This is the fourth part of This is Our Hawaiʻi, a new podcast from Hawaiʻi Public Radio.
Growing up, Todd Yamashita never thought of becoming a farmer. But the pandemic changed things — not just for him, but for the entire island. Molokaʻi only has three grocery stores. Yamashita remembers people sitting in their cars for hours to pick up a limited eight items at a time.
“I called up one of my local representatives and she said, 'You better learn how to hunt and grow food and fish,'” Yamashita recalled. “And that's when we opened this place up.”
The one-acre farm provides Yamashita with about one meal a day. It also doubles as a “Hawaiian petting zoo.” Roughly 30 animals call the farm home.
Molokaʻi was already known to be a small community before COVID-19 shut everything down. Only about 7,000 people live there, compared to nearly 1 million living on Oʻahu. The island has a few hotels and one general hospital.
The pandemic made Molokaʻi even more self-reliant. For Yamashita, that meant growing his own food.
“It's not about this big commercial farming or anything like that,” Yamashita said. “It's really just for your friends, your neighbors, your family. And I like to think it's always been that way.”
Supporting one's neighbors is the bedrock of life on Molokaʻi. According to Yamashita, it's not uncommon for people to leave boxes of food on each other’s doorstep, no questions asked.
“I think that’s what sets Molokaʻi apart,” he said. “It does adhere to Hawaiian values… You have enough for your family, and you have enough to give away.”
An unconditional love
Yamashita isn't the only one who sees the way the community values prosperity and generosity. Over the last 10 years, the island has seen an increase in organizations committed to helping Molokaʻi provide for itself on its own terms.
Malia Akutagawa is a professor of law and Hawaiian studies at the University of Hawaiʻi. She's also one of the founders of Sustʻāinable Molokaʻi, a non-profit supporting local growers and producers with online markets and island-wide initiatives.
Akutagawa believes people on Molokaʻi rely on what they can make for themselves, not on what other islands or the mainland can provide for them.
“The strength of our island has always been our connection to ʻāina,” she explained. “We're not expecting anyone to save us. And so if you have this notion that nobody is going to save us but ourselves, you end up just taking care of yourself and your people. … The heart of the people is really aloha ʻāina.”
Aloha ʻāina refers to the fundamental, and at times political, connection between Kānaka Maoli and the land.
Walter Ritte and George Helm founded Hui Alaloa to fight for land access on Molokaʻi. The so much as put their bodies on the line to protest the desecration of Kahoʻolawe.
A few years ago, Ritte told HPR what aloha ʻāina means to him. “Aloha ‘āina describes your deep relationship with the land where there’s no difference between you and the land and anything on the land. It's an unconditional love, the same kind of unconditional love that you would have for your child.”
When Akutagawa applied the idea of aloha ʻāina to her own life, conventional narratives surrounding sustainability began to feel flawed.
“I felt like the sustainability movement was more about greenwashing,” she said, “It was a movement just accessible to those who could afford hybrid cars and who like eating tofu.”
Instead, she wanted to focus on fostering the land itself, knowing it would help the community thrive in turn.
In hopes of emulating that philosophy of abundance, Akutagawa helped start Sustʻāinable Molokaʻi. Today the organization feeds hundreds of families every week. “We were able to feed our island,” Akutagawa said. “To me, that's success.”
From the outside, looking in
When people talk about Hawaiian sovereignty, they often focus on political sovereignty. The people of Molokaʻi prove that resource sovereignty — the ability for a community to feed itself, power itself and support itself on its own terms — also deserves attention.
“We realize part of that sovereignty is: we've got to be able to own these ancestral lands and manage them in a way that is consistent with how our kūpuna did it,” Akutagawa said.
The choice to prioritize sustainability has put Molokaʻi at odds with the tourism industry. To a lot of residents, stewardship of the land means preventing Molokaʻi from becoming the next Waikīkī or Kīhei. The 'Friendly Isle' has beenvehemently opposed to large developments for decades, especially when it comes to tourism.
By turning away from development, the island has earned itself a reputation.
“I think what people failed to see was [that] the strength of our island has always been our connection to ʻāina. … We know that what we rely on is our resources, and it gives us the ability to tell people to eff off, you know?” she said.
Many residents of Molokaʻi are fiercely protective of the land. Regardless, outsiders continue to come to the island. It can be frustrating for those who value sustainability when people move to Molokaʻi without knowledge of the community or its culture. Yamashita noticed an influx of people from the mainland buying property on the island during the pandemic.
“The cross section of people that are working against us here are the people who own their second, third or fourth home here in Molokaʻi,” he said. “Their homes sit empty all year round. They come two weeks out of the year.”
However, there are also a lot of outsiders who have begun to think of Molokaʻi as a place to which visiting is a privilege, not a right. The messaging comes by word-of-mouth, social media messaging, and sometimes even TV shows (such as an episode of CNN's “Parts Unknown,” in which Anthony Bourdain visits Molokaʻi and tells his audience, “If you're watching this show, I hope your heart is swelling with admiration, but bottom line: don't come here.”)
Residents tend to be more accepting of outsiders who keep a respectful distance from the island, or who arrive with the understanding that they have no claim to the land.
“People who haven’t been here, they're like, ʻOh no, I haven't been there yet because I haven't been invited yet,ʻ” Yamashita said.
“It's okay if you're from the outside, right?” he went on. “It's more okay if you're married to somebody from Molokaʻi, or if you're here to do work, or you serve a space, right? But even if you're not, the type of people that are okay on Molokaʻi are the people that are active here. The people that you'll see in the supermarket buying local things, coming to whatever kind of local events we have, volunteering, right? People who take part in this community.”
For Yamashita, the next step in showing care to the land is gaining ownership of it.
“It's one of my passions to figure out how to keep these locally owned lands from passing out of local hands,” he said.
Akutagawa agrees. Sustʻāinable Molokaʻi, in collaboration with the Molokaʻi Heritage Trust, has turned its attention to purchasing Molokaʻi Ranch from Hong-Kong based Guoco Group, which itself is part of the Hong Leong Group, one of the largest conglomerates in Malaysia.
The Guoco Group closed down operations on the ranch over a decade ago, and officially listed it for sale in 2017. The price tag is more than $250 million, and Molokaʻi residents want to buy it.
Akutagawa called the effort “a David and Goliath story.”
“It sounds a little crazy, right? For the small island of 7,000 people to be able to afford a $100 million-plus purchase of this ranch, which represents one-third of their island,” she said.
That hasn't stopped residents from trying. The Molokaʻi Heritage Trust is in the process of electing an interim board, and it just started holding regular meetings. Many people showed their support for buying the ranch: people who have lived on the island for their entire lives, who just moved away and who want to move home.
“There must have been over a hundred attendees there,” Akutagawa said of the first meeting. “When you see these people come together, and you see the deep level of strategy and planning that's starting to pop up in these conversations… You can't help but smile.”
Yamashita said the community’s commitment to protecting the land makes Molokaʻi unique, but the struggle against exploitation and displacement is felt in Indigenous communities around the world.
“If we can figure it out here on Molokaʻi, it’s definitely something that can be extended to other places,” he said.
This Is Our Hawaiʻi is produced by Hawaiʻi Public Radio, a member of the NPR Podcast Network, with support from PRX and is made possible in part by a grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Sound from "An Island in the Pandemic"courtesy of Matt Yamashita.
This podcast is hosted by Russell Subiono and produced by Savannah Harriman-Pote, with assistance from HPR staff: Ananddev Banerjee, Taylor Nāhulukeaokalani Cozloff, Bill Dorman, Sylvia Flores, Casey Harlow, Sophia McCullough, Liberty Peralta, Krista Rados, Emily Tom and Jason Ubay.
Mahalo to PRX's Mike Russo for his continued support. Logo design by Kristin Lipman.
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