It has been nearly a month since the wildfires blazed through West Maui. Many in the Native Hawaiian community have been working through loss and generational trauma to get things done, but the sadness and sleepless nights are beginning to add up.
Moaliʻi farmer Kekai Keahi’s genealogy traces back to the Mala, Kahana and Kahoma areas of Lāhainā. His days are filled with meetings with lawyers, government officials and community members. He’s also been delivering goods to his community in the burn zone.
“If you love your place and you love where you’re from and you love your people, what else is there?” Keahi said.
Fortunately for him, the fire went around his neighborhood of about 20 homes, but he’s still without electricity. Keahi has also been dealing with sleepless nights, a canned-good heavy diet, and lots of stress and sadness.
“It’s taxing. It starts to wear you down. It’s not just that, but you feel the hurt,” Keahi said. “My heart is saying keep on fighting. But people tell me you need to be healthy physically and mentally and you got to step away sometimes. And for me, stepping away is like letting people down. And so this weekend, that’s the game plan. I'm going to be up in the taro patches and just kinda kicking back you know.”
Strengthening that connection to land, to culture, and to traditional ways of knowing can be essential in healing, especially for the Indigenous people of these islands. But finding any connection to the land in West Maui following the fire is a very difficult task.
Healing with the land
An estimated 1,900 homes have been lost and more than 5,000 Lāhainā residents displaced. As the Lāhainā community moves into week four since the wildfire, many in the community are running themselves into the ground. That’s according to Noelani Ahia, co-founder of the Mauna Medic Healers Hui.
“That’s a trauma response and it is okay. We’re all coping in our own way,” Ahia said. “The most important thing is not to judge ourselves but be compassionate with ourselves and to understand that we’ve all been through something incredibly violent, destructive, disturbing, and horrific. And it’s okay not to be okay. But there are resources available.”
The Mauna Medic Healers Huitent at Honokōwai Park offers everything from lomilomi massage to herbal medicine to talk story sessions to help discharge that trauma. Ahia said there’s a lot of trauma and loss in the community of Lāhainā right now.
“But for kanaka, it so deep because this isn’t the first time. We went from close to a million people down to 40,000 (in the first 100 years since Western contact). Those of us who are kanaka maoli alive today are the descendants of the 40,000,” Ahia said. “That is an unfathomable loss of population, so we have that trauma in our DNA, of that loss of our people.”
Ahia said adding to that is the loss of land and the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893, the move from a subsistence economy to an extractive one, and the suppression of culture, language and spiritual practices.
Much has been accomplished by the Native Hawaiian people over the last 40 years to restore cultural practices, revitalize the native tongue and rebuild Native Hawaiian identity. Despite the successes, Native Hawaiians are working to undo the impacts of more than 150 years of settler colonialism. Disasters such as the Maui wildfires are a huge setback to these efforts, Ahia said.
“It’s super triggering because it feels like cultural erasure again. Even though it may not have been intentional. That is the problem with settler colonialism and folks not understanding that framework, is that this happens to us over and over and over,” she said.
“A lot of people don’t realize that that trauma gets triggered every single day by the influx of new people coming here, by the real estate investors, and even some times by well-meaning people coming here for their own healing because it’s nice and pretty. That’s insulting for kanaka.”
Ahia said she’s not trying to lay blame, but she is trying to create awareness.
“Because if people understood how much it hurts us that we are only 10 to 20% of the population here but we have the highest amount of homelessness, diabetes, incarceration,” Ahia said. “And its not because weʻre stupid, violent or lazy. Its because the settler system intended to disenfranchise in that way, to disempower us so that they could continue to have control and dominion over the land and water.”
Ahia did not grow up in Lāhainā. She calls herself a “diaspora kanaka.” She moved to Hawaiʻi 15 years ago from New York, and realized how much she wasn’t taught about her own history.
“But because I came home, I was able to find out my genealogy or moʻokūʻauhau, and it turns out I do come from the Piʻilani line — as do thousands of other people. I’m not saying I’m special,” she said. “But it is part of who I am and I honor, respect and claim that now.”
Exclusion from the mainstream
The Native Hawaiian experience of colonization had largely been excluded from mainstream history narratives for nearly a century. This lack of knowledge has had serious consequences on the Native Hawaiian people.
“The trauma that we talk about is generational,” Keahi said. “Sometimes I look at my dad and my grandparents and I was like almost angry at them like why you guys never do something about it when we had the chance.”
Keahi added that he didn’t learn much in school about the systemic dismantling of Hawaiian identity. It wasn’t until later that he understood why generations of his family did what they did.
Once Keahi understood that history, he was able to name things that impacted generations of his family, and figure out how he can play a role in changing it.
Recent statements from Gov. Josh Green blaming Native Hawaiian communities for the fire have been triggering for Keahi and many Native Hawaiians in Lāhainā. As a taro farmer, Keahi has played an instrumental role in the restoration of mauka to makai stream flow in West Maui.
After hearing those comments from Green, Keahi got on a plane to join several dozen prominent Native Hawaiian leaders gathered at the Hawaiʻi State Capitol on Aug. 24 to voice their concerns.
“I not supposed to be here today. I supposed to be home with my family and people helping dig people out of the ashes, we not done with that,” Keahi said.
But he showed up, through the loss and the grief, to protect the progress Native Hawaiians like himself have made to get the state to honor the protections set for taro farmers.
“It’s somewhat disheartening. But we not going stop,” Keahi said. “We been in a fight for 18 years. If we got to be in a fight for another 18 years, so be it.”
But if trauma can be passed down across generations, so too can resiliency.
“I going try do as much as I can so that my boy not looking at me how I look at my parents and my grandparents,” he said. “But I know better now, it had nothing to do with them. But my boy cannot say the same for me, I knew.”
