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 Hui tent 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.