Hawaii Nei

 1) The amount of kuleana lands that are left today compared to the amount, even though still small, before was much bigger.  2) Families of kuleana lands sell portions or all of the ohana kuleana lands to large landowners and they just end up using the land for new developments that don't help Native Hawaiians.  3)Kuleana lands were used for native tenants to reside on and use for agricultural purposes. Now, Hawaii struggles with limited land availability to build homes for Native Hawaiians and/or any agricultural purpose. 4) The waitlist for Hawaiian Homelands is extremely long, and even though Native Hawaiians apply, they could be waiting their whole life to be placed into a home.

 Lately, I've been a little more stressed than usual. After doing some brief research on my Paper 3 topic, I learned very quickly that there's not enough information on kuleana lands. It's becoming very difficult for me to understand my topic the way I feel like I should be understanding it, but I'm not giving up. I'll try to gather as much information as I can and use it.  Overall, I"m completely stressing about ending the semester on a strong note. I would like to get a B or higher for both of the classes that I am taking, but there are times where I feel like I could do so much better on my assignments and class work.

  Within the Hawaiian community today, the most pressing issue relating to shared/common resources or the environment that I’ve learned about by reading Kaiaulu and other articles is kuleana lands. This is an important issue because Native Hawaiians were awarded lands to perpetuate kuelana, natural resource management and connection to a place through protection of cultural landscapes and family lands. From 1839, Hawaiians lost their family kuleana lands through family members making a decision to relinquish their claims to the land or through court battles. To this day, some Hawaiian families continue to fight to upkeep their family kuleana lands.

As stated in the book, kuleana lands were described as "plots of land given by the governing ali'i of an area...to an 'ohana or as an individual as their responsibility without right of ownership. (Vaughan 5) But "the concept and process of awarding ownership under the Kuleana Act was very foreign. Maka'ainana had to register for ownership of their kuleana lands, pay to have that land surveyed, find two other native residents as well as one "foreigner" or non-Hawaiian citizen to testify in support of their claims, and, if awarded, pay taxes."  Today, there are still a few 'ohana with kuleana lands. For instance, my hanai mom and her 'ohanas hui, as they call it, has/had kuleana land in Kona from the mountain to the sea. Over time, their hui discussed amongst themselves and decided to sell part of their kuleana lands. As new developments were being built, the government wanted to buy more land to expand the mall in Kona, but the hui decided t...

Mehana Vaughan talks about sharing resources between the people and the community throughout the book. She also stated that some konohiki were greedy and would keep majority of the fish to themselves. Same thing with modern society, nowadays, so many people are greedy. We  are so used to taking things, we automatically think, "it's okay if I take one/some", without giving back.   Loke Pereira said, "you feed on each other's talents, you share that with one another. That is the part we miss, in today's generation. They don't think that way. They on the opposite side, they wanna take," and she's right. We take advantage of all the resources that we are given today, and look what happened recently, egg shortage. We wouldn't have this type of problem if we malama the 'aina that malamas us. In the mo'olelo, Minamina, the kupuna sharing this story talked about their Uncle Ah Meng doing hukilaus in Hanalei. After a big commercial operation a...

At first, I thought writing Paper 1 was difficult. Boy was I wrong. I'm pretty sure I have white hairs now. Ha! To be completely honest, I procrastinated on this assignment, but I absolutely regret my decision. When I first started, I thought I had my outline in order the way I wanted to write my paper, but, when re-reading what I wrote, it was pretty obvious my brain was all over the place. One of the most frustrating things about this paper was picking out parts of the book that is connected to MY most meaningful way of being in a place.  I was able to find a bunch of different parts of the book that I could relate to, but the more parts I added to my paper, the more difficult it was for me to give a detailed, yet straight to the point explanation. I had to take several breaks between writing because my head felt like it was spinning, and I lost focus on what I wanted to write about. After sitting and thinking about the organization of my paper, I was able to figure out my introd...