On the morning of August 11, days after wildfires destroyed Lahaina, a historic town on Maui and the former capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom, residents spotted a boat letting tourists into the sea to snorkel. The tourists were swimming in the same ocean where families had recently leapt to escape the flames that had engulfed their homes.
At the time the boat was spotted, at least 93 people had been confirmed dead with more than 1,000 still missing, making the wildfires the deadliest in the US in more than a century. (At the time of this writing, the death toll is 115 and expected to rise.)
“The same waters that our people just died in… are the same waters the very next day these visitors, tourists, were swimming in,” one Maui resident told the BBC.
Soon after, there were reports that residents whose homes had been damaged or lost were being approached by individuals offering to buy their land.
These incidents were met with outrage, but they aren't shocking for those who have called Hawaii home for generations, like Native Hawaiian Kaimanamālie Brummel, who was born and raised on Maui, and whose great-grandparents are buried in Lahaina. “Frankly, it didn’t surprise me,” Brummel tells Teen Vogue. “People have felt entitled to Hawaii, to our culture, and to our people for a very long time. Now we’re seeing people feeling entitled to our grief.”
To understand what is happening on Maui in the aftermath of the wildfires — whether that's residents getting predatory cold calls from people claiming to be realtors or tourists visiting the Lahaina ruins to take photos — it is necessary to understand the islands’ legacy of US occupation and how tourism has effectively created two Hawaiis: the rightful home of a historically colonized and continuously exploited people, and the year-round paradise for visitors who expect these same people to welcome them with smiles and aloha.
A history of exploitation
Lahaina offers a prime example of how colonialism has transformed Hawaii’s landscape into a place that is ripe for wildfires:
The area was once known in the Hawaiian Kingdom for its wetlands — so much so, that in the late 18th century, a British captain famously referred to Lahaina as the “Venice of the Pacific.” But colonists brought with them non-native grasses, including for livestock forage, and cultivated sugar plantations and pineapple farms. Over the past three decades, many of these plantations and farms have closed and been dormant, with plant species thriving across untended land, invading nearby areas, and turning the island into a “tinderbox.” According to experts, it was these same invasive plant species that helped spread the wildfires.
While Hawaii’s early tourism dates back to the late 1800s, Hawaii’s statehood, in 1959, helped to solidify the islands as the popular tourist destination — a playground — for people looking to get away and enjoy sun, surf, and aloha. Today, this messaging persists, even at the expense of the islands’ residents.
In the wake of the wildfires, some residents are rejecting tourism in favor of “letting Maui heal,” while others argue that tourism in different parts of Maui is necessary to generate income for households and the Hawaiian economy. According to the Maui Economic Development Board, approximately 70% of every dollar spent on Maui is generated directly or indirectly by tourism.
“We don’t want our businesses to close, of course,” says Brummel, who is the director of advancement for Seabury Hall, a private school in up-country Maui. “But it’s hard for me to support tourism when some tourists have demonstrated that they can’t be trusted here.”
Some residents have reported seeing tourists drive to nearby neighborhoods to vacation. In a Facebook Live video, West Maui councilwoman Tamara Paltin urged tourists to go elsewhere. “We don’t want to be seeing people on vacation when we’re trying to pull our lives back together,” she said. “We don’t want our roads closed because tourists can’t follow directions.”
Maui Snorkeling, the company that took the tourists out on its boat, later apologized on its website and Facebook page, and explained that the trip was a fundraiser and all proceeds would be donated to the Maui Food Bank.
Still, some residents feel the trip was insensitive. “When West Maui residents see tourists snorkeling or vacationing [right now], it’s triggering,” Tiare Lawrence, a Native Hawaiian community organizer who was born and raised in Lahaina, tells Teen Vogue.
Lawrence’s family home, as well as the houses and apartments of other family members and friends, burned down. It took her several days to determine that her brother had survived. “PTSD is settling in,” she says. “We already have this negative sentiment when it comes to tourists, so when people come, pull over, and take selfies of the devastation, it hurts us. We’re still trying to find our loved ones, and you have people who don’t belong coming out to take pictures.”
How “disaster capitalism” exacerbates Hawaii’s housing crisis
Those reported calls from people posing as realtors looking to buy property isn’t just an issue in Hawaii; rather, the practice falls under “disaster capitalism,” a term coined by author Naomi Klein in her book The Shock Doctrine. Klein cited, for example, the 2004 earthquake and tsunami that killed 230,000 people across South Asia. After that catastrophe, she noticed developers were seizing the land evacuated by local farmers and residents.
Disaster capitalism is a phenomenon in which private interests take advantage of situations that cause significant disruption, such as wars, government upheavals, and natural disasters. In these times of crisis, people are primarily focused on meeting their basic needs, making them more vulnerable to those who want to use the crisis for financial gain. While residents are preoccupied, privatization and deregulation can run rampant, according to Klein.
“When I first started looking at disaster capitalism, it was in the context of warfare and counterterrorism and how that was sort of an extension of the military industrial complex. But after the tsunami, what we started to see was that it was happening in the aftermath of natural disasters,” Klein told Teen Vogue in a 2021 story. “And then [Hurricane] Katrina happened in 2005, and many of the same defense contractors that had been in Iraq [during the War on Terror] showed up in New Orleans, seeing it as another opportunity for free government money.”
In the case of the cold calls from realtors, Brummel says, “they see it not as an opportunity to rebuild Lahaina, but as a way to enrich or advance themselves.”
But the threat of displacement is not a new concern for Hawaiian island residents, including Native Hawaiians who can no longer afford to live on their own ancestral land. In a 2021 story for Teen Vogue, I wrote about how the median price of a single-family home on Oahu reached $920,000 during the pandemic, up 20% from the same month the previous year, according to Locations, a real estate firm.
I also interviewed a young Native Hawaiian whose family had to move to Nevada for a more affordable cost of living — a trend that’s become more common in recent years. One notable example is Iam Tongi, a young singer who made headlines this year for being the first American Idol winner from Hawaii. In his viral audition video, Tongi mentioned moving to Seattle with his family. When Idol judge Lionel Richie asked incredulously, “Why on earth would you leave Hawaii?,” Tongi put it simply: “Priced out of paradise.”
The power of “kuleana” and Hawaii collectivism
Though the wildfires have amplified Hawaii’s longtime struggles, they’ve also amplified the best of its community. Amid the death toll updates and devastating images of burned cars in the streets are countless examples of mutual aid, many of them led by Native Hawaiians who sprung into action without waiting for help from the Federal Emergency Management Agency or even the state or county.
In the days after the fires, Maui residents set up rest stops along the highway, complete with pitched canopies, coolers, and handwritten signs announcing free food, water, and restrooms to those evacuating Lahaina. Volunteer boats from neighboring islands Oahu and Molokai came bearing supplies like propane tanks, generators, and extra clothing. Grassroots organizations born from the Mauna Kea protests — held to stop the construction of a telescope on land considered sacred by Native Hawaiians — and repurposed during the pandemic kicked into high gear once again.
“We like to say there was already a ‘kānaka Costco’ at every corner before there was government assistance,” Lawrence says (many Native Hawaiians use “kānaka maoli” to refer to the Indigenous people of Hawaii). “People were coming by boat to make sure we had what we needed. We were the emergency response.”
In Rebecca Solnit's 2009 book A Paradise Built in Hell, the author challenged the traditional narrative of disorder and chaos after disasters with numerous examples of people responding with solidarity and altruism, which she coined “disaster collectivism.” In the wake of devastation, newly formed networks and energized activists can come together to challenge the threats of disaster capitalism.
Hawaii’s collectivism in the wake of the fires, however, is also uniquely rooted in Native Hawaiian culture. “We have a word, ‘kuleana,’ that most know as ‘responsibility,’ and there’s also privilege there,” says Brummel, who helped staff the distribution hubs in Lahaina with volunteers. “Any responsibility we have is a privilege, and any privilege we enjoy bears responsibility. Those of us not in Lahaina have a responsibility to help.”
It will be a long time before the community can fully focus its efforts on rebuilding the Lahaina they want to see. Hundreds of people are still missing, and officials are urging relatives to get their cheeks swabbed to help authorities make identifications.
Despite losing loved ones, livelihoods, and houses that have been in the family for generations, people still need to pay phone bills and make car payments. In an effort to get families the immediate assistance they need, Lawrence and her team started an Instagram account, lahaina_ohana_venmo, which promotes the personal Venmo accounts of those directly impacted by the fires (all of whom are vetted by the Lahaina community). Within the first 24 hours of the account’s creation, she says, it amassed 30,000 followers.
“We encourage people to donate directly, because it’s going a long way to providing them with help,” Lawrence says. “Thirty days from now, people will have moved on to the next disaster. But at least we’ve put the world on notice. If you think you’re going to come in and buy Lahaina, you’re in for a rude awakening. We’ll do what it takes to protect the cultural integrity of our town. We take care of each other here.”
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