In her new book ‘Kuleana,’ Sara Kehaulani Goo fights to keep her family’s land
Sara Kehaulani Goo’s journey to save her family’s land on Maui began in 2019 with an email she read at her kitchen table in Washington, D.C.
“Sara, the Hāna property taxes went up 500%,” her dad wrote. “If we can’t find a way to pay, then the trust funds will be depleted in 7 years and we may be forced to sell it.”
Goo, who is Native Hawaiian, said it was the moment she realized she had to fight for her ancestral home, or risk it being lost forever.
In her new memoir, Kuleana — a Hawaiian word that loosely translates into both “privilege” and “responsibility” — Goo describes the efforts she and her relatives undertook to fight the tax increase and ensure that the land would remain in their family. But Kuleana is more than a story about rising taxes in Hawai’i, it’s about what it means to be Indigenous and reclaim identity in diaspora while highlighting the costs of colonial land theft and its continuing harm to Hawaiʻi. Goo challenges readers to think about what their responsibility to Hawaiʻi is in light of how Indigenous land loss has drastically altered Hawaiʻi’s environment and made the archipelago precariously dependent upon imported food.
Despite the U.S. overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom, Goo’s family had kept the title to their ancestral land that they’d received from Hawaiian royals, and they had the documents to prove it. They had setup a trust fund to pay for the property taxes, but despite those precautions, rising property taxes — partially driven by out-of-state millionaires and billionaires buying up land — threw the future of the family’s land into question.
Goo is a former staff writer at The Washington Post and former editor-in-chief of Axios. Grist spoke with her about what she learned writing her memoir, and what she hopes her readers take away from it. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. Your memoir focuses on your fight to keep your family’s land. Can you tell us more about what that land meant to you and why it was so important to keep it?
A. Some people might think of it as an inheritance, but it’s more than that. This was something that my grandmother talked about to our family as something that she promised to her mother and her grandma. That it was something that she wanted us to continue to carry on. So it was an intergenerational promise, and even before I knew the word, it was how I understood kuleana to be.
I was very aware of how far a distance there was between me and Hawaiʻi. That was uncomfortable for me, and I think that’s why sitting there reading that email in my home in Washington, D.C., felt so uncomfortable: It could be the end of the line, and I very much did not want that to end with me. So I realized I needed to act and it was more than just about money. It was more than being about me. I needed to act on behalf of my children. It was a big wake-up call about where I was in my life and where my generation was in our lives. We had drifted too far from Hawaiʻi in more ways than one.
Q. Climate change doesn’t figure heavily in this book, but it is something you acknowledge as an ongoing threat to the islands that compounds the trauma of colonialism. How do you see the relationship between Indigenous land ownership and climate change?
A. One thing I hope that people will take away from this book is that they will think about, “What is my kuleana?” Because I think that it is a word that Hawaiians can teach the world. The word gets boiled down to responsibility, but I don’t think it’s just that. The Western concept often feels like a burden, right? But the Hawaiian concept is much more than that, it is more about honor. It’s more about your role in society and being part of a whole. That concept was part of the Hawaiian way of life and it had to do with stewardship, not just my role and my responsibility, but how do I care for something? My stewardship and my responsibility for my part of an ahupua’a (land divisions, often from the mountains to the sea).
If you think about the way Hawaiians lived, that is something they’re trying to get back to today. You have a place that once was self-sustaining for up to 800,000 people in the middle of the ocean because they figured out how to sustain themselves with just the natural resources around them. And today, Hawaiʻi imports 90 percent of its food. Now Hawaiʻi’s looking at, How do we go back to that?
I think that Hawaiians can inspire future sustainability concepts by looking to the past. That’s not a crazy idea. I think it’s quite an inspired idea. And especially when you think about the Lahaina fires, you look at what has gone wrong and it’s not too hard to figure out. My book is not about policy, but I do think that it is about how you draw that line through history to understand a little more context for how we got here. That’s a big reason I wrote this book: It wasn’t really to tell a story about me. I really felt like as a journalist, the story of the Hawaiian people and the real story of their history was not accurately understood, even by people who visit Hawaiʻi and love Hawaiʻi. I felt like that story really needed to be better understood.
Q. Can you tell us more about what that real story of Hawaiʻi is that you say needs to be better understood?
A. Ten million people visit Hawaiʻi every year and they love it, and I think what’s missing is the real story about the economic crisis and displacement of the Hawaiian people. It’s not even just the Hawaiian people, it’s the local people: The economy is not working for them and hasn’t been working for them for quite a long time. It made a headline for a week, maybe, when the census in 2020 showed that more Native Hawaiians live outside of Hawaiʻi than live on the islands. But what is Hawaiʻi without Hawaiians? This has been a slow boil crisis that no one’s been paying attention to.
As a journalist, I’ve seen this happening where housing and real estate have been out of reach for a very long time. The housing that exists is of poor quality. It’s multiple generations of a family living under one roof and homes are unoccupied and owned by people who don’t live there: They’re owned by investors, they’re owned by people who live off-island. And you have no place that is worse than in Maui, where now you have thousands of people who have had to leave because of a fire. Meanwhile, you have all these homes available for them that are empty. But they’re not for them. They’re for wealthy vacationers. So who is Hawaiʻi for? It’s not for local people. Who is the food for? It’s not for local people. What is going on? We’re importing people, importing food — it doesn’t feel like a real place.
I wanted to tell a real story here about our most recent colonial experience that we still haven’t quite dealt with the aftermath of, and no one wants to talk about it because we just want to have a lovely vacation. I just have to bring up a really uncomfortable truth here because I’ve been seeing it and experiencing it for quite a long time, my whole life. This is the reality.
Q. One of the aspects of your experience was your frustration with government bureaucracy. How would you describe the role of government in your fight to keep your family’s land?
A. We were fighting just the latest version of this kind of faceless, shape-shifting bureaucracy when it came to this tax fight. We didn’t know who was on the other side. We didn’t know when we were going to hear back. We didn’t know what the timetable was. We didn’t know why any decision was made. It didn’t feel like we had any recourse. And I think what was interesting is that I would look through all the documents that my family had collected over the course of the 175 years this land had been in our family, and it felt like we were always fighting the same faceless bureaucracy.
We had all kinds of paper-trail evidence of court documents declaring that the land was deeded to us. We’ve been in this fight all along; this was just today’s modern version of it, and we’re always going to be in it. My kids are going to be in it too. At the end of the day, it didn’t matter who was on the other side: You feel powerless. You feel like you’re just at the mercy of some bureaucrat with a rubber stamp with an official set of documents, and it’s very frightening.
Q. Many other Indigenous people face similar experiences of feeling disconnected, either from their land, their culture, or their communities. What can they learn from your book?
A. We’re all given breadcrumbs of our family history and some of us have more and some of us have less. We all have a choice in what we choose to do with that. Some of us kind of let it go and others of us choose to investigate and are curious and we want to know more. And so that’s all up to you. For me, I was so curious and I was surprised to learn that even my cousins who lived in Hawaiʻi, some of them had the same insecurities that I did about being Hawaiian. And I realized if they’re feeling uncertain about their Hawaiian-ness and I’m feeling uncertain about my Hawaiian-ness, then who is anyone else to tell me how Hawaiian I am?
You either live your culture or you don’t. You either embrace it or you don’t. You either pass it on to your children or you don’t. It’s either part of you and speaks to you and brings you joy or it doesn’t, and you only have one life to live, so why worry about what other people think? I think that we all are on our own journeys and each person has to decide to either connect with their community or not, and how you want to do that. But you have to do so with intention.
Q. One of the most meaningful aspects of your book was your experience learning hula and how that anchored you in your Hawaiian culture. But there were challenges too: You wrote about how your children didn’t want to attend hula and how your daughter refused to wear a lei. What happened with that struggle after the book ended?
A. It has a happy ending. So my daughter Chloe is now in the eighth grade, and she has her eighth grade promotion next month. And she read the book and said, “Mom, I was young and I didn’t know, I didn’t understand.” And she said, “For my eighth grade promotion, will you make me a lei?” And I said, “Of course I will.”
So I feel like Hawaiʻi’s in their heart, you know? At some point you have to let your kids go and they will find their own way. You cannot force them. My kids have said, “Hula is not my thing,” but they have to find their thing. It may not be next year or the year after, but they have to find their own way. I just hope that I have given them enough. I’m grateful that I found myself and was able to teach them what I could and had surrounded them, I think, with enough other people in their lives to teach them, and that they will find their own way back to Hawaiʻi and the culture, and then it speaks to them. But that is up to them and their own journey. So I can just hope that it’s part of their journey. It means a lot to me, and I wrote this book for them.
This story was originally published by Grist with the headline In her new book ‘Kuleana,’ Sara Kehaulani Goo fights to keep her family’s land on May 30, 2025.