--- title: Hawaiians Have a History of Reasons to Fear Land Speculation description: The history of Hawaii is one of outsiders taking land and destroying local culture. Maui residents fear land speculators will do the same. canonical: https://time.com/6306090/lahaina-wildfires-history-exploitation/ author: Susanna Moore article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2023-08-17T20:58:09.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:51:00.281Z article:section: Ideas og:title: Fear of Land Speculation on Maui Evokes a Traumatic History og:description: The history of Hawaii is one of outsiders taking land and destroying local culture. og:url: https://time.com/6306090/lahaina-wildfires-history-exploitation/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt540388edc41940aa/698a3f9be6e84aad0c2b0631/maui-fire-hawaii-history.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 8256 og:image:height: 4644 og:image:alt: US-FIRE-MAUI og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Fear of Land Speculation on Maui Evokes a Traumatic History twitter:description: The history of Hawaii is one of outsiders taking land and destroying local culture. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt540388edc41940aa/698a3f9be6e84aad0c2b0631/maui-fire-hawaii-history.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Fear of Land Speculation on Maui Evokes a Bitter History of Exploitation > Sponsored content. 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It explains how TIME's journalism is made, from the first pitch through the editorial decisions behind a finished story or cover. #### How can I read about how TIME chooses its covers? Inside TIME is the newsletter where TIME's Editor-in-Chief explains cover selection and the editorial reasoning behind major stories. It is free at time.com/newsletters. #### Who is the editor of TIME? Sam Jacobs is TIME's Editor-in-Chief. He writes Inside TIME, a twice-weekly newsletter about the newsroom's reporting and editorial decisions. #### Is Inside TIME free? Yes. Inside TIME is a free newsletter, available at time.com/newsletters. A paid TIME subscription is separate and available at time.com/subscribe-agent. ## Video: Biden Addresses Victims in Maui as Search for Hundreds of Missing Drags On [Watch (HLS stream): Biden Addresses Victims in Maui as Search for Hundreds of Missing Drags On](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/Z9C4FYnb.m3u8) (2:30)  _Published 2023-08-22. After arriving in Maui via Air Force One on Monday, President Joe Biden boarded a helicopter, taking in from the air the miles of charred remains left behind by the deadliest American fire in a century._ by [Susanna Moore](https://time.com/author/susanna-moore/) ## Susanna Moore Aug 17, 2023 8:58 PM UTC  Destroyed homes and businesses are seen in the aftermath of the Maui wildfires in Lahaina, Hawaii, on August 16, 2023. Destroyed homes and businesses are seen in the aftermath of the Maui wildfires in Lahaina, Hawaii, on August 16, 2023. PATRICK T. FALLON/AFP via Getty Images by [Susanna Moore](https://time.com/author/susanna-moore/) ## Susanna Moore Aug 17, 2023 8:58 PM UTC In the aftermath of the fires on Maui and the loss of the town of Lahaina, an intense fear and resentment on the part of the people of Lahaina has been directed at speculators who would buy the land left desolate in the conflagration to build homes and hotels and commercial buildings. Josh Green, the governor of Hawai’i, is exploring “options to do a moratorium on sales of properties that have been damaged or destroyed.” This in answer to persistent, if not angry questioning, as to the possibility that the people of Lahaina might never be able to return to their town. Anger and despair are emotions familiar to those residents with a sense of Hawaiian history. It explains the appearance of signs reading “No Tourists” and the admonition that people refuse to speak to developers or real estate agents. When [Oprah Winfrey arrived at a refugee shelter](https://deadline.com/2023/08/maui-officials-clarify-reports-oprah-winfrey-cbs-news-crew-denied-entry-shelter-wildfire-survivors-1235498020/) near Lahaina with a camera crew, the people inside initially barred her and didn’t allow the crew to film. The fear of exploitation is deeply held, and a result of more than 200 years of historical trauma. The early history of the Islands may be seen as a story of arrivals—from the first hardy seeds and insects that found their way to the islands on the husks of coconuts, and the confused birds blown from their customary migratory routes, to the early Polynesian adventurers who sailed across the Pacific in double canoes, and the Spanish galleons en route to the Philippines, and the navigators in search of a Northwest Passage, soon followed by pious missionaries, whalers from Nantucket, shipwrecked sailors, and rowdy Irish poachers escaped from Botany Bay — all wanderers washed ashore, sometimes by chance. ### More From TIME ## Traditions in flux With the arrival in the late 18th century of English explorers, seamen, adventurers, and merchants, and in the 19th century of Protestant missionaries, the fixed world of the native Hawaiian, governed by hereditary chiefs and priests, and bound by a prohibitive system of rules known as _kapu_, suddenly became one of flux, if not chaos and disorder. Flora and fauna have become extinct at an alarming rate, and continue to do so, and the Hawaiian people, due to the introduction of diseases to which they had no immunity, and an encompassing melancholia that overtook them with the perceived loss of much of their culture, came close to disappearing as a race. In little more than 100 years, a closed and isolated culture, bound by superstition and ritual, with no comprehension or experience of individual freedom or private property, was transformed. The subtle, ill-defined sense of depression and alienation that Hawaiians began to suffer after the arrival of foreigners, and their vulnerability to diseases from which they had no immunity went unremarked by the new inhabitants. There was little in the missionaries’ view of humankind that encompassed the idea of racial distress, in this instance frequently occasioned by themselves, and little in the experience of the majority of foreigners who settled and worked in the Islands to provoke compassion. Incapable of imaginative sympathy or understanding, they could not begin to assuage the fear and sorrow that was overtaking the Hawaiian people. **_Read More:_**[_Maui Depends on Tourists. After the Fires, It Also Wants Them to Stay Away_](https://time.com/6305545/maui-wildfires-tourism/) For generations, Hawaiians had been able to find all that they needed in their own _ahupua’a_ or plot of land. The old system established by the chiefs had given them both sustenance and a form of independence, despite their indenture to the chiefs and their tenuous possession of property, dependent as it was upon the will of their masters. (It would not be until the revolutionary land divisions of the Great Mahele in 1848 that so-called commoners were allotted land of their own.) In 1816, Queen Ka’ahumanu, the widow of Kamehameha I and regent, along with Kamehameha’s son Liholiho, negotiated a treaty with the U.S. in which the Kingdom of Hawai’i assumed the payment of $150,000 owed by the chiefs to foreign merchants, traders, and shipbuilders. The debt was to be paid in valuable sandalwood, resulting in its depletion, but winning Ka’ahumanu the allegiance of the many chiefs who were in debt, having borrowed to buy guns, Chinese beds and silks, and yachts. The treaty also ensured American citizens the right to enter all ports of the kingdom, the right to sue in Hawaiian courts, and the protection of Hawaiian law, which some historians note as a beginning of the end of Hawaiian sovereignty. ## A rapid conquest When the cabinet minister William N. Armstrong, who accompanied King David Kalakaua on a trip around the world in 1881, warned him the future of his people was under threat, the king insisted that the Hawaiian people were happy enough — there was enough to eat, their small _kuleana,_ or homesteads, managed to support them, and no one stole from them. “I think the best thing is to let us be.” They were not left to themselves, as both Kalakaua and Armstrong must have foreseen, and they did begin to disappear. There is no little irony in recognizing that the rapidity with which this took place—a brief 120 years from the arrival of Captain James Cook in 1778 to the annexation of the kingdom in 1898—is ample testimony to the generosity of spirit, patience, endurance, and adaptability of the Hawaiians. Although profound disruption and loss had not been the intention of the missionaries who arrived in 1820, they achieved in many instances what they had come to accomplish, that is to instruct the Hawaiian people in the social, religious, political, and legal institutions of the West. At the death of King Kalakaua in 1891, the new queen, Liliuokalani, inheriting a kingdom riven by politics and disorder, requested the making of a new constitution in which the rights of native Hawaiians would be better protected. The legislature, made up predominantly of white merchants and landowners, accused the queen of sedition and wrote to the U.S. Minister in Hawai’i for protection. The queen and her supporters surrendered. In 1894, a counterrevolution failed and Liliuokalani was arrested. Four years later, Congress voted by joint resolution to annex the Hawaiian Islands with little resistance other than a petition signed by half the adult native population, and little effort by the acquisitive Americans, many of them descendants of missionaries and seamen and traders who had for years tirelessly sought such a treaty. It is any wonder that the survivors of the Lahaina fire are wary of the loss of their land, and resentful of anyone attempting to profit by their profound misfortune. The following is a verse by a Hawaiian chanter born in 1852, bemoaning the loss of the land: “O piano I heard at evening, where are you? Your music haunts me far into the night like the voice of land shells trilling sweetly near the break of day…I remember the upland of Ma’eli’eli where the mists creeping in and out threaded their way between the old houses of thatch. O piano I heard at evening, where are you.” ## Transcript To my left is The Banyan Tree. Beloved by this community for over 150 years. Are the former capital of the Kingdom Hawaii. That has stood for Generations as a sacred spot of exceptional significance. One of the people took me under his wing when I first got to the scene with Danny and I used to talk about it, talk about the kingdom of why he was just came from Japan, but it was amazing to listen to him today is burned, but it still standing tree survive for a reason. I believe it's a powerful, a very powerful symbol what we can and will do to get through this crisis. And for this, as long as it takes, we're going to be with you, the whole country be with you, You know, we will be respectful of the Sacred grounds and the Traditions that rebuild the way the people of Mali want to feel not the way others want to feel. We're going to rebuild the way the people of Maui want to go but you know, it's going to be hard America's deadly wildfires deadliest wildfire in over a century and Jill. And I have what's left of the front street was left of it. You surveyed the damage from the air as well. The devastations overwhelming, the date 114 dead. Hundreds of people are unaccounted for but I also want all of you to know the country's Grieves with. You stands with you and will do everything possible to help you recover rebuild and respect culture and traditions on the rebuilding takes place. From stories of grief, you've seen so many stories of Hope and heroism of the Aloha Spirit every emergency responder. Put their lives on the line for us to save. Others are our everyday Heroes neighbors-helping-neighbors native, Hawaiian leaders offering Solace and strength and this Banyan Tree one called it a diamond in the rough of Hope another referred to as fire cannot reach his route with his fire cannot reach, its roots, that's Molly, that's America. And the people of why we're with you for as long as it takes. I promised may. God bless all those we've lost. May God. Find those who haven't determined yet and may God bless you all. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"OpinionNewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/6306090/lahaina-wildfires-history-exploitation/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/6306090/lahaina-wildfires-history-exploitation/"},"headline":"Fear of Land Speculation on Maui Evokes a Bitter History of Exploitation","datePublished":"2023-08-17T20:58:09.000Z","dateModified":"2026-08-04T07:51:00.281Z","description":"The history of Hawaii is one of outsiders taking land and destroying local culture.","url":"https://time.com/6306090/lahaina-wildfires-history-exploitation/","keywords":["hawaii"],"thumbnailUrl":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt540388edc41940aa/698a3f9be6e84aad0c2b0631/maui-fire-hawaii-history.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Susanna Moore","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/susanna-moore/"}],"articleSection":"Ideas","image":[{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt540388edc41940aa/698a3f9be6e84aad0c2b0631/maui-fire-hawaii-history.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=1200:675&height=675","width":1200,"height":675,"headline":"US-FIRE-MAUI","caption":"US-FIRE-MAUI","creditText":"PATRICK T. 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