For generations, Sara Kehaulani Goo’s family owned a vast area of land along the coastline of eastern Maui. It was given to her ancestor by King Kamehameha III in 1848. “And for the most part, this land has remained exactly as it was some 175 years ago,” the longtime journalist writes in her debut memoir, “Kuleana.” “Raw, undeveloped, wild.”
Then one Monday night in 2019, Goo got an email from her father. The property tax bill on the land was increased by 500%. If they couldn’t find a way to pay, he wrote, they may be forced to sell. Goo felt like the ground beneath her shifted. So began a fight to keep the family’s land, and a personal journey for Goo as she returned to Maui, reconnected with her relatives and learned how much generations of her family had already lost.
Out June 10, “Kuleana” is a richly layered story that is part reportage and part memoir. Goo delves into questions about Hawaiian identity and the meaning of legacy and details the urgency with which she felt the need to act to save her family’s land.
“All I knew was, I didn’t want to be the last one whose name was on this ledger,” Goo told Poynter. “And I know that my father didn’t want to either, and I knew that my brothers and sisters and my cousins didn’t want to, either. There was too much at stake. This was not about real estate. This was about family and lineage.”
Ahead of the book’s release, Goo spoke with Poynter about writing her debut, Hawaiian representation in mainstream media, and more.
This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Amaris Castillo: Congratulations on your book, “Kuleana.” How do you feel about being closer to its publication?
Sara Kehaulani Goo: It’s so nice. This book has been more than a decade in the making, so it feels a little strange to finally be at the finish line. But it feels just right, and I’m really excited to finally be at this point. It feels really wonderful.
Castillo: Your book focuses on your family’s fight to keep your ancestral lands along the east coast of Maui. In the introduction, you write about the land and how it’s considered heritage and evidence of your family’s survival. You also write that the land is your family’s kuleana — or responsibility. What has been your relationship to kuleana, to this principle, in your own life?
Goo: “Kuleana” ended up being the perfect title for the book, not only because of the meaning of the word in Hawaiian, but because it represented the journey I was on to come to understand its meaning and to fully embrace it. As a journalist, I always felt pulled between these two places. My responsibility — my kuleana — in a sense of duty to journalism, to tell the story of our nation, of what is happening to the public, to the world. I felt like this profession called me, and it drew me from the West Coast to the East Coast, where it felt like the center of the media world really was. I was mesmerized by that. It soaked up my days and nights and weekends.
Yet I also felt equally pulled to my family story and the culture of Hawaii. For a very long time, I put that on the back burner. In fits and starts, I would soak that up, maybe report on that during my visits there with my grandparents. It always felt like something I could come back to. But when my grandparents passed away, I realized time was limited. We all reach that point in our lives where one generation fades away, and suddenly we realize, “Oh, wow. We’re not going to get that time back.” As I was writing this book and the land crisis hit our family, I realized now is the time when I needed to pay attention.
Castillo: One day, your father sends you an email, in which he says property taxes on the family’s land went up 500%. He says if the family can’t find a way to pay, you may be forced to sell it. “This is how Hawaiians are losing their birthright lands,” your dad writes in the email. Was that the impetus for you to write this book?
Goo: Yeah. I knew that I wanted to write a story about Hawaii, our family land, and the Hawaiian people. I struggled for a long time about what frame to put that in. I initially thought that I would write a book about the heiau (Hawaiian temple), and the mystery of the heiau. Honestly, I struggled with how to sell this book because I saw, as a journalist, this huge disconnect. I felt like Hawaii, as a story, was misunderstood by the media. It was caught in these tropes of terrible narratives that were either written poorly about by Hollywood as this tacky tourist destination, or just very simple narratives that never really got deep into the culture and the history.
When I tried to find an even deeper understanding about the history of Hawaii myself, I couldn’t find enough books about it. I had to really dig into museum archives or online databases. I write about how I visited this ancient heiau on our family’s property, and I couldn’t find a single book that explained what a heiau was. I found that really sad. It was almost like Hawaii’s history had been erased, or never written to begin with. It was like the world had moved on once Hawaii became a state, or Hawaii’s government had been overthrown — almost like it didn’t deserve a place in history. And I felt like, as a journalist, I wanted to right that wrong.
Castillo: What do you think of how the stories of Native Hawaiians are represented in mainstream media?
Goo: I don’t think that they really are represented, to be honest. Only recently have we begun to see a little bit more of Native Hawaiians representing themselves when it comes to standing up for issues, such as the Mauna Kea and the Thirty Meter Telescope, and land preservation issues. Maybe to some visitors in tourism you see a little bit more of that, if you’re visiting Hawaii. But that’s such a very small part of the population. You get a little bit of that in “Lilo & Stitch” or maybe “Moana,” but I think it’s just starting to creep into mainstream culture. I actually saw “Lilo & Stitch” over the weekend, and I was a little surprised that they had “kuleana” in there, which was great. It’s good to get beyond “ohana” and “aloha” and, you know, poke bowls.
I have a lot of grace and understanding that it’s a small population of people who live very far away, and not many people have the privilege of visiting Hawaii. It’s a bucket list destination. But I think that we haven’t really been curious enough, and I think that we haven’t yet been conscientious enough to understand there’s a whole history of people here and a whole culture here. It’s part of America. It’s part of our history.
Castillo: If you can take us back to that moment, what questions went through your mind?
Goo: When I got that email, it was really a chilling panic because I felt very helpless, that I was so far away. And yet, to some level, I feared that that kind of email might happen in my lifetime — in part because my grandmother always drilled it into us that the land was so important to her, and it should be important to us. Because of that, we felt that we needed to honor it, and needed to honor her. And so it felt like we needed to do something.
Castillo: During that struggle and fight to hold onto the family’s land, was there something that surprised you the most?
Goo: I realized that our family had been fighting a version of this for generations. This was just the most recent. The main reason we had this land to begin with was because, thank God, my family was good at keeping records. We had land records, tax records, probate records from courts, wills and testimonies that prove that we were the owners of the land for generations going back more than 175 years. But we were always trying to prove to some court, to some powers that be, to some government bureaucrat, that our land was ours. We were always on the defense. We always had to have the paper trail. We always were fighting some faceless bureaucrat.
Castillo: You are a journalist who has led several news organizations, including Axios, NPR and The Washington Post. Can you talk about the role journalism played while writing this book?
Goo: I took a lot of my journalism skills and put them to work in this book, because I did a lot of reporting for this book. I interviewed dozens of family members. This book really took me into some unexpected places. I ended up interviewing anthropologists and going down the rabbit hole into genealogy, archeology, and ancient Hawaiian history.
Writing a book was like writing a giant magazine story. (Laughs) It was the most satisfying project I’ve ever done, and I’m someone who didn’t really set out to write a memoir. I resisted that from the beginning, because I didn’t want to write a story about myself. But I tried to write it in a way that was telling a larger story about the Hawaiian people. That’s what I really tried to do.
The truth is, when I tell people in Hawaii that I wrote a story about my family’s struggle to hold onto our Hawaiian land, people just say, “Oh, yeah. That is a very common story.” It’s not very novel. It doesn’t seem very unique, but it’s, of course, a very worthy story.
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