How we reported on Lahainas returning wetlands -

Five months after flames tore through Lahaina, the burn zone looked eerily similar to the first time I saw it, in the immediate aftermath of the August disaster: charred trees, husks of burned out cars, remains of cremated buildings.

But then I noticed the water.

It flowed through ditches, pooled on fields and stood so deep in an underground parking garage that it spilled out of the entrance. All this water was a big reason I returned to Maui in late January, after being part of The Washington Post’s team that initially covered the devastating fires there.

It was a striking sight, especially given how dry the land had become before the blaze. But Lahaina was not always that way. The fire had disrupted the pumping operations that once turned the town into a tinderbox, and now its historic wetlands were showing signs of returning all on their own.

Intrigued, Post photographer Sarah L. Voisin and I traveled to the burn zone to report on the phenomenon and the ambitious plan to seize this chance — when Lahaina is facing a large-scale rebuild — to restore the wetlands and a sacred Native Hawaiian site at their heart.

Our guide that day was Ke‘eaumoku Kapu, who I had first met months earlier, just after his Na ‘Aikane O Maui Cultural Center burned on Front Street. At the time, Kapu had described the fire as a chance for the town to “hit the reset button.” Like many, he felt his town had too zealously embraced its status as a tourist destination, to the detriment of Hawaiian history and culture.

The answer, Kapu believes, is to bring the water back to Lahaina, especially to a long-buried island called Moku‘ula and the 17-acre fishpond that surrounded it, Mokuhinia, home to royalty and deity. It’s a site that has remained one of Hawaii’s most sacred — even after it was concealed beneath a baseball field more than a century ago.

The restoration effort is still in its earliest stages, but it’s quickly gaining momentum. Gov. Josh Green (D) announced his support, and he has directed other top state officials to study the matter. Locally, restoration has become both a beacon of hope and a rallying cry.

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To report this piece, I interviewed more than two dozen people, compiling some 70 pages of notes that ran over 30,000 words long. I talked with advocates and elected leaders, scientists and lawyers, business groups and direct descendants of those who once lived on Moku‘ula. I read reams of dense legal documents and studied up on Hawaii’s tortuous water code.

But it quickly became clear that this was not just a story about a vision for Lahaina’s future. It was also a story about its past.

To understand how the town got to this point — how lush wetlands were drained, a hallowed island was entombed and Lahaina was reduced to ash and cinder — I hit the library.

I knew of just one book devoted to the subject, “Moku‘ula: Maui’s Sacred Island” by the anthropologist P. Christiaan Klieger, and until its recent reprinting, it was difficult to find on the mainland. When I landed back on Maui, my first stop was the Wailuku Public Library, where I photocopied the book’s 115 relevant pages.

Along with Klieger’s work, I drew on the recorded lectures of the late Hawaiian cultural practitioner Akoni Akana, who helped start the now-defunct nonprofit Friends of Moku‘ula in the 1990s, the book “Sugar Water” by Carol Wilcox and “Water and Power in West Maui” by Jonathan L. Scheuer and Bianca K. Isaki, among several others.

Archaeological reports by Tanya Lee-Greig and Janet Six, ethnographies by Kepā and Onaona Maly, and a University of Hawaii Law Review article by Holly K. Doyle were also instrumental in helping reconstruct the dewatering of a place once known as the “Venice of the Pacific,” a process kicked off by thirsty sugar cane companies and continued through a long history of colonization.

Because Moku‘ula’s heyday came before photography was widely accessible, there are few images of the island and its surrounding pond. To illustrate the historical section of our piece, I scoured the archives. I consulted six collections, including one in Australia, and visited the Maui Historical Society, housed in one of the island’s oldest buildings.

Patient and helpful archivists showed me their musty basement records room and helped me search stacks of old newspaper clippings and files of photos. After I left, one of them uncovered several pictures we hoped to use, but there was a problem: The museum’s scanner was broken, and they couldn’t send the images. In the end, we purchased a portable scanner and asked Maui-based freelancer Deborah Rybak to visit the archive and transmit the photographs.

We did not have space to fit everything. But after pursuing stories from the disaster and follow-ups on its fallout, we wanted to help our readers understand an increasingly popular vision for rebuilding at a crucial point in Maui’s history.

Kapu is fond of repeating the Hawaiian saying, “I ka wā mamua, i ka wā mahope.” Translation: The future is in the past.

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