Maui After the Fire

On August 9, 2023, the smoke finally cleared in Lahaina.

The scene was shocking. In the course of just a few hours on the afternoon of August 8, winds had fanned a dry grass fire on the northwest coast of Maui into an inferno that trapped fleeing residents and left more than 100 people dead and the city in ashes. “We understand that recovery will take years,” Kaniela Ing, the national director of the Green New Deal Network and a seventh-generation Indigenous Hawaiian, told me when we spoke in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy. “And as that recovery unfolds, we want to make sure that the people, the communities, are actually empowered to rebuild themselves — that we don’t open the door for disaster capitalists.”

Since then, Ing and other community leaders have put in the work. Over the past year, their group, Lahaina Strong, has tried to empower the community and challenge the power structures they say contributed to the confluence of factors that made the fire possible.

“We’re all about the community arm — grassroots power, and coalitions,” he told me this week. “Unfortunately, our groups are the same groups that have had to respond to climate disasters like Hurricanes Maria, Harvey, Sandy, and the Paradise fires. There’s always something, and it’s getting more and more frequent.”

On the anniversary of the fire, I spoke to Ing about how other communities can learn from the Lahaina model, the victories organizers secured to ensure a better future for native Hawaiians and locals, and how to ride the momentum forward into November. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity and brevity.

It’s been almost a year since we last spoke; at that time, you’d just arrived in Maui from your home on Oahu after the fire. What happened after that?

I don’t think there had been a clear model of best practices for how to respond. So when [a climate disaster] happened in my backyard, it was like, “Okay, let’s learn from all the responses and organizing traditions that we’ve studied and been trained on” — from the Civil Rights era to the mutual aid of the Black Panthers and tenant rights and welfare organizers, to the modern efforts of the Alinsky-type ACORN model, to the Sunrise model, which is momentum-based. But how do you draw from everything at once?

That is where Lahaina Strong came from. Because this is where I grew up, we knew which community leaders would be stepping up. But it’s not common for everyone to work together — they can be on different sides of different issues. So we convened all of them — mostly those we call kupuna, the older generation of elders. We started coordinating the responses of our leaders and immigrant churches, the heads of canoe clubs and governmental departments, Indigenous leaders, and pro-surfers, because that’s what the community here looks like. And what came of it was a few younger leaders — Millennials, so young for our community — were given the elders’ blessing and told, “It’s time for y’all to lead.”

There was Pa’ele [Kiakona], who was a server at a restaurant, and Courtney [Lazo] and Jordan [Ruidas], who were expecting mothers, and they’re the ones who really blew it up. I raised some money to get them on a salary and train them, but they were already community leaders in their own right. So the question was, “How do we maximize their power?”

The first thing we did was needs assessments. Everyone lived in a hotel, but many of the more established charities were opening up in malls 13 or 14 miles away. But our team had iPads and lived in the hotels, too, so while more established groups were getting 100 or so folks signed up, we were getting thousands every day because they were neighbors.

Yeah, you have to be there.

Right, and they all knew each other. We were working on a team with Salesforce — Marc Benioff was helping us back then — and we could figure out people’s needs and direct them to services. There are so many services, but people just lost their homes; they don’t know where to go. So that was the job.

The last question was, “Would you want to get involved down the line with the big decisions that the government will have to make about the priorities of the rebuild?” So once the council started holding hearings about the rebuilding and the policies of reopening and tourism, we were able to turn out hundreds of people instantly. We seized the momentum. We won unanimous support from the council for delaying the reopening of Lahaina to tourists, and we did a big petition delivery to the governor. The governor wasn’t supportive of us at the time, though, and we didn’t ultimately win that one.

From there, it was, “What else do we need?” We needed to house people; that was the main thing. There was also a government guy, Kaleo Manuel [who had been on the state Commission on Water Resource Management until a land developer accused him of delaying water resources during the fire], who we demanded to be reinstated, and we won that. We also had a demand for a billion dollars in direct aid; we won that. But the housing thing was a longer-term flight and went through the legislative session this year. We did this thing called Fishing for Housing, which involved the occupation of Kā’anapali Beach.

I saw your video about that!

That occupation was rough because we lived on a really sandy beach. And it was big. A lot of people came out. But the local news covered it pretty much daily, and it raised a lot of sympathy. We were educating tourists and raising money.

With that, we were able to form a historic partnership. Pa’ele’s uncle is an activist who wants to return water from the hotels to the communities and restore public streams. The unions generally don’t like that kind of stuff in Hawaii, but we were able to bring in ILWU, the hotel union here, and Local 5, another hotel union, which hadn’t partnered with ILWU since 1940. When we came to the legislative session, it was like, “Okay, we have real power now.” The governor came around and committed to passing the bill.

Our theory was that we had to raise a ton of money for direct relief; that was the most important thing, getting direct monetary aid to people. But it was not going to be enough; we weren’t going to raise $10 billion. We could buy one house if we raised a million and a half. Instead, we did this through a [501(c)4 social welfare organization], where you can advocate and contest power where it matters. And we were able to win 50,000 homes instead.

What’s next?

The next steps are on the climate front. The Inflation Reduction Act is a good step; building and electricity, we’re also on track. Agriculture and transportation on a national level are where we need to fill the gaps. Why is Maui growing mono-crops like sugar and coffee for people thousands of miles away? Why can’t we feed our own people? And transportation — when the fires hit, everyone was stuck because of the one-way-in, one-way-out road. Those issues are pertinent not only on the disaster, resiliency, and community infrastructure levels, but also on the mitigation side.

People are also excited about the possibility of microgrids or community-owned energy systems. When we initially had community hubs, members were using Star Link or small solar systems, and locals were like, “Wow, why can’t we do this everywhere?” It’d be way cheaper than fixing the grid at this point.

We have a blank slate to build the future we need. And we’re going to be up against a lot of powerful opponents in the next 10 years.

When we spoke last year, you talked about how rebuilding after the fire was an opportunity to ensure that the people came first and that the forces that contributed to the problem were pushed out of power. Has that effort been successful?

It’s ongoing. Power has many forms: There are the institutional forms, like CEOs and politicians, but there are the shadows — how ideas are organized, industry association gatherings — that are harder to crack. It’s a chess game, and we’re all trying to stay a step ahead.

I think that’s what is critical about our work. If we were to stop, if we could no longer provide our organizers with salaries, they’d have to go back to working two service jobs, and they wouldn’t have the time to compete with full-time lobbyists.

You mentioned other climate disasters early in our conversation. What advice would you give to people in other communities about incorporating mutual aid and holding corporate powers accountable after a catastrophe?

If you come out right away and say, “Hey, this is a climate disaster!” then everyone is like, Oh, an activist. But if you just come out and help and earn people’s trust — that’s what it really takes. Listen to folks.

The thing about climate action and climate solutions is that they have been so polarized over the last few years. I think it’s been moving in our favor. Generally, the population supports us. But those who don’t are much more vocal than they were 10 years ago, and that matters because as soon as they start speaking up, the less political people are just like, “Keep me out of this.” So we have to be careful about how we approach these communities. They’re not thinking about climate; they’re thinking about how to feed their family and how they will get their kids to school or if school is even available. You have to meet them where they are.

Then you go from there. You start to have conversations with them, and they will support getting the polluters out and not being taken advantage of by corporate utilities. You don’t have to talk to them about climate like we always do among advocates; you shouldn’t. If you want to build power in a community, you’ve got to have a different approach. These people, their power is ultimately that they’re survivors, not activists. The public doesn’t perceive them as having an agenda other than just surviving and showing up for their community.

There’s still a lot of work to be done. How do you plan to keep up the forward momentum heading into this fall and the election season?

Visibility and outreach. There’s that old saying that politics is downstream from culture, and our group has been really political, especially during the legislative session. So we’re trying to show up for the community in more direct ways. Today, we paddled with the canoe clubs to honor the first anniversary of the fire. We’re showing up in these more community-based ways so we grow in cultural power, too — not just as an advocacy group, but as a holistic community.

Do you think anything has been missing from the media narrative about Lahaina?

Some of the media that came out today was like, “A year later, people are still without homes.” But if you look at the numbers, the per capita investments from the federal government, and the commitment from FEMA — I mean, it wasn’t great at first, I’ll admit that, but we’ve won quite a bit. We’re winning. The momentum is on our side, and I think it’s important for folks to understand that. They have to feel like it’s worth it and that there’s hope to keep going. I know it’s not the sexiest media narrative and it’s easier to draw criticism, but this is the rise of self-determination. The survivors, to me, are the real story.

And it’s going to take a long time. The fact that it’s like, “Oh, we can’t rebuild a year later.” It was still toxic just a few months ago! There’s debris everywhere. The focus should be less on charity and more on the change and how the power structures have shifted. That’s been really positive.

Do you feel optimistic about the Harris-Walz ticket heading into this fall?

I do. Many reporters have asked me, “Why Harris and not Biden?” Politics is all about coalitions; our movement did a lot of work to become part of the Biden coalition, which was great. But Big Oil was also a part of the coalition he needed to win, so there was always that tension, from my perspective, during his presidency. But with Harris, we’ll have the opportunity to build a dual coalition — perhaps with us and labor, and not Big Oil.