knowledge of feeding ourselves, and suffer more social ills. Problems develop when people are cut off from their ancestral work. A fisherman I’ll call Lawai’a, since he asked me not to print his name, throws net and sells fish door-todoor for a living. He shares how expanding developments make him feel. “[Some resorts] so big, for just get to the ocean, might as well go somewhere else,” Keoni Turalde and friend display a nenue, he says. “[At] the caught to feed their families. guard shack, the (Photo by Prana Mandoe) guards tell us the public parking is full, and we go inside, no-one stay there…. [The residents] asking me where I live. I tell them, ‘Where they from? ’ They say they are residents, and I say, ‘So am I…’”
“As one people trying to survive, we are smothered,” he continues. “Swarmed… They come over here and make us feel like foreigners… Make you feel shame for what I do in my life. They make you feel like you taking too much, just for live.” Both Lawai’a and Turalde were raised in long-time Hawaiian fishing families, and both have had run-ins with the law. For Turalde, it was over turtle. As a boy, turtle was his family’s meat. In the 1960s, however, turtle steak and ornaments became a craze, and the honu population plummeted. In 1978, the green sea turtle was listed on the Endangered Species List. Turalde was once charged for catching turtle, just for home consumption, but the charges were dropped when he asserted native gathering rights. Now he reminisces. “As a kanaka maoli [native Hawaiian], I been eating turtle since I was a baby. Raised up in my grandma and grandpa’s lifestyle— they had 20 kids—and eat what they feed me, and learn what they been taught by their parents for the same kind of living…. Hopefully the state would let the kanaka maoli catch turtle and eat turtle again.” Here we see a native food banned because of over-harvesting for the retail industry; the conservation law that followed both enabled the honu population to come back and shut down a traditional Hawaiian practice. For our second fisherman, Lawai’a, the run-in with the law had to do with location. A game warden saw him walk through Wai’opae Tide Pools, a conservation zone, with a throw net. His wife says that, although court transcripts affirm the warden never saw him throw net, and although he was just carrying his net to a legal fishing ground (which is not against the law), her husband may face jail time. Continued on page 18
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