiian homestead lands. The Navy took possession of Kaho‘olawe in 1953, and the Army established the Pōhakuloa Training Area in 1964. Following statehood, the military retained control of these lands, much of it at a cost of only $1 for the entire length of their 65-year leases.

When Hawai‘i became a state, ceded land entitlements were recast in the Admission Act of 1959. The act transferred 1.4 million acres from the federal government to Hawai‘i as a public trust, specifying five purposes for which they were to be used and managed by the state for:

1, the support of public schools and other public educational institutions, 2, the betterment of the conditions of Native Hawaiians, as defined in the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act, 3, the development of farm and home ownership, 4, the making of public improvements, 5, the provision of lands for public use.

“Their use for any other object shall constitute a breach of trust for which suit may be brought by the United States,” the act specifies. The responsibility to carry out this agreement was bestowed upon the Hawai‘i Department of Land and Natural Resources (DLNR).

Were these transfers of land between the federal government and the state legitimate? One hundred years after the overthrow, Congress passed the 1993 Apology Resolution acknowledging 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.” While the act apologized for the illegal insurrection and urged the U.S. to “support reconciliation efforts,” it held no legal force. No mandate to repair harm or restore dignity was issued.

“I will insist to the day I die that the provisional government – the so-called Republic of Hawai‘i – had no authority. They had no legal right to take those lands, and therefore they had no right to cede them to the United States. If it’s stolen property, and the U.S. has this, it doesn’t fix the situation by transferring it to yet a third agency that does not in any way represent the kingdom,” Osorio says. “This is why you hear so many Hawaiians and Hawaiian sympathizers refer to this as the fake state – that it does not legally exist. The problem is that it is here, and it does have control.”

The Con Con and Establishment of OHA

The 1970s saw a wave of political activism accompanied by a cultural renaissance. Peaceful demonstrations underscored the vital connection of Native Hawaiians to their lands, from protesting evictions in Kalama Valley and Waiāhole-Waikāne to condemning the Navy’s bombing of Kaho‘olawe. The A.L.O.H.A. (Aboriginal Lands of Hawaiian Ancestry) Association launched a movement to seek federal recognition at the same time that Native Alaskans were granted reparations through Congress. Discussions about self-determination and sovereignty began to take place.

As calls for justice grew – amplified in the anthem “Hawai‘i ’78” – the Constitutional Convention of 1978, dubbed the Con Con, was called to order with tenacious activist Frenchy DeSoto and future Hawai‘i Gov. John Waihe‘e III leading the charge on Native affairs. They saw the Con Con as a distinct opportunity to compel restitution through governance.

“They were asking themselves, ‘What are our rights under the Admission Act?” Crabbe says. Why were Hawaiians being barred from Kaho‘olawe when those were ceded lands? Who was making decisions about the uses of ceded lands? They were being used for roads and sidewalks. They were being leased to sugar plantations, the U.S. military and the University of Hawai‘i. But where, they wondered, were they being used to benefit Native Hawaiians?

At the time, the notion of a public trust was fairly new, Waihe‘e recalls, first expressed by Chief Justice William Richardson in the mid-1970s. “If you look for those words prior to 1970, you might not find them,” Waihe‘e says. Since it was an unfamiliar concept to pin action to, the question became a critical point of debate: Was the state upholding its duty as trustee? “The government took the position that they were fulfilling their obligation because they put 100%, according to their records, of the revenues generated by the leases and sales of these lands to fund education – and the education system included Native Hawaiian kids. So one fell swoop, they’re in there,” Waihe‘e explains. “But for Native Hawaiians, [the answer was] no, because Native Hawaiian kids, like non-Native Hawaiian kids, were all entitled to a public education [regardless of the ceded lands issue]. It was shorting the payment, shorting the obligation.”

Concurrently, the question of self-governance was raised. “For many, many people in Hawai‘i, the idea of having a self-governing entity was alien. As we discussed these issues, the thing that came up was, ‘What if Native Hawaiians get reparations like the Alaska Natives?’ ” Waihe‘e says. “The political tradition established by the way statehood had been accomplished was that Alaska goes first, Hawai‘i goes second. So the idea was to create a receptacle for if that happened in Hawai‘i.” As a result, the delegates proposed Amendment 28, which established the Office of Hawaiian Affairs.

Waihe‘e names two criteria that were essential to making OHA a de facto fourth branch of government: legitimacy and independence. For it to be legitimate in the eyes of the people it serves, the leaders would have to be elected by Native Hawaiians – hence, a Hawaiian-only election. Secondly, it would need to be independently funded. “Where would these independent resources come from? That’s when people went back to look at these ceded lands documents and recognized this is money and resources that should be going to Native Hawaiians,” Waihe‘e says. “Revenues from the ceded lands became the answer.”

Delegates then considered two alternatives for calculating the entitlement: 50% of revenue – since the Admission Act designated two beneficiaries (the public and Native Hawaiians) – or 20%, since benefits to Native Hawaiians were one of five designated purposes. Time ran out at the convention, so the decision fell to the Legislature, which, after extensive deliberation, decided on 20% as the amount due. Revenues at the time meant income from public land leases managed by DLNR, but precisely what constituted revenues and which lands these revenues should come from were never clearly defined.

Regarding the 20%, Waihe‘e says this entitlement was not to be applied as a new tax or additional appropriation, but rather as a designated prioritization of existing budgets. He also raises another point: Should the authority to negotiate ceded lands revenues continue to reside with the state? “Maunakea was leased for a dollar,” he says. “That obviously didn’t come from the Office of Hawaiian Affairs.”

In 2006, the state Legislature passed Act 178, arriving at $15.1 million as the temporary dollar amount due annually to OHA to satisfy the 20% revenue requirement. A separate settlement, in the form of the Kaka‘ako Makai land transfer from the state to OHA worth $200 million, was approved in 2012 to compensate for back due payments.

OHA conducted independent audits of ceded land revenues in 2012 and 2016, assessing receipts big and small, from facility rentals to vending machines. Both audits revealed shortfalls, with the one in 2016 finding $247.2 million in discrepancies between what the state paid and what OHA was owed. There are also ongoing disputes about revenue disposition from harbors ($60 million in reported receipts in 2016), airports ($73.1 million in 2016) and the University of Hawai‘i ($3.3 million in 2016) – major facilities situated or partially situated on ceded lands – and what OHA’s portion of these should be.

The most recent allocation to OHA was promised in 2022, when Act 226 increased OHA’s temporary share of ceded lands revenues to $21.5 million annually and mandated $64 million in back payments. The act also established a working group to reconsider the true pro rata amount due to Native Hawaiians.

Legislation and Court Cases

For the past 25 years, numerous laws and court decisions have filled in some of the gaps in ceded lands policy, which has required further interpretation on a case-by-case basis. Going forward, it’s important to understand the major decisions that have been issued and the issues that remain unsolved. Following are some key factors to consider.

1) BENEFICIARIES The Admission Act of 1959 specified one of the five purposes of the ceded lands “for the betterment of the conditions of Native Hawaiians, as defined in the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act.” The HHCA recognizes Native Hawaiians as those having 50% or more Hawaiian ancestry.

While there was talk at the Con Con about how to broaden the definition of Native Hawaiians, the state must honor the federal act, and changes to the blood quantum can’t be made without Congress’ approval, says Melody Kapilialoha MacKenzie, professor emerita and founding director of Ka Huli Ao Center for Excellence in Native Hawaiian Law at the William S. Richardson School of Law at UH Mānoa. However, the purpose of OHA is to benefit the whole Hawaiian community, she points out, so in the statute establishing OHA [HRS 10-1], both groups of Native Hawaiians are named as beneficiaries – those with 50% or more Hawaiian ancestry and those with less.

MacKenzie says both federal and state courts eventually debated whether OHA could legally use ceded lands money to benefit those of less than 50% Hawaiian ancestry. She offers a hypothetical situation presented by one of the judges that illustrates how a strict definition of Native Hawaiian contradicts the policy’s intent: “One of the judges asked, ‘What if you have a Hawaiian woman who is not of 50% ancestry and she is about to give birth to a baby who is 50% ancestry? Shouldn’t she be able to get health care and benefits?’ The plaintiffs said, ‘No, she shouldn’t,’ but obviously it would benefit the child of 50% or more Hawaiian ancestry.” In the end, the courts have declared that as long as the state and OHA adhere to their obligation of supporting those with 50% or more Hawaiian ancestry, any benefit to those of less than 50% does not violate their fiduciary duty to Native Hawaiians.

2) CEDED LANDS INVENTORY In 2000, the DLNR introduced the State Land Information Management System, or SLIMS, an online inventory of state lands that includes lease receipts. By DLNR’s own admission, the inventory was incomplete and inaccurate, hampered by surveying gaps and unsuccessful title searches. Also, only ceded lands managed by DLNR were included in the system. In 2011, the state Legislature passed Act 54 to update the SLIMS database with information on public trust lands managed by any state agency. The revamped Public Land Trust Information System is accessible at pltis.hawaii.gov.

“One of the major, major problems is identifying all of these ceded lands. Over the early days of statehood, they didn’t keep very good records,” says MacKenzie.

During Crabbe’s tenure as OHA’s CEO, the office hired independent researchers to look up royal patents and land grant awards and trace which crown lands had been turned over to private hands. Crabbe points out that accounting during the days of the territorial government was done by hand and recorded on paper, and information may have been lost or re-created as administrations changed. According to OHA’s findings, the lands identified as crown lands in 1898 didn’t match up with the records from 1959.

“The question we were trying to ask was, ‘Is the data we are collecting the same data that the SLIMS database has collected?’ ” Crabbe shares, saying OHA has inquired about the process DLNR used to inventory their acquisitions. “They don’t have the answer.”

Osorio, who sits on the RHS Kingdom Lands subcommittee, says his colleagues recognize the tangled complexity of these questions, which is why their starting point is to create a thorough inventory of the lands. “The inventory should include not just boundaries and a monetary assessment, but also a historic assessment that looks at what those lands were used for, what they might be used for in terms of agriculture and aquaculture and forestry,” he suggests. And he lists the stakeholders who should be included in the process: DLNR, the land use commission, taro farmers and fishpond managers.

“We have produced this growing group of people who have gone back to the land and who now manage the land in more traditional ways,” Osorio says. “We’re producing a tremendous amount of knowledge about what can be done to restore, for instance, ‘ōpae ‘ula in the streams. We have water guardians insisting on the restoration of water in the West Maui streams. They all have to be at the table.”

3) MILITARY LEASES Currently, the U.S. military controls about 222,000 acres, or about 5% of the land in Hawai‘i, including 112,142 acres of ceded lands. In 2029, many of the military’s 65-year leases of ceded lands are set to expire, creating great anticipation for a sea change in ceded land management. While the military has been undergoing the environmental review process and making presentations to the Board of Land and Natural Resources in hopes of renewing the leases, Native Hawaiian advocates are exploring whether self-determination and federal recognition of Indigenous rights might give a sovereign entity legal ownership of ceded lands. “For many in the Hawaiian community, any kind of lease is not an option. It’s a continuing violation of the lands. It’s a continuing hurt,” says MacKenzie.

One of the most pivotal decisions will be what happens at Pōhakuloa, a high plateau in the center of Hawai‘i Island where the Army conducts war games at the 132,000-acre Pōhakuloa Training Area. The Army’s lease of 22,750 of those acres, all of it on ceded lands, expires in August 2029. In 2014, Native Hawaiian cultural practitioners Clarence Ching and Maxine Kahaulelio successfully sued DLNR for failing to conduct regular inspections of that part of the training area, which is zoned as conservation land. Besides the physical damage inflicted by gunfire and detonations, some weapons have left behind depleted uranium, a highly explosive, radioactive heavy metal that can be aerosolized and carried on the wind. The court declared the negligence of DLNR to protect the leased land a breach of the ceded lands trust. The decision was appealed to the Hawai‘i Supreme Court, which affirmed important aspects of the 2019 ruling.

Defense spending in Hawai‘i accounts for $8.8 billion annually, or 8.9% of the state’s GDP, and is the largest driver of the local economy after tourism. At stake if military leases are not renewed is $1.55 billion appropriated for construction projects in 2025, the biggest appropriation for any state. Hawaiian activists have long recognized that the industries driving Hawai‘i’s economy operate at a significant cost to the ‘āina, which if properly stewarded, could offer alternative, potentially more valuable benefits.

“For many of us in Hawai‘i, the way the state continues to promote tourism and insist on military presence is so ruinous to what could be done,” says Osorio. “There is poverty here, and there are incredibly rich lands that aren’t being utilized. We have people without shelter. We have people who suffer from a lack of social services, poor education facilities, not enough teachers, all these things that are prevalent in the state that perhaps could be addressed if these lands could be used more productively, and in some cases, more lucratively.”

Acknowledging its own responsibility to protect ceded lands, the DLNR’s Office of Conservation and Coastal Lands submitted its own disapproving comments to be weighed in the 2022 environmental impact statement for Pōhakuloa: “Military use that involves maneuvers, ammunition, artillery and mortar systems, depleted uranium, explosives, firing points, hazardous materials and waste, live fire, unexploded ordnance, and weapons systems do not appear to be consistent with the Conservation District.”

Expiring Military Lease and Easements

Many of these facilities are on ceded lands, including all or part of Pōhakuloa, Mākua, Kawailoa-Poamoho and Kahuku.

*Pacific Missile Range Facility Barking Sands | note: Army expiring easements are not included in the table as they are small in scale, routine, and not associated to the 65-year lease. Source: Hawai’i military land use master plan, 2021

Reckoning and Next Steps

Tony Mizuno, executive VP of commercial markets at American Savings Bank and a member of rediscovering Hawai’i’s soul, says, “if RHS is to… bring us back together, it’s really hard to do that without one constituent – the one that started it all.

Tony Mizuno, executive VP of commercial markets at American Savings Bank, says: “If you rewind our society, in the last 30 years our community has become stressed, often in opposition with one another. There have been disparate outcomes where there are the haves and the have-nots. If RHS is to unwind some of that and bring us back together, it’s really hard to do that without one constituent – the one that started it all,” referring to Native Hawaiians.

Mizuno zooms out, calling it mind-boggling that so many people can live in Hawai‘i and love Hawai‘i yet have very little understanding about the history that shaped its people. “A hundred and twenty years goes by and it’s embarrassing that this has been swept under the rug. Every now and then there’s a court case, and it gets prime time, but until it’s satisfactorily acknowledged, it’s hard to address so much of the other pain that exists between people.”

Mizuno says his initial reaction followed a Western approach to problem-solving: Identify the problem and then immediately formulate solutions. “It’s like, ‘Traffic’s bad? What do we do?’ ” he offers. “When I joined [the RHS committee on Kingdom Lands] as a businessperson, I looked at the issue and said I could pull title reports, identify the lands, do some math around the economics and do a fair split. I thought, this shouldn’t be hard to solve mathematically.

“But the more we dig into it, the more we realize this is a problem our entire society has to engage in and understand. Only after I understand where someone’s been and what they’ve been through can I sit at a table and say, ‘How shall we move forward?’ There’s a pivot from ‘Here’s the answer’ to ‘We need to help others learn.’ ”

Waihe‘e adds that history can also inform land managers about more effective, efficient and appropriate land use. “These lands are part of a broader system that we don’t necessarily use today,” he says. “It became apparent that on the island, the best way to preserve our lifestyle is ahupua‘a – to go back to the management of land and water from mauka to makai.

“Everybody starts off thinking this is about money, and then they realize it’s about land management,” he continues, pointing to floods and wildfires that force people to recognize “there is a certain way to live on an island that we may not have been doing.”

Crabbe says it’s critical to tackle the issue now rather than passing on the burden to future generations. He cites the value of e ōpū ali‘i, to have the heart of a chief, a guiding principle for Rediscovering Hawai‘i’s Soul. “Chiefly leadership takes courage. It takes a certain degree of moral fortitude to tackle the hard issues with a pure, benevolent intent that would benefit the whole. We have to be upright leaders in this 21st century to provide a greater society for Hawai‘i.”