How One Hawaiian Family Battled In Court For 20 Years To Reclaim Ancestral Land 3 In Kauaula Valley, one family is working to show others what it takes to reclaim ancestral lands.
Back then, Ke‘eaumoku Kapu worried about his father.
He wondered if he might be drinking too much. At the time, they were both living on Oahu. Kapu was a young man in his 20s who working in construction building highways. His father, Paul Kapu, was living in an apartment in Waikiki.
Paul wouldn’t stop talking about a dream he kept having, of a woman telling him it was time to come home. The home in the dream was their family’s ancestral land deep in the Kauaula Valley. Nestled high above Launiupoko in West Maui, it’s where he grew up as a child, in an area where a powerful plantation had taken over massive swaths of land to grow sugar cane for more than a century. He left as a teenager, joined the U.S. Marine Corps, and never returned.
But by the 1990s, Paul felt a pull to go back that was too strong to ignore.
So Kapu, his father and family members flew to Maui, drove to the west side of the island and traveled up a long dirt road deep in the valley. They planned to camp.
At the time, everything was so overgrown they couldn’t make out what had been there before. But his father remembered. He vanished into the brush and pulled out an old poi pounder.
“Dad, you’re home,” Kapu remembers telling his father.
