Reclaiming Hāʻena

View from the wao akua (godly realm) of Limahuli in Ahupuaʻa Hāʻena looking ma kai into the valley. Led by lineal descendants, the residents of Hāʻena, located on the North Shore of Kauaʻi, are reclaiming their kuleana to care for their sacred spaces. – Courtesy Photo

By Dan Ahuna, OHA Trustee for Kauaʻi & Niʻihau and Puanani Fernandez-Akamine

“Can you imagine going home and finding hundreds of cars parked up and down the road and people walking in front of your house 24/7 and nobody asked you if it was okay or told you what they were doing?”

The question was posed by Presley Wann, a long-time community advocate and cultural and lineal descendant of Hāʻena on Kauaʻiʻs North Shore.

Wann was referring to his community becoming overrun by tourists. It began in the mid-1990s and peaked in 2018 when anywhere from 2,000-3,000 vehicles per day would venture out to Hāʻena State Park located at the end of Kūhiō Highway.

“It was ridiculous,” added Hui Makaʻāinana o Makana Executive Director Pua Chin, also a lineal descendant of Hāʻena and Wann’s cousin. “Multiply the number of cars by two and that’s a huge amount of people. They were parked on both sides of the road all the way up past the caves. Local residents wouldn’t go down there anymore because it was just crazy.”

Hāʻena is one of nine ahupuaʻa located in the moku of Haleleʻa, which also includes Hanalei, Lumahaʻi, Wainiha and Waipā. It is a region renowned for its natural beauty and scenic vistas – from the patchwork of loʻi kalo in Hanalei Valley to the picturesque Lumahaʻi Beach to the famous wet caves at Hāʻena State Park – which is also the gateway to the Nāpali Coast, Kēʻē Beach, and hiking trails into Kalalau Valley.

Haleleʻa’s natural beauty has long been a magnet for tourists.

As life-long North Shore resident Charles “Chipper” Wichman, founder of Limahuli Preserve once observed, “Our land is being loved to death.”

Ahupuaʻa Hāʻena

Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop inherited the lands of Hāʻena from her father High Chief Abner Pākī. The land was eventually sold and purchased by entrepreneur William Kinney of Nova Scotia.

Kinney initially intended to grow sugarcane on the land but soon realized that Hāʻena is too wet. In the meantime, he married Kaiwihoopilipili, a woman from Hanalei, and fathered a son, William Kihapiilani Kinney. It was likely due to his newfound connection to place, through his half-Hawaiian son, that Kinney decided in 1875 to sell the Hāʻena land to the Hawaiians who were already living there and farming the land.

He suggested that the 38 families form a hui to purchase the land – and they did, calling themselves Hui Kūʻai ʻĀina o Hāʻena.

At that time, the concept of “owning” land was still very foreign. “It’s mind-blowing that they had the foresight to [realize] that the only way they were going to be able to stay on the land was to jump in and do the monetary thing,” reflected Wann, whose great-grandfather was William Kihapiilani Kinney.

The elder Kinney reportedly sold Hāʻena to the hui for cheap. Most of those families and their descendants continued to live on and farm those lands for the next 100 years – until the State of Hawaiʻi began to condemn the lands of Hāʻena in the 1960s shortly after statehood to make way for a state park.

When the 65-acre Hāʻena State Park opened in 1972, the Native Hawaiian families who had farmed those lands for more than a century were permanently displaced. “Our family land was on the other side of Limahuli Stream and, fortunately, the state ran out of money so our kuleana was spared,” said Wann.

A Wahi Pana Overwhelmed

Hāʻena is a wahi pana that features prominently in the moʻolelo of Pele and Lohiʻau; it is at Hāʻena that Lohiʻau lived – and where the foundation of his home still stands.

When Lohiʻau died from grief after being separated from Pele, he was buried in a cave on the cliff overlooking Kēʻē. Pele sent her sister, Hiʻiaka, to Kauaʻi to retrieve Lohiʻau. Finding him dead, Hiʻiaka and her companion, Wahineʻōmaʻo, restored him to life and took him to Pele.

Hāʻena is also the location of Ka Ulu o Paoa, part of the Kēʻē Heiau Complex. Within the complex is Ke Ahu a Laka, a hula platform where contemporary hālau hula still pay tribute. Hāʻena is also famous for its wet caves, Waikanaloa and Waikapalaʻe.

As has happened elsewhere, unchecked tourism in Hāʻena eroded both the natural environment and the community’s patience. “A lot of our woe is from the visitor industry,” noted Wann. “They were promoting tourism without looking at the impact to the people or to the environment.”

“They were all coming in to hike and swim, which is fine – it’s a beautiful place,” said Chin. “But it wasn’t being cared for. It was being overrun.”

When Hāʻena State Park opened, about half a million tourists traveled to Hawaiʻi each year. By the late 1980s, that number had increased to more than 6 million. And as Hāʻena grew in popularity as a tourist destination, the local people were squeezed out.

By the mid-1990s, “some of the people in our community were ready to drop trees across the road,” Wann said. “The feeling was that if we can’t go down there [to Hāʻena] then nobody can.”

Instead, the lineal descendants of the original hui that purchased the Hāʻena land in 1875 decided to regain control of their ancestral land in a more proactive way. In 1998 they formed nonprofit Hui Makaʻāinana o Makana (Hui) to mālama the natural and cultural resources within Hāʻena State Park.

Creating the Hāʻena CBSFA

“One of the most significant things the Hui did after its founding was to begin the process to establish Hāʻena as a community-based subsistence fishing area (CBSFA),” said Chin.

“Our kūpuna who were on our Hui advisory committee told us – at that time we were the younger generation – that we had to get back on the land. That we were losing our ability to feed ourselves. Because we’re so isolated, our kūpuna had to sustain themselves from the land and the sea,” Wann said.

“They told us we had to watch the fishing, that the area was being overfished, and they didn’t see the biomass they used to see when they were growing up.”

It took about nine years but, with the Hui leading the charge, in 2015 Hāʻena became the first CBSFA in Hawaiʻi. It wasn’t just a policy measure in response to overfishing or unchecked tourism. It was a statement of self-determination – an assertion that Native Hawaiians possess both the right and the responsibility to steward the resources of their ancestral homeland.

Hāʻena had become overwhelmed by commercial activity and unmanaged visitation – and the burden fell on the community. Unregulated tours, congestion, and ecological damage threatened both livelihoods and sacred sites. Creation of the CBSFA re-centered decision-making back into the hands of the people. Now, local rules, education, and monitoring have transformed the landscape – restoring both marine life and community voice.

“A CBSFA is one of the few tools that actually gives Native Hawaiians a way to exercise real leadership outside of elected office,” said Kevin Chang, executive director of nonprofit Kuaʻāina Ulu ʻAuamo (KUA), which was instrumental in helping the Hui through the process. “Self-governance gives you a model that works beyond just fisheries. It empowers people.”

Hāʻena lineal descendant Lei Wann is director of the Limahuli Garden and Preserve and Presley Wann’s daughter. “The significance of what Hui Makaʻāinana o Makana did is that it showed how communities can lead,” she said. “We weren’t asking for permission. We were asking for support to make our kuleana whole again.”

Reclaiming Hāʻena Ma Uka to Ma Kai

Establishing the CBSFA was just the beginning for the Hui. Reclaiming and restoring the loʻi kalo within the boundaries of the state park was also critical to the Hui’s holistic view of mālama ʻāina for Hāʻena.

Early on, they established a productive working relationship with DLNR archaeologist Alan Carpenter (now the Hawaiʻi State Parks assistant administrator). This relationship has enabled the Hui to restore and manage some 6 acres of loʻi kalo in Hāʻena State Park.

These loʻi are fed by Limahuli Stream which originates deep in Limahuli Valley, the largest valley in Ahupuaʻa Hāʻena. It was once owned by Juliet Rice Wichman, a botanist from a Kauaʻi kamaʻāina family. In 1976, Wichman gave 13 acres to the National Tropical Botanical Garden (NTBG) to establish Limahuli Garden. These lands included extensive archaeological sites and ancient loʻi terraces.

Then in 1994, to protect the land from development, her grandson “Chipper” Wichman donated another 989 acres of the valley to the NTBG, creating the 1,006-acre Limahuli Garden and Preserve.

Today, under the leadership of Lei Wann, Limahuli is not just a place of conservation – it is a center of intergenerational cultural learning. “In Hāʻena, conservation isn’t a concept,” she said. “It’s who we are. We don’t ask whether to protect the land. We ask how to do it better.”

The staff at Limahuli cultivate native species, restore loʻi, and teach youth the intimate relationship between culture, food systems, and biodiversity. This work complements the CBSFA, creating a comprehensive stewardship model that spans from mountain to sea.

Because the valley is properly managed, by the time the water travels from up ma uka down to the kula lands through the loʻi kalo, to the muliwai and finally into the ocean it’s clean with very little silt and so the reefs are healthy. “We are fortunate. We have one of the most pristine streams in Hawaiʻi,” said Presley Wann.

Floods, a Pandemic, and Opportunity

In April 2018, a series of supercell thunderstorms over Kauaʻi resulted in massive flooding and landslides. Kauaʻi’s North Shore was hardest hit, with a rain gage at Waipā measuring nearly 50 inches of rainfall in a 24-hour period. Damage to Kūhiō Highway was so extensive that access to the community was cut-off – and later restricted to residents – for a year afterwards.

Despite the damage it wrought, the storm provided an opportunity.

In the decade leading up to the 2018 storm, the community had worked with the state to develop a master plan for Hāʻena that reflected the Hui’s vision of limiting the daily number of visitors to 900 and establishing a reservation system. Just a month after the floods closed the road, the Board of Land and Natural Resources adopted the master plan allowing the county to reduce the number of visitors from approximately 5,000 per day to a maximum of 900.

“The floods were a big opportunity because the complete shutdown allowed the state and the community to reopen the park in a different way,” Chin said.

As they prepared to reopen Hāʻena, the Hui reached out to the community for help managing the new system. Artist and photographer Joel Guy, who is kamaʻāina to Hāʻena, stepped up.

He formed a nonprofit called the Hanalei Initiative, which in partnership with the Hui would take on management of the online reservation booking system (gohaena.com) and utilize funding from the county to begin running shuttle services to Hāʻena State Park.

Needing a place to pick-up and drop-off visitors, Guy approached Stacy Sproat-Beck, executive director of the Waipā Foundation. Ahupuaʻa Waipā is about six miles east of Hāʻena. Sproat-Beck was able to make some of the foundation’s land available to set up parking for visitors taking the shuttle to the park.

A second vendor was chosen to manage the limited parking at Hāʻena – which became problematic. “We had an outside vendor running the parking lot trying to maximize their profit and increase the number of people parking, and a community-run shuttle system trying to take more cars off the road,” Chin said.

That conflict was short-lived because the next year the COVID-19 pandemic brought tourism to a grinding halt.

When the worst of the pandemic abated and plans to reopen began, the Hui partnered with Hanalei Initiative to set-up a different agreement with DLNR. “By now the Hanalei Initiative had experience running the shuttle, so the state agreed to establish an all-inclusive reservation system for parking, entry and shuttle,” Chin said.

“What’s nice is it’s self-sustaining,” she added. “The revenue it generates feeds back into the system and our organizations.”

The Shutdown Brings Clarity

But something even more transformational happened during the pandemic – it gave every community across the pae ʻāina a once-in-a-lifetime respite from the pressures of tourism.

“Everyone who was taking care of ʻāina or ocean saw the recovery of our resources while we were shut down,” Chin recalled.

“Our rivers ran clear, our beaches were clean, and our families gathered in the road to eat together,” remembered Hanalei kupuna Moku Chandler. “For once, it felt like home again.”

That period of isolation provided both clarity and inspiration. For Kauaʻi’s North Shore community, beleaguered by decades of over-tourism, seeing the healing power of rest firsthand – not just for the land, but for their people – raised a new question: how can we manage these spaces in a way that restores harmony rather than reactionary control?

Inspired by Indigenous ranger programs in Australia and at Maunakea, a movement of Kānaka Rangers emerged from within the community at Wainiha in the aftermath of the pandemic. The rangers serve Kauaʻi’s North Shore as caretakers, educators, and peacekeepers grounded in local genealogy and culture.

Trained in conservation practices, cultural protocol, visitor engagement, and first response, Kānaka Rangers offer a new kind of public presence – one rooted in pilina (relationship). They are lineal descendants fulfilling a mandate passed down through generations.

“We don’t need outside law enforcement to protect our ʻāina,” said community advocate Nancy Chandler. “We need our own people, rooted in place, who understand the land and carry its stories.”

Collaboration and Shared Vision

What binds Hui Makaʻāinana o Makana, Limahuli Gardens and Preserve, Hanalei Initiative, Waipā Foundation, and the Kānaka Rangers is not just protection of place but a shared vision of kuleana in action. Their stewardship is a lifestyle. A daily practice of mālama ʻāina, recalling moʻolelo, guiding visitors and holding space for ʻohana to reconnect with the land.

This work also involves engaging with government, translating ancestral priorities into modern policy, creating access to land that educates rather than exploits, and activating the community.

“We have this huge volunteer base,” Chin pointed out. “Massive numbers of people would come out on workdays to help clear the land. We don’t ever forget how much our community has given.”

Presley Wann said the biggest take-away from his community work over the past 30 years is the power of collaboration – not just within the community or with like-minded organizations, but with the county and state government as well. “One of the keys to our success – even with our CBSFA – was we were able to get connected and build networks,” he said.

The success these organizations have achieved individually and collectively is an example of what is possible when our communities are empowered take the lead in visioning, planning and managing.

It’s not just about conservation, mālama ʻāina, sustainability or a regenerative economy – although it is all of that; it’s also about reclaiming our kuleana, rebuilding our lāhui, and taking care of our places for the generations to come.