This story is part of Hawai‘i, the Local Way. a package celebrating the food culture and traditions of the islands. Here, Kanaka ‘Ōiwi author T Kira Māhealani Madden shares a story about returning to her family’s home lands.
The first morning I woke up on the Wai‘anae fruit farm, our host Kris, a hardscrabble, brilliant woman who emigrated from China, walked me through her yard to meet every tree. “All this bounty,” she gestured around her three acres of land, “is for my dogs.”
Some of the trees were Native, others had been imported, introduced by migrant communities. Like the components of a Hawaiian plate lunch, every plant on Kris’s farm told the story of the island’s diverse history. We carried baskets and she showed me how to check for ripeness by color, feel, smell; we tore open fruits with our bare hands, touching the flesh inside. “Eat this,” she said, tossing me a spiky soursop. I scooped with my fingers and ate it, the perky sourness true to its name. Then Kris handed me an ‘ulu, otherwise known as breadfruit. I held the alien globe, knocked on its vibrant green surface. Like dinosaur skin. “What is it?” I asked.
“Aren’t you a Hawaiian?” Kris said. “A Hawaiian should know this. Eat it for dinner.”
Later that night, as I sliced into the ‘ulu and found its flesh dappled with thousands of tiny holes, I threw the fruit away from me into the sink. I texted my mother: “Trypophobia triggered. I think I just felt the Indigenous leave my body.”
My mother, like so many other Kanaka Maoli, was displaced from the ‘āina before I was born; she raised me on Seminole land in South Florida. Most stories of displacement are the same: cost of living, cost of survival, the cultural push to move over to the “mainland,” to Americanize after the illegal overthrow and statehood of our islands. My mother is of the generation banned by the United States from speaking our native language, ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i; I had my high school graduation at a Polynesian-themed restaurant called the Mai-Kai Fort Lauderdale, plastic lei festooning the tables.
Which is to say, I was looking for something when I was offered a job at University of Hawai‘i Mānoa, a one semester stint as their distinguished writer and teacher in residence. I had never before lived on ‘āina, and from my laptop screen in Massachusetts, I zoomed in on the fruit farm, located on the leeward coast of O‘ahu, over an hour drive from the strip of Waikīkī resorts I knew well. Kris’s rental was also a block from the Lualualei Hawaiian Homestead—one of several areas assigned back to Native Hawaiians as “home lands” by the US government—where my own ‘ohana had once lived.
When we finally arrived in our oil-leaking pick-up truck, my wife, Hannah, and I drove past the encampments of houseless Kanaka,
