Dear friends (welcome, new subscribers!) —
With this post, I want to take a slight detour to address an event that falls mostly outside the niche topics of my doctoral research, but which I feel deserves space on this platform since it is close to my heart. As a socioecological issue, it sits in the encircling, peripheral space of my art philosophy as it is concerned with ecofeminism, postnatural landscapes and anticapitalist activism. I’m referring specifically to the Maui wildfire situation. Though I pepper this entry with my personal connection, feelings of home and sense of place, the more complex story of ‘home’ on Maui has acquired deeper nuance that extends to the ends of the earth, becoming shared with the entire planet in the aftermath of the mass tragedy that has shaken the island’s people to the core.
I’ve been asked by many concerned individuals (friends, colleagues, supporters, etc.) if my family on Maui is OK. My family and friends are at a safe distance from the wildfire hot spots since they live on or near the North Shore, the wettest part of the island (though recent years have seen some droughts). Regardless, the emotional space I’ve been holding for people who have been directly impacted is real, shared, and has taken time to unpack. I postponed publishing about this until more local stories, told by Maui residents and affected families had a chance to emerge and be given airtime amongst the (social) media frenzy; also, until financial recovery efforts were vetted and I could help promote some of them.1 Lastly, I postponed so that I would not be caught up with the rush of individuals and companies eager to profit from disaster capitalism and its sensational momentum.
My 35-year long relationship with Maui is deeply associated with my dad, stepmother, aunt, other extended family and close friends who live there permanently, as well as memories of those who have passed; it is thus integral to my sense of self and place in the world. My first visit to Lahaina, in 1989, included a stop at a rough roadside cross that marked the place where my uncle, Douglas Malcolm Hunter (1952-1985) had crashed his motorcycle and lost his life. Marked only with his pseudonym, BOB, and draped with a faded ti leaf lei, this humble wooden cross stood for years in the same spot on the side of the road that feeds into Lahaina, until it was removed some years ago. I remember feeling a little taken aback that such a memorial would be discarded like highway debris, though not many outside of my family circle would have known or remembered Bob and I hadn’t seen him since toddlerhood—my only memory of him was distilled into a photograph of chubby me in a diaper and baby bonnet, propped on the seat of his chopper. Yet, stories of his unruly life, his relationship with his longtime parrot companion, and his talent for playing the flute like Jethro Tull permeated my psyche and took material form in the spindly monument that bore his adopted name. He had moved to Maui in 1979, when it was still an escape from the rest of the world, and the law.
For me, Maui is a beloved ‘home’ because as a location and shared culture, it has impacted my development in core ways over decades. The broader collection of my early memories of Maui bear a stark difference to the Maui of today. Mainly, this is due to the development that has taken place: I remember a Maui with no golf courses, no palatial hotels; increasingly now, its once open access beaches are being swallowed into the groomed leisure grounds of popular restaurants and resorts and becoming off-limits. I remember a Maui with impenetrable swathes of jungle surrounding dirt roads and paths, when the location of Twin Falls was still a secret; now, it is so swamped with tourists trying to crowd in to an already glutted makeshift parking lot, that walking over from my dad’s nearby farm is too risky with all the confused traffic. I remember a Maui where hitchhiking was a fairly safe, communal mode of transport; now, there is no stopping the bumper-to-bumper parade of rented Mustang convertibles along the Hana Highway. I don’t mean to say that all development is bad or to blindly romanticize the past. My point here is that I empathize with one particular aspect of the Lahaina tragedy to the extent of my own experience, and that is the slow but insatiable capitalist erasure of ‘home.’
The feeling of home I have on Maui is a privilege I don’t take for granted. Home is a living relationship with others and environment, a complex and meaningful organism nurtured through sustained care and shared experiences—those that ebb and flow and break and mend: efforts to grow, difficulties and grief, illnesses, celebrations, meals, laughter, conflicts and change. Home is the shared history these things, embodied by the people who have formed it together, embedded in their living memories. The wildfire in Lahaina claimed the lives of (still) innumerable kanaka maoli, indigenous Hawaiians, many of them children—and thus, has gravely impacted Maui’s future. Though their story runs deep as lava tubes, extending from the core of the earth and the beginning of the island’s history through ancient cosmologies, it also bears the colonial imprint of attempted cultural destruction, capitalistic repackaging (tourism) and industrial land devastation. The recent wildfires encapsulate all those things, either stemming from them or continuing to be embroiled in them.23
I have been witnessing the outrage of Lahaina residents as new conversations around (re)development have arisen from flames that have barely been put out. Colonial capitalism moves to erase or overwrite cultural memory and thus, dis-place belonging—especially where embodied memories are threatened, weakened or eliminated. Just as my uncle’s fragile memorial cross stood in a place marked by a tragic end but that was ultimately overwritten by new highway development, Lahaina has been swept up in the discard/ erasure attempts of hyper-futurist ‘progress.’ Rebuilding after a land and human tragedy is something that takes time; money alone can’t do it. Rebuilding a sense of ‘home’ is necessarily supported by compassion and patience, something that industrial corporate management and its proprietors have none of and would not profit from.
However, the collective strength displayed by local communities on Maui has been notable. The determination of Lahaina residents to so quickly organize to resist attempts at land grabbing that threatens their home is truly inspiring in this egregiously extractivist world. Even though houses no longer stand, and lost family members and pets are still being searched for and mourned, the swiftness of response through community interdependence makes me want to weep with relief that such a force still exists in the world. I know I’m not alone in this feeling. We are all subjects of colonial displacement to greater or lesser degrees, and have our own experiences with alienation from family and community. Those who choose to perpetuate that for personal gain (eventually) come to bear a poverty of spirit, one that has been highlighted by stark contrast to the wealth of spirit on Maui. It’s been amazing to see how the people of Maui’s resistance efforts have been successful so far in waylaying the investment property vultures, to create space for mourning and healing and moving forward on their own terms. But collectivism is not a short-term effort—this is an endurance test, a commitment, and one that we struggle with societally due to our groomed fixation on the next shiny, new thing.
A former artistic research project that I worked on (in 2018) was around colonial industrial extraction, at a legacy gold mine tailings site in Nova Scotia, Canada.4 This project was a reality check for me, as a settler descendant conditioned by capitalist cultural beliefs. What I mean specifically is that I began the project with a remedial approach, imagining ways that the poisoned landscape could be fixed through technological intervention (in the case of my project, this was through biotechnology). These unconscious beliefs were brought to my attention through conversation with the local Mi’kmaq curator and ethnologist, Roger Lewis. I was working directly with Roger to consult on the project development, and our meetings involved him gifting me with stories of the extensive historical (and living) relational aspects of the local landscape to Mi’kmaq people. In this light, as I came to understand, anything done to the land was done to the people, not just physiologically but spiritually and culturally. His final message to me was that the land is either better left alone to heal itself over time, or through slowly sustained care versus yet another short-term intervention. I think that this an important lesson that took me some time to swallow and fully integrate, since I had come from a place of wanting to be helpful. This, I believe, is a decolonization process that begins with the individual.
What we can do to help Maui now is to listen to its local people, especially indigenous residents who have a multi-generational memory of place and culture, and thus deepest understanding of how it needs to be rebuilt and recovered. Again, I’m not romanticizing here because this isn’t a pitch for the usual ‘noble savage’ narrative of colonial fetishization. I believe that Maui residents are sophisticated in their perceptions of the centuries long negative impacts of colonialism on their way of life, and experts via embodied knowledge through cultural memory. I will continue to watch as events unfold, beyond the crisis sound bytes and horrific images of destruction, and look for ways to support on-the-ground efforts organized locally.5
The fundraiser campaign I chose to donate to is organized by The Na Wahine Toa Foundation and can be found with a donation link here: https://ilimanator.com/maui/
Another local fundraiser effort that goes directly to supporting Lahaina ohana (families) can be found on Instagram here: https://www.instagram.com/lahaina_ohana_venmo
Also, Slow Factory has published the Maui Mutual Aid Guide, a permanent resource of places to donate to help in the recovery efforts.
Many others have written about this already. For more, see:
An Instagram account that specifically addresses how climate and human rights are directly connected is Slow Factory @theslowfactory
More information on that project, called PROSPECTIVE FUTURES: THE AURELIA PROJECT, on my website here: https://www.whitefeatherhunter.ca/landscape-as-laboratory - scroll down to the project title for images and a description.
A friend who has been supplying (for free) indigenous plant remedies to support sleep and healing can be found here: https://biotemple.earth/
Huge tragedy! Your thoughts are greatly insightful.