Leveraging the abundance of fresh water, Kānaka Maoli cultivated Lahaina’s landscape into a verdant mix of agroforestry, agriculture, and aquaculture. The famed epithet, “Hālau Lahaina, malu i ka ‘ulu,” means “Lahaina is like a large house shaded by breadfruit trees,” and describes Lahaina’s famed ‘ulu (breadfruit) grove that covered more than 10 square miles, so much so that the sun could only be seen from the ocean. Interspersed within that ‘ulu grove were lo‘i kalo (irrigated taro patches) that doubled as fishponds and boosted moisture retention. This biocultural resource management produced a cornucopia of food and favorable conditions that enabled a sizable population to thrive despite Lahaina’s grueling sun.
Life in “paradise” changed forever when haole (foreigners) arrived in the Hawaiian Islands in 1778. Commerce followed, first in the form of the sandalwood trade that decimated Hawai‘i’s upland forests. Hawai‘i later became an important re-provisioning station for the Pacific whaling trade. Following the collapse of the sandalwood industry in the 1830s, whaling became the biggest economic generator in the islands, positioning Lahaina as the Pacific’s central marketplace.
In tandem with the decline of the whaling industry and the onset of the United States’ Civil War, which complicated slave-labor sugar production in the American South, haole businessmen saw Hawai‘i’s bountiful natural resources as a prime opportunity to turn a profit. They razed Lahaina’s massive ‘ulu grove to make space for and to fuel sugar mills. To quench this thirsty crop, the plantations, predominantly owned and managed by haole, constructed extensive ditch systems and numerous wells to control, divert, and hoard billions of gallons of Lahaina’s abundant ground and surface water each year into massive reservoirs.
The systematic diversion of streams from their natural flow toward the ocean devastated Lahaina’s physical and cultural landscapes. It also halted local food production dependent on streams, which almost exclusively impacted Kānaka Maoli. Insufficient water to cultivate lands and the onslaught of haole-introduced diseases disemboweled the Indigenous economy and communal system of infrastructure maintenance, forcing many Kānaka Maoli onto plantations for survival. By 1867, only six years after the formation of Pioneer Mill—Lahaina’s first sugar plantation—famine ravaged this once bountiful region. A commission investigated the famine’s causes and concluded that water diversions and the destruction of Lahaina’s biocultural landscape for sugar were to blame.
With increasing competition from a global market, haole went to great lengths to maintain their sugar industry’s profitability, including playing a central role in the illegal overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom. Local plantations benefited from a treaty that allowed tariff-free sugar to be imported into the United States from Hawai‘i. When the McKinley administration allowed all foreign sugar to enter America duty-free, however, while also subsidizing domestically produced sugar, Hawai‘i’s sugar industry suffered. Annexation to the United States became a clear path for Hawai‘i’s sugar barons to secure a portion of the American market. In 1893, haole businessmen, many with significant interests in the sugar industry, illegally overthrew the reigning monarch, Queen Lili‘uokalani, and the Hawaiian Kingdom with support from United States Marines.
Pioneer Mill continued to prosper in Lahaina after the illegal annexation, imposing environmental destruction and widespread social and cultural harms on Native Hawaiians. For instance, Lahaina’s wetlands became stagnant by the late nineteenth century due to sustained stream diversions. American officials overseeing Hawai‘i’s newly formed territorial government labeled these areas a health hazard as they devolved into mosquito breeding grounds. Haole businessmen, including the owner of Pioneer Mill, then succeeded in leading a campaign to fill in the remaining 11.5 acres of wetland, including a significant portion of Mokuhinia. Soon after, part of the covered land hosted a railroad line for Pioneer Mill’s operations. The physical and cultural trauma of this action endures today.
Despite sugar’s downturn in the 1960s and the coinciding rise of tourism, Pioneer Mill continued to profit. Adapting to the times, it developed some lands into resorts and sold other holdings for large-scale luxury development. Although its business model shifted, Pioneer Mill’s monopoly on water did not. It retained strategic wells and ditches for new ventures and sold other water systems to developers. Despite the power Pioneer Mill amassed in the region, Kānaka Maoli continued to challenge the corporation’s control over the community’s water.
After the plantation closed, its footprint remained. Pioneer Mill’s legacy corporations employed the same formula of water extraction for private profit without concern for the environmental, human, and cultural impacts across the region. Today, more than 75 percent of Lahaina’s water is privately controlled, filling hotel pools and watering the lawns of gentlemen’s estates above a now-parched Lahaina town. Moreover, with the demise of agricultural operations, large swaths of once biologically diverse land that had been plowed for sugar were taken over by invasive species. These invasives became the tinder that fueled the August 2023 wildfires.
Plantation capitalism’s hegemonic resource mismanagement persisted despite legal safeguards. In 1978, to protect the island’s precious natural resources and Indigenous culture, Hawai‘i’s people enshrined key public trust provisions into Hawai‘i’s constitution. Grounded in Kānaka Maoli values and practices, these constitutional amendments adopted the public trust doctrine with respect to “all natural resources” and a directive to “protect, control, and regulate the use of Hawai‘i’s water resources” for the benefit of the people. Almost a decade later, the legislature codified Hawai‘i’s water resources trust in Hawai‘i Revised Statutes Chapter 174C, also known as the “Water Code.” This regulatory framework includes mechanisms for the Water Commission, the agency responsible for fulfilling the Water Code, to operationalize its constitutional mandate, including prioritizing water for traditional and customary Kānaka Maoli rights and practices such as kalo and fishpond cultivation. Another mechanism is to designate water management areas, which triggers additional permitting requirements where resources may become threatened by existing or proposed withdrawals or diversions. Ultimately, designation seeks to ensure reasonable-beneficial use of water resources in the public’s interest.
Even with the highest protection under Hawai‘i’s constitution, progress to operationalize Hawai‘i’s public trust with respect to water has been slow. Kānaka Maoli continues to advocate for environmental justice and the right to continue their traditional and customary practices that require flowing streams, as opposed to diverted ones. In 2022, against staunch opposition from Maui County officials and local developers and their respective water subsidiaries, the Water Commission led a successful effort to designate Lahaina’s surface and groundwater as a management area with strong support from Lahaina’s Native Hawaiian community. The Water Commission based its unanimous decision on data demonstrating rising salinity levels in groundwater due to over-pumping, climate uncertainty, potential drought, decreased rainfall, and historic and on-going disputes about whether regional water distribution complied with legal protections for public trust purposes such as traditional and customary Native Hawaiian practices. Hawai‘i’s Water Commission is now in the process of reviewing permit applications for various uses, including Indigenous wetland agriculture and aquaculture, domestic uses, luxury developments, and resorts. Unfortunately, the fire belatedly exposed to the larger community what Native Hawaiians have been asserting for over a century: the need for better allocation of water resources in Lahaina that respects both the law and common sense.
The Hawaiian proverb, “I ka wā ma mua, ka wā ma hope,” teaches us that the future is in the past. With predicted increases in extreme weather events due to climate change, it is imperative that Lahaina be mindfully rebuilt. This includes prioritizing water uses to restore the area’s traditional biocultural landscape, such as its wetlands and streams, which would have provided natural firebreaks on that fateful day in August 2023. It also includes restoring the ‘ulu grove that once shaded and fed Lahaina while sustaining its hydrologic cycle.
Restoring Lahaina in an environmentally sensible and just way is no easy feat considering entrenched luxury development and resort interests. But after over 150 years of exploitation, this tragedy is a reckoning of Lahaina’s colonial history, plantation capitalism, and our new climate reality that uplifts the wisdom and potential of Kānaka Maoli biocultural resource management. How Lahaina recovers could be a model for resilient rebuilding in the wake of climate tragedies. Here, restorative justice prioritizes the health of the land and people while also beginning to redress the harms of colonialism.
