Native Land and Foreign Desires: Pehea Lā E Pono Ai?

Lilikala Kame’eleihiwa’s Native Land and Foreign Desires provides the historical framework for understanding land tenure in Hawai’i. The Great Mahele of 1848 converted communal ahupua’a holdings into fee-simple parcels, creating private property where collective management had operated. The intention was to secure Hawaiian land rights within Western legal frameworks. The effect was dispossession. Commoners could claim kuleana parcels, but the process required navigating unfamiliar procedures; many claims went unfiled or were later lost through tax sale. Missionary families consolidated holdings. By the late nineteenth century, land ownership in West Maui had concentrated in few hands, establishing the conditions for plantation agriculture and the tourism economy that followed.

The thesis draws on this analysis to argue that Lahaina’s post-fire land market operates on tenure structures produced by this history. Recovery that ignores it will reproduce it.