The Great Mahele and the Land That Was Given Away

For most of Hawaiian history, land was not property. It was relationship. The ahupuaa, the traditional land division that ran in wedge shapes from mountain ridge to the ocean, organized communities around watersheds in a way that gave people access to both high-country forest resources and coastal fishing. The chief held the land. The commoners held the right to work it. Neither owned it in the Western legal sense, because the concept did not apply.

In eighteen forty-eight, King Kamehameha the Third, under sustained pressure from Western advisers and foreign residents who wanted land titles they could legally hold, passed the Great Mahele. The Mahele divided Hawaiian lands into three categories: crown lands, government lands, and the lands of the ali'i chiefs. It also provided, through a follow-on act called the Kuleana Act of eighteen fifty, a mechanism by which Native Hawaiian commoners could apply for title to the land they actually farmed.

What followed was one of the defining tragedies of Hawaiian history. The Kuleana Act required that commoners navigate a formal surveying and registration process that was designed in English, administered by people who often did not speak Hawaiian, and required fees and documentation that most rural Hawaiians could not produce. Of the approximately eighty thousand Native Hawaiians alive at the time, only about eighteen thousand claims for land were ultimately awarded, representing less than one percent of the islands' total land area.

The rest of the land passed into the private market, where it was available to foreigners who could meet the legal and financial requirements. The plantation economy that followed the Mahele was not built on empty land. It was built on land that had been Hawaiian for centuries and was made available through a legal structure designed and administered by the people who wanted to use it.