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 and commercial nets were used to catch an entire school of fish, community members pole fishing asked themselves when the sampan was going to bring the nets in for the akule were sitting in the net for four days, while they make business calls to get the best price on them. Later that night, the boat pulled only half of the fish and released the rest. Throughout the night and into morning, akule began to wash up to shore and were later buried by Uncle Ah Meng who mourned over each fish, for he said it was minamina or waste. The biggest challenge in this mo'olelo and most parts of the book is lawa pono. The sampan crew didn't take into consideration that there were others in the area that depend on the akule to nourish themselves. Similar to today, in many Hawaiian households, when it's time to eat, our 'anake, anakala, or kupuna would tell us "Only take what you can eat in the one sitting. If you finish all the food on your plate, then you can go back and get more." This helps make sure there is enough food for everyone who comes and goes and also assures that none of the food is wasted.
Within each chapter, Mehana Vaughan highlights the many different ways to maintain resources. But many of us today are so accustomed to this western lifestyle, we forget that our kupuna did all of these things to create sustainability for future generations. The trouble with this is that now our future generations have less resources and we are struggling to maintain whatever resources we have left. In chapter 5, Mehana Vaughan and kupuna from North Shore, Kaua'i explained that foreigners from the continent are buying out the same land they used for resources and are creating new developments for the place. Instead of these foreigners talking to the people of the community about the importance of the place and possibly gain better insight of the place, they slowly but surely took away almost every single resource the people used. Better yet, most of the families that lived there in the early days, moved to the continent or elsewhere on the island because they felt there was nothing left there for them. As sad as it sounds, this is still happening to this day. Many Hawaiians are flying out of state because cost of things is too expensive and us minorities can't afford this new "luxury life". As Gary Smith wrote, "They're living the Hawaiian life, where the rest of Hawai'i is no longer living that."
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