- 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 What?

- Yeah.

People on the nose.

You know, - It's kind of strange.

Yeah.

I mean, imagine this, if you go to the island of Lanai, you, 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.

- Welcome to Forum, I'm Alexis Madrigal.

What do we owe to our ancestors?

In modern times, many people answer nothing but Sara Kehaulani's Goo's new book "Kuleana" describes the calling and commitment that she felt to hold onto 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 Sara Kehaulani 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 ina, that's the, that's - Right.

- Yeah.

Tell us what it's like.

I mean, where is it?

What does it look like?

Just kinda 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 its 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, you know, Hawaiian lands in Hawaiian hands.

Yeah.

- 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 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?

- You're like, sure.

We're descended from the king.

Got it.

Okay.

Yeah.

Sorry, mom.

- Yeah.

Yeah.

So this was one of the stories I was like, I gotta 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 willing 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 near your properties a little, your family's property there is this native Hawaiian temple, right?

- Yeah.

- So tell us a little bit about that and how it played into your kinda family story.

- Yeah.

It felt like I was being let in on a, not just the story of the land, but a family secret.

And this was nine in 1980.

So imagine I'm a 8-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 it was, 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 heiau.

And 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 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 Hawai'i didn't have their own history somewhere.

- So you mentioned that you grew up in Southern California.

So what was your relationship to Hawai'i as your growing up and your, 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 Okinawa, 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 this 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 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 sort, 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 danced hula, that was the food we ate more than anything.

And I think, you know, the land and the place, you know, called them back.

So they did.

Eventually my grandparents moved back to Hawai'i when I was in college.

- Hmm.

And it really, right.

Your grandparents really are the kind of crucial kind of connection to your heritage that you had.

Right?

- Right.

- And they're, and also your grandmother's brother.

- Right?

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They, you know, they kept the tradition life.

They, my grandmother in particular wanted to move back to Hana, wanted to move back to the place where the heiau, wanted to build a home on her ancestral land.

And fortunately, she never achieved that goal.

And she died, you know, before that could be constructed.

So I think that, you know, the crux of this book was, you know, 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.

You know, she had never fulfilled her dream, but now what was our promise to her?

You know?

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, the history of Hawaiian dispossession, right?

I mean, I think people have, have some sense of Hawaiian history, but maybe not the specifics of, maybe you could just lay it out for us, like before colonization.

Like how did native Hawaiian society work?

Like what, what were people doing in Hawai'i?

- Right?

Yeah.

One of the reasons I wanted to write this book, 'cause I felt like, you know, Hawai'i 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, you know, was a, a, a colony, and yet we don't really know this part of its history.

But Hawai'i, 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.

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% of their food.

They're importing, you know, 9 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 make 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 sort European colonists?

- Yeah.

So just to, 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 and the 1820s after business people came from foreigners convinced the monarchs that they should change their system and allow crops to be grown for exports soon after that.

So the great Mahele of 1846 is what allowed King Kamehameha to divide his land and gave our family our properties 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 they, this foreign concept of ownership, they didn't understand, they didn't understand.

Then what happened is you needed to survey your land, what you needed 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, so that dispossession quickly followed because the systems were foreign.

- Well, and you had mainland European Americans who this is what they 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 Hawai'i and do the exact same thing.

- Exactly.

And it, it was that, that brought in the sugarcane plantations.

That is what brought in other systems that restricted resources, water resources.

The sugarcane plantation owners then went to the top of the mountains and said, we're gonna divert the water sources to feed our sugar plant cane plantations.

That then affected everybody else's way of life.

That then led to, you know, less irrigation for other native farmers that then led to, you know, the, you know, the, the climate to change and other parts of the island.

So you see how that immediately changes the way of life for everybody else.

Hmm.

And the impacts of that are still being felt today.

- Yeah.

We're talking with Sara Kehaulani Goo, who's a journalist and author.

She's got a new book out called "Kuleana."

And this book really explores her family's relationship to the ancestral land that they have in Hawai'i.

Amidst these kind of pressures of capitalism and displacement, she is doing an event tonight at Manny's in the Mission.

It is at 6:00 PM and they're gonna be talking about the book, and there'll be a performance by a hula group as well.

Yeah.

- Yeah.

I'm so excited.

I'm gonna be talking with Kumu Hula Patrick Makuakane and his hula group will be doing a short performance.

I'm so honored.

- We also want to hear from you, you know, 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 a sense of duty in your own family legacy.

You can give us a call.

The number is 8 6 6 7 3 3 6 7 8 6.

That's 8 6 6 7 3 3 6 7 8 6.

The email address is forum@kqd.org.

You can find us on social media at Blue Sky, Instagram, all of those things.

We are KQED Forum, I'm Alexis Madrigal.

Stay tuned for more right after the break.

Welcome back to Forum.

I'm Alexis Madrigal.

We're talking with Sara Kehaulani 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 Hawai'i.

So let's talk a little bit about the family's land and the 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 to, mostly the answers to questions that you have had for your whole life.

- Yeah.

I mean, it's amazing.

It, 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?

Yeah.

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 fam of this land left.

What astounded me is I learned, Alexis, that this land was once 990 acres.

It blew my mind.

It really was from the mountain to the - Sea.

Yeah.

Yeah.

- 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 the local resort, - Right?

Yes.

His day job was the record - At the hotel.

- Yes.

I think many of us and our families have a record keeper who's like the genealogist or, and thank goodness for these people in our lives.

And thank goodness for my Uncle Takei 'cause 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, at least sold to the sugary plantation later to the ranch, to the owners, the family 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 can you look at it on Zillow, I mean, it's on for sale for $77 million.

Oh my God.

And guess who's gonna buy it?

I mean, - Who's gonna Yeah.

- Pick your billionaire.

Yes, exactly.

Yeah.

I mean, that's who owns a lot of Hawai'i's land today is some of the biggest billionaires.

So that's where, that's the story of Hawaii's land.

Yeah.

And it's really interesting, you know, there's just a, 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, you know, your family wasn't swept off the land all at once.

Right.

It was kind of nibbled away at, nibbled away at, you know, all, 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 Hawai'i.

It's been this slow boil, it's been this generational churn.

And I think that even when I'm in Hawai'i, I've told people I'm running 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.

Right.

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.

- Yeah.

- But they don't like outside of Hawai'i, that is not something that people know.

- Right, right.

I mean, it does bring up for me a lot of connections to what has happened in, say, traditionally black neighborhoods in, you know, the Bay Area where you have, you know, people who own homes, you know, maybe take out a reverse mortgage here or maybe end up renting it out there and then there's a, a problem or end up selling it to somebody.

Yeah.

I mean, what do you know about how you 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 in the, you know, most recent census in 2020.

We now know that a, a majority of native Hawaiians live outside of Hawai'i.

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, you know, competing against, you know, in a finite place of real estate.

They're competing for with the world's richest, you know, - 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 and human experience.

- Yeah.

I, I think that this book also 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 it was also a personal journey because the book is titled "Kuleana," but, you know, responsibility.

But I think I had to kind of retrain my own brain about thinking in my own western capitalist, you know, way of thinking to a Hawaiian way of thinking about land.

Right.

At one point I had even been, you know, the real estate editor at the Washington Post.

So I Right, I understand real estate, I understand how that works.

- Yeah.

- But I think that land, in this case, you, you know, going back to the way Hawaiian people live land ina means that which feeds, right?

It is about that connection.

And if Hawaiian people don't have that connection to the land, they don't have, you know, that is part of their identity.

That is part of who they are.

It is what connects 'em 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.

It, it, 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'd actually love that you show in the book that there wasn't, there isn't one relationship that Hawaiian 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, 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, 5,000 miles away from Hawaii, live in Washington dc So I think I had to wrestle without myself as 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, the fact is that, you know, I I, my grandmother was very meaningful to me as a, we have a special relationship and I, you know, I'm, she's my grandmother.

So - Yeah.

- That, that, that's all right.

Like, I feel like if someplace, if this calls you, then you have to act on it.

- Yeah.

It's not like there's an ancestry police who - Gets to - Come in.

Yes.

Right.

And like designate, you know, give you a permit to, - 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, what am I, am I not?

And I think like, you know, who are you waiting for to like tell you, you, you know, you have to act on this.

You're, this is something for you to decide.

Yeah.

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, Sara, I just really wanted to thank you so much for this book.

I am Native Hawaiian, and it, interestingly enough, my daughters are in their twenties, 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 nineties, - Giving - Us our roots.

And it's interesting, we grew up in the Bay Area.

I am native Hawaiian.

But it's that your book and the way that you describe your relationship to Hawai'i 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 wanna thank you because it was just, it was so beautifully written.

You know, while blood quantum doesn't mean a lot, it it does, if you're trying to get into Kamehameha or you're in the island, that's, that's true.

You're, you know, your hapa and you're living on the mainland when you go.

But finding your roots, it's, it was so beautifully written and how do 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.

- Aw, thank you - This evening.

- Oh, Mahalo, Mahalo nui for sharing that.

That's so sweet.

Yeah.

Thank you.

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, Hawai'i, you know, its narrative, I think has been falsely kind of presented by Hollywood and chores, brochures for so long.

And I felt like it, you know, like, well, the real Hawai'i, you know, I experienced, 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, and I also feel like a lot of the things I'm writing about are not just unique to Hawai'i.

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.

- Well, and there was also appeared in many an assimilation period in many cultures.

Yes.

And one of the things that's beautiful about this book is it's also your rediscovery kind parallels the rediscovery of Hawaiian culture by native Hawaiians.

- Yeah.

- Like, at one point you share in the book that the number of native Hawaiian speakers was down to 2000 people.

And we actually have a clip of your great-grandmother Malaka, 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 into Sara's great grandmother.

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, I've started to take olelo or Hawaiian language classes, but I, it gave me the chills just now.

I'm thinking I, every time I hear it, it gets me the chills.

But this is an amazing story.

Most indigenous native languages, as you know, is a sad story.

And they're, you know, dying.

But the Hawaiian language is a, you know, a rare case where it's reviving and it's coming back.

And now when you go to, you know, the airport and you see kids, you hear the language even on the radio.

So the story begins with the clip of that you just played in the seventies, 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.

She was one of them.

He started a radio show in Honolulu, and it, people heard it and they thought, this is amazing.

I wanna 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 start, have to start young when children can learn and absorb languages so much better than, than old than adults, as we know.

- Yeah.

- They developed a preschool program, then they developed a, a kindergarten program and so on.

They kept building through 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 Hawai'i's Hawaiian studies program.

I mean, it was amazing accomplishment that they have done this.

And, and now, you know, tens of thousands of people speak Hawaiian at home.

- Yeah.

- I wish, I'm so jealous.

I wish I, yeah, I wish I were one of them.

But you can't, you can learn on Duolingo, you can learn online.

I have a tutor who learned and grew up in that program.

- Yeah, - It's amazing.

- I mean, it's just, it's, it's nice to have a success story in indigenous language revitalization, you know?

Yes.

I mean, I think there's like a, there are many other groups that are trying to get there, but this is one where like the, the effort of this Hawaiian renaissance, like really has, has worked.

And it's really paid off.

- It has.

I think it's so inspiring.

I'm, I'm inspired by it.

I think others can be inspired by it.

And I, I hope they keep going.

- Yeah, - I really do.

- Let's return to the land.

You know, I can keep coming back to the, I keep coming back to land.

Yeah.

The, 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, are, do you - Yeah.

- 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 the, 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.

And not everybody knows everybody.

Not everybody's very close.

And so just imagine your own family in 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 a hatch, a plan, and he really led a lot of those efforts.

A lot of Zoom calls.

This happened during COVID, but we did, 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?

Yeah.

And we hatch out some quick options for ourselves.

- We're talking with Sara Kehaulani 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 wanna hear from you.

What's coming up for you as you hear this story about Hawaiian culture and land?

The number is 8 6 6 7 3 3, 6, 7, 8, 6.

That's 8 6, 6, 7, 3, 3, 6, 7, 8, 6.

The email is forum@kqe.org, and of course on social media.

Blue Sky, Instagram, discord.

We are KQED forum.

I'm Alexis Madrigal.

Stay tuned for more right after the break.

Welcome back to forum.

Alexis Madrigal here with Sara Kehaulani Goo, who's a journal and author.

She's got a new book out.

It's called Ana.

She's gonna be at Manny's tonight at 6:00 PM talking about the book before the break, we were talking about the kind of complexities of land that comes to you through, 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 my father's Lebanese, he was born and raised in Lebanon, left during the Civil War, the 1980s.

And he has land that has 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, it's something that is a little bit tricky because 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, there, part of the land had actually been given to a neighbor.

If, if you're not there to manage it, weird things happen.

Right?

Yeah.

And so, yeah, 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 siblings, 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, but I, i to 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.

Yeah.

So it, all this talk has, has that through - My head.

Oh, it's such a, you know, Melanie, thanks, thanks so much for that.

What it really strikes that for me is the way that inheritance is both an opportunity.

It's a duty, it's so burden - Yeah.

At - Times, right?

It's like hard, hard for people to, to talk about that.

But of course, when it, when it gets this concrete form of the land and you gotta do something with it, someone's gotta manage it.

Like, what do you, what, what are you gonna push the squatters off the land from California?

You know, there's all these things that are so complicated in this and, and this obviously shows up in your book in a variety of ways.

- Yeah, I mean, I, 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, 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.

The checklist that we have a running in our brains, it's like, ugh, 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.

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 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 Hawai'i is more like about caring for your tarot patch or caring for your fish pond, or caring for your family's.

You know, your, 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.

- Yeah.

Huh.

So how did that end up applying in your family's case?

Like what did you end up deciding to, 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, that kind of frees us from making real estate decisions, if you will.

- Hmm.

- 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, our legacy to the Hawaiian kingdom and our on the Kahanu family, then that is what we have honored to do and care for and the heiau as well, so that those two, that is our family's kuleana.

And if we remain true to that, then that's, that's, that's what we're here for.

- Hmm.

Talk a little bit about what happened to the land near your families with this heyo 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 - Like the sort of extended family.

- 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.

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, you know, it's not a place that attracts the typical wealthy billionaire, to be honest.

Hana's a real chill, remote kind of place.

It has attracted people who kind of wanna escape from the - World.

Hmm.

- So I think that it has remained, I think, you know, just as it has for, 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.

- Yeah.

- Which, which is, I think has its benefits.

- Some of our listeners want to talk about sort of what's been happening in Hawai'i more generally, Matthew writes.

You, I've spent a lot of time in Kauai where Mark Zuckerberg bought the old Tara Plantation, took vast plots of land adjacent to his palatial estate, and tried to block access to a wonderful nude beach.

Oprah seems to have claimed Maui and Larry Ellison basically owns the entire island of Lanai.

How do these billionaires encapsulate ongoing colonization and what are the possibilities now for local forces of resistance?

- Yeah, I mean, that's a very good point.

And, and I think it's kind of touches on what we talked about like 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 what - It's on the nose, you know, it's - Kind of strange.

Yeah.

I mean, imagine this, if you go to the island of Lanai, you, 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, and 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.

- Mm.

- And so it is a, 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.

Yeah.

- Well, and that's cement, right?

Is that people are living in tents on beaches, right?

Yes.

Yeah.

I mean, it's like a, 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 that Yeah.

They're driving your bus from, you know, the airport shuttle.

- Yeah.

Let's bring in another call 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 this paperwork and it took time to find out that my family, going back to Emancipation Proclamation and what we just went through Juneteenth, that as a black family, we were probably one of the first families that inherited, or gi was given some property back in the 18 hundreds.

- Hmm.

- And I could 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 who 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, you're up against a lot of forces, right?

And this land can, you know, you, you gesture at it in your book.

It's hard to tell when lands are sold or mortgaged or whatever it is.

Were these actually, did people really have a choice?

And David, thanks for for calling him, sorry about your dad as well.

- Yeah, thank you.

And I think that what the paper trail shows you is, there's, 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 everyone, - Are you now the keeper of the box?

- I'm, I think, I think I have no choice.

- 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, that question?

Yeah.

Between heritage and identity for yourself.

- I think that's a, 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, I have to have faith that they'll understand it, you know, in 20, 40 years after I die.

Right.

I needed to make sure that I was passing, 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, to have a cultural practice.

I turned to hula.

Hmm.

And believe it or not, I found a hula halal or hula school in Washington dc 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.

- Right?

Exactly.

Yeah, exactly.

So that was one way to realize that I had to put some skin in the game.

You know, 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, you know, what we were talking about really 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, my awakening.

- Yeah.

Let's bring in a call, Dawn in Mountain View.

Welcome, Dawn.

- Good morning.

Thanks for this interesting conversation.

I'm a, I'm a scientist, I'm a geologist.

I'm volcanologist and I work with scientists at Hawai'i Volcanoes Observatory.

Hmm.

And one of, I'm actually gonna be looking at samples from KI today in my lab.

Oh, wow.

So cool.

And yeah, the, 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're returned back to Hawai'i when we're finished.

So I have like, I don't know, 20 or 30 samples I need to return, but they're eventually returned back to Hawai'i to, to close that circle of bringing the Kilauea, Pele samples back to Hawai'i.

I actually, you had just mentioned, you know, 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, to Hawai'i, to Hawai'i Volcanoes Observatory, this allows additional studies and additional learning from, you know, from these samples from Kilauea if you wanna speak to it that way.

But, oh - Yeah, - There are people in, in the, well at least at Hawai'i Volcanoes Observatory in here at the USCS in Mountain View, who are very familiar with this concept.

So - Yeah, - We, we support it and, and wanna protect it as well.

- Thanks.

That's beautiful, Don, thank you so much.

I, I, I do like, just thinking about the ways that you think Kuleana can be applied in other context, you know, not to just purely adopt - Yeah.

- You know, a native Hawaiian concept, but just as a way a, a mode of thinking.

- Yeah.

I love that.

I didn't know that Dawn, and that's really, that's really cool.

But it doesn't surprise me, actually, and I feel like this, this concept is, it is Hawaiian, like you said, Alexis, but I do think it's something Hawaiians can teach the world.

- Yeah, absolutely.

You know, Kim writes in to say, you know, as a non Hawaiian who lived in Hawai'i for 11 years, it was impossible to avoid the sadness, which permeated any discussion of ancestral lands, the scars of the US takeover of an independent monarchy live on in the psyche of the people, the only people who profited were the missionaries descendants.

What do you think, I mean, as someone who would travel to Hawai'i, 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 Hawai'i 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 they, I think Hawaii's doing a better job of making the culture an intentional part of the experience beyond the kind of - Performative, - Yeah, 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 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 wanna 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 Hawai'i that truly offer that.

There are a lot, but I, there are a number of them.

But I think that this was a way, and you know, by telling my family story to tell a larger story.

- Yeah.

We have been talking with Sara Kehaulani Goo, journalist and author about this new book, "Kuleana," exploring her family's relationship to their ancestral land.

Thank you so much for joining us.

- Thank you for having me.

This is great.

- Yeah.