Teaching Environmental Justice in U.S. Occupied Hawaiʻi: Defamiliarizing the Impacts of Militarism and Tourism on Native Landscapes

HUAKAʻI AS METHODOLOGY

Before we set off on our journey, it is important to note that a huakaʻi involves much more than simply sightseeing as a tourist would. It involves more than visiting beautiful places so that we can take pictures to post on Instagram. Instead, a huakaʻi is deliberate and purposeful, involving immersive, “ʻike maka” experiences that challenge us to truly see, feel, and understand a place. ¹ Huakaʻi can be physically as well as intellectually and emotionally demanding, as they defamiliarize or challenge our taken-for-granted assumptions and urge us to view and experience familiar landscapes with heightened insight and awareness. ²

Ultimately, huakaʻi demand that we proceed with humility and remain open to what we might learn about these places (and ourselves) along the way; for, ideally, as we begin to see and embrace familiar landscapes through fresh eyes and embodied, place-based experiences, our perspectives of these lands and our kuleana (responsibility) to them will be forever changed.

PREPARING FOR OUR HUAKAʻI: A SHORT LESSON IN HIDDEN HISTORIES

As we prepare to embark on this huakaʻi, there are some hidden histories that we all need to learn. These are facts that many of my students, even those who are Native to Hawaiʻi, often need to learn as well because much of our Native history has been “buried, written over or erased” ³ by dominant, settler narratives and has only recently been uncovered through the diligent research of contemporary Kanaka Maoli scholars. ⁴

First off, it is crucial for all who reside in or are visitors to Hawaiʻi to understand and acknowledge that they are on the ancestral lands of the Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians), which are currently U.S.-occupied lands of the Hawaiian Kingdom. For thousands of years before Westerners first set foot on these island shores, Kānaka Maoli, the aboriginal people of these lands, lived in harmony with their environment. These volcanic islands in the middle of the Pacific provided our kūpuna or Hawaiian ancestors with fresh water, fertile soil, and seas teeming with life. Within this environment, they established intricate and interconnected social-ecological systems that sustained the land, the people, and our more-than-human relatives. They planted complex networks of taro patches and other food crops. And they engineered natural irrigation systems through which the abundant freshwater streams could collect rich nutrients as they watered the crops and flowed towards the sea, eventually nourishing the fish growing in fishponds built along the shoreline. Thus, through their harmonious and reciprocal interactions with their environment, our Kanaka Maoli ancestors transformed the land into ʻāina or literally “that which feeds.” ⁵

Through these methods of mālama ʻāina (or taking care of the land), long before the arrival of the first Westerners, our kūpuna had developed a thriving, self-sufficient, self-governing, and self-sustaining civilization supporting upwards of 800,000 people on these small islands. They developed interdependent sociopolitical and economic systems based on a deep respect for the ʻāina and rich cultural and intellectual traditions that produced experts in voyaging, agriculture, aquaculture, history, music, dance, and medicine. ⁶

By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, British explorers and American Calvinist missionaries began to arrive on our islands. With the arrival of these ever-encroaching foreigners, the Hawaiian aliʻi (rulers) foresaw the need to secure their status as an independent nation. The aliʻi adopted and adapted a number of Euro-American diplomatic strategies and institutions, which enabled them to gain legitimacy in the world arena while maintaining a distinctly Hawaiian identity. Consequently, by 1843, Hawaiʻi had achieved formal recognition as a sovereign and independent nation-state by the major colonial powers of the time, including Britain, France, and the United States. The Hawaiian Islands became the first Polynesian nation to be recognized as an independent and sovereign state and entered into extensive treaty relations with major world nations. During the time of the Hawaiian Monarchy, the Hawaiian Kingdom had a 90% literacy rate, a national school system that was led by Kanaka Maoli administrators and teachers, and customary laws ensuring that every citizen had access to fresh water and natural resources. ⁷

In 1893, however, a group of American missionary descendants and plantation owners with sugar interests in Hawaiʻi illegally overthrew the Hawaiian Kingdom government with the backing of the U.S. Navy. ⁸ From that time forward, our sovereign nation has been under the continual occupation of the U.S. military, which sees our location as pivotal to its imperial projects throughout the Pacific. Over the past 130 years, this prolonged military occupation has enabled the ongoing settlement and dominance of a U.S. settler society here in Hawaiʻi, to the detriment of our Native people, our once rich and fertile lands, and our Native self-determination and sovereignty. For instance, in the name of “U.S. national security,” for decades, the U.S. military has bombed and poisoned the ʻāina of Mākua Valley and the plains of Pōhakuloa as they have used our beloved homelands to conduct war games and live weapons training. Moreover, they laid waste to the entire island of Kahoʻolawe, dropping over 2500 tons of bombs on this sacred ʻāina while using it for target practice in preparation to wage their imperial wars across the Pacific and beyond. Sadly, while Kānaka Maoli continue to challenge the desecration of our Native lands on many fronts, to date, 115 different sites on the islands have been identified as having been poisoned by decades of U.S. ordnance testing and military activity. ⁹

I share these hidden histories with you (as I do with my students) because it is impossible to understand Hawaiʻi today without understanding the mutually caring and familial relationship that Kānaka Maoli have traditionally had with our ʻāina and our more-than-human relatives, and how these relationships have been strained, altered, and ultimately severed by the imposition of U.S. imperialism and militarization in these islands. With this history in mind, we can now embark on our huakaʻi.

BOARDING THE SCHOOL BUS FOR A DETOUR WITH HAWAIʻI PEACE & JUSTICE

For the first leg of our huakaʻi, my class and I board a school bus for a “DeTour” led by Kyle Kajihiro of Hawaiʻi Peace & Justice. As our bus pulls out of the university parking lot and merges onto the freeway, Kajihiro turns on his microphone and strains to be heard over the traffic. He begins by explaining how this DeTour grew out of his work with the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC). As Kajihiro recounts, the AFSC frequently organized trips for its members to visit and learn about the peace and justice challenges that people were facing in other countries. But whenever they met in Hawaiʻi, Kajihiro noticed that these typically very progressive people switched off their critical perspectives and treated the islands like a playground. Over time, Kajihiro realized that Hawaiʻi’s natural beauty, combined with the tourism industry’s creation of an image of our islands as a multicultural paradise, functions to conceal the harsh realities and challenges experienced by our Native people and lands, which are in large part brought on by the U.S. military’s prolonged occupation of Hawaiʻi.

LOCAL HOUSELESS ENCAMPMENTS AND SUBSIDIZED MILITARY HOUSING

En route to the Pearl Harbor-Hickam military base, our bus passes roadside houseless encampments and local families living in tents along the slopes of the freeway. When we arrive at the manicured and pristine military housing complex, Kajihiro explains that the U.S. military occupies and controls 21% of the land on the island of Oʻahu (where our DeTour is taking place) with 143 bases or facilities across all of the Hawaiian islands and 41,000 active-duty personnel. As we peer out the bus windows, we see in stark contrast how the Native people of this land suffer disproportionately from homelessness and poverty due to centuries of displacement and dispossession under illegal American occupation, while U.S. military personnel enjoy subsidized housing, golf at elite military golf courses, and shop at “The Mall at Pearl Harbor,” the largest Navy Exchange in the world. Moreover, as scores of military families happily emerge from the Exchange with shopping carts overflowing with merchandise, Kajihiro explains that these federally subsidized commissary and department stores are shielded from the state’s alcohol, tobacco, and general excise taxes. Thus, much of the military’s purchases in Hawaiʻi provide little, if any, assistance to our local economy.

As Kajihiro notes, the U.S. military is everywhere in Hawaiʻi. While the bases themselves are the most obvious manifestation of their presence here, some of the military’s most devastating impacts on our people and ʻāina are hidden in plain sight. ¹⁰ Therefore, one of the goals of our DeTour is to sharpen our “defamiliarizing vision” so that we can begin to recognize and question the destructive impact of militarization all around us, which is now so commonplace in our island experience that many have come to accept it as necessary or natural.

HIDDEN IN PLAIN SIGHT: LEAKING FUEL TANKS AT RED HILL

One of the early stops on our DeTour is Kapūkakī (a.k.a. Red Hill). Built into the side of a volcanic ridge, which many have driven past countless times without noticing, is the U.S. Navy’s massive underground fuel tank complex that was secretly constructed during World War II to refuel trans-Pacific ships and planes at Hickam and Pearl Harbor. These 20 massive underground tanks store 250 million gallons of jet fuel and sit just 100 feet above the aquifer that supplies 25% of Honolulu’s fresh drinking water. Hidden in plain sight, the aging storage facility has largely escaped public attention until a recent incident in November 2021, when a bursting fuel pipe leaked 14,000 gallons of jet fuel into the water supply, drove thousands of families from their homes, and poisoned the drinking water of over 93,000 people, resulting in nausea, vomiting, hair loss, and ulcers, among other chronic illnesses that are yet to materialize. As if the poisoning of our aquifer with jet fuel was not enough, in November 2022, there was a leak of an estimated 1,100 gallons of AFFF firefighting foam that contains toxic levels of PFAS—dangerous, cancer-causing “forever chemicals” that could contaminate our water supply for generations. ¹¹

As our class ventures further on our DeTour, we meet with Hanaloa Helelā, a Hawaiian activist and grassroots organizer for Kaʻohewai and the Oʻahu Water Protectors. Helelā explains that this wasn’t the first time that jet fuel or toxic forever chemicals had leaked at Red Hill. Unreported leaks have been occurring at the facility for decades. (In fact, since its construction in 1943, the facility has leaked more than 1.2 million gallons of fuel into Honolulu’s water supply. ¹² ) Helelā then leads us to a nearby koʻa (shrine) to Kāne, the god of freshwater, which a coalition of Hawaiian water protectors had recently constructed directly outside the gates of the military command headquarters. Helelā explains that the shrine was built to raise community awareness of the desecration of our aquifer and to call people to gather at the site and join in the movement demanding that the U.S. military fully defuel and decommission the deteriorating fuel tanks to avoid future crises.

LOOKING BENEATH THE SURFACE AT PEARL HARBOR

The next stop on our DeTour is a military site that has become so familiar to many Hawaiians that we have almost lost our ability to look at it critically: Pearl Harbor. An active military base and home of the World War II USS Arizona Memorial, Pearl Harbor is a popular tourist destination visited by locals and tourists alike. Anyone who has taken the Navy-operated boat tour of the USS Arizona Memorial will likely remember the patriotic story that the military tour guides tell visitors to explain the intoxicating smell and massive oil slick that is ever-present on the water’s surface. The guides assert that visitors should view this glistening oil slick as a memorial in itself, as it serves as a continual reminder of the valiant, sunken (and continually leaking) warship that now rests at the bottom of the harbor.

The stories of military valor and the postcard-like images that are promoted by the Arizona Memorial visitor center contain such salient messages of U.S. patriotism that it’s difficult to imagine the site as anything other than a justifiably polluted U.S. military harbor. However, as we exit the visitor center and meet with Kanaka Maoli resident Danielle Espiritu at a small urban park on the eastern end of the harbor, we begin to imagine this place differently.

A GLIMPSE INTO THE PAST (AND POSSIBLE FUTURE) OF PUʻULOA

We sit at the water’s edge amid signs warning against swimming or fishing due to sewage contamination and other toxic pollutants that the military has released into the harbor through the decades. There, Danielle Espiritu, whose Kanaka Maoli family has lived in this area for generations, shares with us some of the forgotten histories of this ʻāina. She shows us historic pictures and accounts of this once-fertile estuary before the arrival of the U.S. military. She shares how this ʻāina, originally named Puʻuloa, was known for its abundance of wai or fresh water, and was once the breadbasket of the Ewa area with a network of spring- and stream-fed loʻi kalo and more than 30 fishponds filled with fish, shellfish, and oysters. And she shares old pictures of earlier generations of her family swimming and fishing in its clear blue waters. Listening to these stories, we are reminded that Pearl Harbor, which is now one of the most contaminated places on the planet, was once one of the most fertile and abundant areas on the island (and perhaps could be once again).

As we leave Puʻuloa and return to the university, we discuss the costs and consequences of the militarization of our islands and call into question patriotic narratives that portray the U.S. military as Hawaiʻi’s “protector and provider.” We then challenge ourselves to conduct DeTours of our own and to use our newly honed skills of defamiliarization to uncover the hidden impacts of militarism, tourism, and unabated development in the areas where we work and live.

UNEARTHING STORIES OF NATIVE DISPLACEMENT IN COASTAL KAILUA

For one of our DeTours, we unearth stories of the nearby coastal town of Kailua, a previously quiet beach town that has recently grown so popular with tourists that it has become difficult for Kānaka Maoli to feel at home there. As Maya Saffery, a kupa or Native of Kailua, explains, in the eyes of many Kānaka Maoli, Kailua has become a “playground for malihini or visitors—a place too pricey to live in, too touristy to feel comfortable in, too developed to recognize.” ¹³ The town has become so overrun with vacation rentals and expensive tourist shops that many locals no longer think of Kailua as being a place for Hawaiians and often assume that there are no Hawaiian people or Hawaiian practices remaining there.

The way in which tourism displaces Kānaka Maoli and distorts or suppresses our Native identity in Kailua is mirrored in the very architecture of the town. For example, after numerous Kanaka Maoli iwi or skeletal remains of our ancestors were found during the planning of Kailua’s modern retail district, the trendy shops and restaurants intended for those sites were built anyway. Now, thousands of people drive through Kailua’s retail district every day without any awareness of the sacred remains of our displaced ancestors who were forcibly relocated to small, fenced-off plots along the roadsides where they are expected to enjoy their eternal sleep amid the hustle and bustle of tour buses and sightseers.

TRANSFORMING LAND BACK INTO ʻĀINA AT ULUPŌ

Thus far, our DeTours of Kapūkakī (Red Hill), Puʻuloa (Pearl Harbor), and Kailua have exposed the harsh realities of Kānaka Maoli living under U.S. occupation and how the intertwined forces of militarism, tourism, and unabated development have distorted our Native landscapes and our traditional relationships with our ʻāina and our more-than-human relatives. At the same time, however, these stories can also serve to inspire us to reimagine how our landscapes and our communities might look and function differently if we could work together to transform these lands back into ʻāina (or that which feeds) once again. In an effort to reimagine these lands as ʻāina, for our next-to-last huakaʻi, we venture to a hidden kīpuka or tucked-away oasis of aloha ʻāina that has thus far resisted the ravages of rampant militarism, tourism, and unrestricted development.

Ulupō is a hidden oasis on the outskirts of Kailua that, for the most part, has escaped the gaze of tourism and development. The ʻāina of Ulupō is home to acres of restored loʻi kalo (taro patches) and a massive wetland that was once the island’s most abundant fishpond. The ʻāina is stewarded by Kauluakalana, a group of Kanaka Maoli scholars, advocates, and cultural practitioners who serve as a living testament to the fact that, hidden amid the vacation rentals and trendy tourist shops, Kānaka Maoli have always persisted in Kailua. And although it might be hard to see at times, if you know where to look, our cultural traditions are still being practiced there and are just waiting for more of us to return to them.

Kauluakalana works to re-engage the people of Kailua and neighboring areas in Kanaka Maoli cultural traditions by hosting community workdays, school field trips, and ʻāina-based, Hawaiian language immersion intersession programs for youth. During our class huakaʻi to Ulupō, we sit on a hill overlooking the wetlands and listen to Maya Saffery share traditional stories of the place. We then get knee-deep in mud to help weed the many taro patches and end the day by sharing in a traditional meal made from the taro, breadfruit, and sweet potato grown in that ʻāina. Many youth and community members have been fortunate to have similar experiences at Ulupō, which reconnect Kānaka and ʻāina (or people and place) and remind us all that Kailua can, once again, be a place for Kānaka Maoli and our traditional practices.

BREAKING THROUGH THE CONCETE IN URBAN KALAUAO

Our class’s final huakaʻi is to Kalauao, just inland from Pearl Harbor in one of the most heavily urbanized sectors of Oʻahu. Kalauao was once home to an intricate system of spring- and stream-fed taro patches but is now almost completely covered with asphalt and concrete. Here at the nexus of militarism and development, sandwiched between the popular Pearl Ridge Shopping Center, Kamehameha Highway, and elevated rail tracks, there sits a small, unassuming three-acre farm with a few terraced loʻi kalo as well as sugarcane, banana, and coconut.

In this small parcel of land, which is now literally surrounded by buildings and concrete, a group of Hawaiian farmers draws upon the area’s few remaining freshwater springs to grow our traditional foods and create space within the heavily urbanized landscape to feed people and create abundance on this ʻāina once more. During our huakaʻi to Kalauao, our class rolls up our sleeves to help Danielle Espiritu (who we had met earlier at Puʻuloa) restore an overgrown taro patch. We also spend time weeding the ʻauwai, or irrigation ditches, and watch how, in a small way, our hands help create space for the freshwater to flow freely once more. In the process, we develop a deep appreciation for the great value and care that our ancestors extended toward wai (freshwater), and we come to implicitly understand the traditional Hawaiian proverb that says, “Ola i ka wai” (or Water is life).

We are, therefore, quite alarmed when Espiritu shares that the fate of their farm is uncertain, as the freshwater springs that feed Kalauao are now at risk of being contaminated by the U.S. military’s recent jet fuel and forever-chemical leaks at Red Hill. ¹⁴ This alarming news, combined with our recent huakaʻi to Kalauao, has since inspired many of my students to testify at relevant city council and town hall meetings, sign petitions, attend rallies, and create curricula to educate their own huamāna (students) on the vital importance of caring for our islands’ aquifers.

CONCLUSION

As Maya Saffery attests, only when we meet and speak with the Native people of a place, and engage with them in cultural practices on their ʻāina, will we truly “ʻike maka” (see, know, and experience) the ʻāina and its people first-hand and understand what they both need to survive and thrive. ¹⁵ By engaging in these huakaʻi and meeting with and working alongside the Native farmers, activists, and cultural practitioners from Kapūkakī to Kalauao, my students have come to appreciate the vital importance of fresh water and healthy lands to the foods we eat and, ultimately, to our survival. Perhaps most importantly, they have been inspired to stand up for our ʻāina and wai and speak out against actions that will distort or pollute our Native lands, poison our aquifers, and ultimately displace our Native people and practices.

Likewise, I hope that these accounts of our class huakaʻi inspire you to take the lessons that you’ve learned back to your home communities. I hope that you’ll go on defamiliarizing DeTours of your own hometowns and educate yourself on their hidden histories and environmental injustices. True to the intentions of a huakaʻi, I hope that you proceed with humility and an openness to what you might learn along the way. And if you are so moved, I hope you will take action and get involved.