I have no idea what it’s like to watch your world burn. But when I hear the Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians) describe the conditions that allowed the Maui fires to explode, I recognize their anguish and concern for the future. Indigenous People understand their pain and frustration through our shared experience with settler colonialism. For those of us who continue to live on our lands, and to share it with tourists, the indignities shown to us are amplified during times of conflict and crisis.
I will not tell the Kanaka Maoli’s story. They have plenty of people who are capable of doing so. A good place to start is Kaniela Ing’s August 17 essay for Time magazine. What these accounts detail in Lahaina is an accelerated version of the harm that unbridled climate change, resource extraction, and crisis exploitation inflict on Indigenous Peoples.
In Maui, the effects of climate change have been exacerbated by plantation practices that push out native plant species and divert water for commercial use. In the West, we see similar effects from mining, ranching, and restrictions against incorporating Indigenous management principles into public land use policy. The onslaught of mining that started during the Gold Rush era continues to devastate our environment at an astonishing rate in the Global South. Moreover, the consequences of climate change-induced drought are intensified in areas previously deforested by mining. In the Great Basin, for example, our beloved pine trees are being ravaged by beetle infestations that threaten to decimate an already meager source of sustenance.
A further insult, once plantations and mines are no longer commercially viable, municipal and regional managers convert them to other uses — such as tourism. Consider my home, in Death Valley National Park. The Pacific Coast Borax Company, perhaps best known for its 20-mule team and the Death Valley Days TV show, created the Death Valley Hotel Company that continues to operate under a new name and owners: the Oasis at Death Valley and Xanterra Travel Collection. Such resorts usually have superior water rights, which is why, as Naomi Klein and Kapua’ala Sproat wrote in their August 17 article for The Guardian, there was no water to fight Maui’s fire. The resorts use the water to fill pools and maintain golf courses, sustaining the allure of lush developments.
Mineral rights go even further — the General Mining Act of 1872 allowed miners to retain ownership of lands after their claims were played out. It’s gruesomely fitting that mining developments would morph into commercial enterprises, which University of Antwerp fellow Vijay Kolinjivadi refers to as “extractive tourism” businesses. Kolinjivadi explains, “Like a gold rush to the latest discovery of untapped ores, a panoply of hotel chains, foreign tour operators, online booking agencies, airlines, real estate speculators, and multinational construction companies quickly rush to capitalize on any curiosity that a visitor might have toward any site of historical or natural value.”
Attraction sites such as Lahaina and many of our national parks provide examples of what Kolinjivadi describes as extractive tourism’s “mining pits.” Once tourism takes hold of these places, gentrification pushes out residents who are unable to withstand the financial pressure. Those who stay must deal with the demands required to sustain this new industry.
The story of the Timbisha Shoshone Tribe and the Pai ’Ohana illustrates this theory. In the 1990s, the Timbisha and the Pai ’Ohana both feared they were being forced off their ancestral lands — in what the U.S. has designated, respectively, as Death Valley National Park in California and Kaloko-Honokohau National Historical Park in the Kona region of Hawaii. To resist dispossession, they formed the Alliance to Protect Native Rights in National Parks and began organizing other Indigenous People with similar concerns. Following almost a decade of work, President Bill Clinton signed the Timbisha Shoshone Homeland Act into law, formally recognizing the tribe’s right to remain on their lands. Unfortunately, the Pai ’Ohana were forced off land they had occupied since well before the king of Hawaii relinquished his throne. A plantation owner sold the land out from under them, for $60 million, to create the national park — which is dedicated to the interpretation of Native Hawaiian culture.
Such dispossession can also result from what Naomi Klein calls “disaster capitalism,” when private interests descend on a region in the wake of a major destabilizing event and displace local residents. Disaster capitalism is an extension of Dutch writer and professor Arjen Boin’s notion of crisis exploitation — when entities capitalize on the disruption of governance as usual by emergencies and disturbances. This is what the Kanaka Maoli now fear in the aftermath of the Maui fires: that their aloha ’aina (ties and responsibilities to homeland) will be severed in the rush to “clean up” after the Maui fires.
As I mentioned in a previous article, Indigenous People claim the climate “crisis” is being used to justify actions that harm them and their homelands. The evidence they point to includes the framing of global warming in a way that deems specific minerals as critical, thus granting billons of dollars in tax credits and loans to their extractors. Interestingly, mining is responsible for between four and seven percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and tourism produced eight percent of global greenhouse gas emissions between 2009 and 2013.
There is one glimmer in all of this. In 2022, the White House released guidance to recognize and include Indigenous Traditional Ecological Knowledge in research, policy, and decision making across federal agencies. This new directive is folded into the federal tribal consultation process. Still, tribal consultation holds less meaning than the international human rights standard of Free, Prior, and Informed Consent. I’ll cover the issue of tribal consultation in a future article. In the meantime, please join me in sending aloha to the people of Maui and in ensuring their worst fears do not materialize. Φ