How should a history of West Maui be approached? A typical large-scale narrative of West Maui likely moves from Native Hawaiians to missionaries to sugar to tourism. Whales and tourists come and go. But this type of history may be neither helpful nor insightful. Historical Investigations in West Maui seeks to extend known histories of West Maui in multiple directions.
Messy, local histories help to open up the range of possibilities for action by giving us additional insight into the circumstances and conditions that previous generations faced. Historical knowledge helps to frame perceptions which organize space. Local histories therefore help to render visible aspects of historical space and time that have been obscured by overarching dominant narratives and timelines. Local history can disrupt social reproduction that can lead to new ways of confronting the past and imagining people, the community, and the world. Making history complicated and messy is a way to question the existing structures of understanding and existence.
Historical Investigations seeks to look at a wide range of topics from Micronesian plantation labor in the nineteenth century to the history of Kaomi, Kauikeaouli’s co-ruler, to the South Asian Muslim awardee at the Mahele. It looks at historical processes such as the evolution of the Kingdom educational system to the 1860s Lahaina famines to the imposition of the Land Court system on land titles.
By offering more local histories of West Maui, we are reminded that what exists is far from expressing all possibilities and that those neglected areas of political space can be reclaimed for different stories leading to alternative, preferred futures.
Lance D. Collins is an attorney in private practice on the island of Maui. He also holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Hawaii at Mnoa. He was the compiler and indexer of the seventeen-volume Proceedings of the Charter Commissions of the County of Maui (19662012). He coedited Tourism Impacts West Maui (2016) and Social Change in West Maui (2019) and edited Civil Society in West Maui (2021). His research interests focus on the Philippines, Hawaii, American colonialism in the Pacific, and legal and political history.
Bianca K. Isaki is a writer, solo legal practitioner, community activist, and a director of the North Beach-West Maui Benefit Fund. She received her PhD from the University of Hawaii at Mnoa Department of Political Science for research on Asian settler colonialism and plantation labor organizing, completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, returned to Hawaii to teach Women's Studies, and then graduated summa cum laude from the William S. Richardson School of Law. She has contributed to the following West Maui oriented books: Tourism Impacts West Maui (2016), Social Change in West Maui (2019), Civil Society in West Maui (2021), and Water and Power in West Maui (2021).
