LAHAINA PAST, AND FUTURE
The Hot Globe Interview with Dr. Janet Six, Chief Archeologist of Maui County
Dr. Janet Six: I lost two friends yesterday. And, you know, it's just, it's just Twilight zone. I liken it to September 11th when I was on the East Coast. It's like, did this really happen? It's a burned-to-the-ground melt. The landscape is still there. But, you know, it's just hard to wrap your head around.
HOT GLOBE: What's left in your mind?
Janet Six: Oh, plenty. I mean, the place was there for a thousand years or more. So, you know, I think your son worked with me at Moku’ula Island, buried underneath the baseball park, which is a royal capital. There were 17 acres of wetlands. There were canals. What’s still left is the Banyan tree, which is post-colonial. But it's going to live. And then it's the harbor, the birthing stone, Kamehameha's taro patch. There's also lots of buildings that are still “standing.” Air quotes there. The Baldwin house is gutted. The courthouse is still there. Some of the cement-front storefronts. But most of the town, as you know, because you spent some time with me out in Pahala, those houses are made of 100-year-old redwood. And it was just like tinder. It was a density problem. There's no evacuation routes. We're in a five-year drought. And then we had the Kaua`ula winds, the legendary winds that come down the mountain. Because on the leeward side we usually worry about a Kona storm coming from the other direction, blowing onshore. So this came down off the mountain and knocked down 29 power poles. And then we have all those fallow cane fields. Right? Because sugar shut down over 20 years ago.
Cane regenerates on its own. You see it out in the valleys, but it’s also guinea grass and other invasives that can move in. It was like a big green lawn going up the mountain. And granted, it wasn't a great crop. It wouldn't catch fire. They did intentional cane fire burns. But it's been fallow for 20 years and it's not developable because there's no water source like the water that was from the Pioneer Mill. This is all coming from wells. It was recently sold to West Maui Land Partners, and they are diverting that with a two-mile pipeline down to serve some of the gentleman farms. Water in Lahaina, about 97%, comes from wells. It's hard to think of Lahaina as being a wetland or having a subterranean water source, but the Pu’u Kukui watershed is above. “The Big Bog” they call it. It just replaced Kauai as the wettest spot on the face of the earth. And it rains up there constantly and then it percolates down through lava tubes, the path of least resistance. And it comes down in Lahaina. And so when the first, Voyagers got there, they would have found a beautiful, natural wetlands.
HOT GLOBE: Meaning the Hawaiians from Polynesia.
Janet Six: I don't like to call them Polynesians. It's a European term poly, meaning many, nesia mean islands, right? So I just say early Voyagers. The first people came from the Marquesas. We know that archaeologically because we see the rat bone DNA is from Marquesan rats, and they have a very unique-shaped fishhook. You've seen that Hawaiian looking fishhook, the J-shape. That's Marquesan. About 500 to 700 years after that, you get the Tahitians coming in. We call it the Polynesian triangle, which is like Hawaii, Easter Island and New Zealand. It's really an octopus, a he`e, and the head is Tahiti. And the arms go out to Hawaii and they go out to Tonga, Samoa, right out to the Islands.
HOT GLOBE: So, a long time ago Lahaina was a wetlands with fish ponds and irrigation?
Janet Six: Can you imagine, Steve? You roll in, in your canoe, it's empty. There's an endless supply of fresh water, sunsets every night, abundance of everything. So the first people that arrived built the fish ponds, did a lot of the aquaculture. And then the Tahitians, when they come, we see more of a rise of, um, it takes about 300 years, but the rise of more social stratification and intensities of sweet potatoes and sugar cane, sweet potatoes, and taro patches, at Lo`iloa, where your son Jack also worked with me in `Iao Valley. At one time, it was the largest contiguous set of taro patches or lo`i kalo in the state or the archipelago. Huge, beautiful farmlands. Once industrial sugar takes off in the 1860s, the water becomes diverted to service the cane and the terraforming starts. The wetlands are backfilled in 1917. It makes sense. An infestation of mosquitoes.
Mosquitoes are introduced in 1826 by the HMS Wellington. They weren't successful at whaling, so their water kegs were empty and they had a little bit of water in the bottom with some mosquito larva and they went to fill their casks in the stream and introduced mosquitoes.
Lahaina is in an area--it's in the Moku of Lahaina, the District of Lahaina, and it's in the Ahupua`a or the smaller land division of Wainee, which means flowing waters, which is hard to think about if you've been to Lahaina, because it's pretty much bone dry. But there used to be this famous nine mile auwai - native Hawaiian canal that brought these waters, and then the waters came out in these caves. You'd call them cenotes in Mexico or sinkholes in Florida. But the whole island has a big karst system. Karst is one spelling, and it's made from limestone. So when this water comes down from West Maui, it's iron rich and acidic. It bores holes like Swiss cheese. And you end up with this kind of natural drainage system with all these wetlands on the coast. It's brackish water, which they call waikai, which is fresh and salt or brackish. And that became the fishponds because the royalty, especially later, really liked the moi or the mullet. That's a fish that does well in brackish water. So there's nine different types of fish ponds. We're not going to get into it. Some project out into the water, into the ocean. Some are inland. But they got filled in.
HOT GLOBE: Filled in for the sugar when the sugar happened in the 1840s, 1860s?
Janet Six: So sugar is first processed in 1802 on Lanai by a couple of Chinese guys because China knew about sugar from India and then the Chinese had invented the three roller mill, the press that squeezed the juice out. These Chinese immigrants started doing cane and then suddenly with the abolition of slavery on the mainland the locus of sugar production moves to Hawaii. The first really industrial growing of sugar is at Olowalu in the 1860s. They divert the water. Now the water is stagnant in these ponds and here come the mosquitoes, stagnant water. Lahaina is a boggy hot mess. There's this great guy, a young Norwegian that came to be the postmaster, and he just wrote all kinds of stuff down. And he complained a lot about mosquitoes. And he also complained a lot about the Chinese merchants price-gouging him for his mosquito net. And he talks about Lahaina being a hot, swampy mess and walking on wooden boardwalks. It's really hard for us to imagine.
There was a huge campaign and it's tied into baseball, of all things. Baseball gets to the Hawaiian archipelago in the 1840s when Alexander Cartwright, one of the founders of the New York Knickerbockers, gets so seasick on his way to China, he never gets back on a boat. So we have baseball early on. And there's a big push for a baseball field.
The baseball field was over by the Jodo mission, where the Jodo mission is now in Lahaina. But it's not there anymore. The Buddha is there, the bell is there, and that's where the ballpark was. And so there's a big campaign to fill the wetlands in and get rid of the mosquitoes and we can build a baseball field, too. In 1917, the plantations built a narrow-gauge rail, the 24 inch rail, and they brought their little trains down with cane dirt from mauka, you know, up, up mountain. And they backfilled the wetlands.
They had their first game in June, I think it was June of 1918. It was “the Japs”--super racist, right? against the whoever, you know. By 1954, the tidal flow pulling out the dirt that was in there caused the park to start to sink. So they did a campaign to dredge Lahaina Harbor, and they dumped all that dredge into this loco, this fish pond. And then they built another baseball field. So when your son was working with me, we were digging through the Lahaina Harbor dredge, and we were finding like kaolin pipe stems, which would be from the whaling days alongside soda bottles with silkscreens, which haven't been around since 1926. We finally, through archeological research, realized they had backfilled it again. Lahaina is a wetlands on high tides. You could see salt rings in the ballpark. The ballpark’s been shut down for years and there's been a number of attempts to try to perhaps restore it. But it's actually just a burial ground for the most royal. The chiefs on Maui were the Pi'ilani line and their aumakua or their totem was a mo`o half dragon-half woman. And her name was Kihawahine. And she lived in that loko there. And what's important about that loko and the island of Moku’ula, is that it was the royal home of Kamehameha, the Third. They drafted the Hawaiian constitution there and they drafted the Māhele there. And that was the royal seat, and the Kingdom of Hawaii.
HOT GLOBE: When was that?
Janet Six: 1840s, 1850s. I mean, it was before that. I mean, Kamehameha’s wife Keōpūolani is buried there. She was the royal wife of Kamehameha. Kamehameha had different homes. And then when Kamehameha the Second died of measles in England, they had the Brick Palace. The first one they built was brick. That must have been like the little pigs. Like the Brick Palace would have been so hot in Lahaina! Then they built Hale Piula, which was supposedly plaster covered with petroglyphs, like drawn in the plaster. There are no images of it, but it would've been fantastic to see in lime plaster, but with coral. And then when he died and his brother reluctantly took over command, he moved back onto the sacred island of Moku’ula and built traditional pili grass huts. But he also had the mausoleum for Princess Nāhiʻenaʻena and her mother and her daughter. There's some great missionaries describing that it was just like a riot of color. It was a scarlet pink, velvet coffins covered with a peach bloom lace, all encased with a mosquito net and cobalt, you know, and then all these feathered kahilis everywhere. These missionaries and their wives were going there and be like, this is the royal mausoleum? because it was just a riot of color. When Kaahumanu abolished the kapu system and Christianity takes over, Isaac Hale and Bruce Hale build the first church at the edge of Moku’ula, next to the baseball field. And that's the church. That church has burned down and blown down five times. This will be the sixth time.
HOT GLOBE: That's the one that made all the newspapers.
Janet Six: Waiola church now, which means “waters of life.” I mean, there's more translations. I'm doing real Cliff notes, here! Yeah. Right next to that, Bernice Pauahi Bishop. Bishop supposedly moved all the bodies out of the mausoleum off Moku’ula. and out. Keōpūolani who was Kamehameha sacred wife. She was a Pi`ilani who birthed him, Kamehameha, the Second. He never had any children with what was his favorite wife. But Keōpūolani had so many kapu, so much taboo on her that she couldn't even move around in the day because if she cast a shadow, you couldn't stand there. So they moved her around, they carried her, she couldn't touch the ground. And when Kamehameha came over, he really needed to marry her because the line travels with the mother. Because you're never sure who the father is, right? You see the pregnancy with the woman. You see the baby come out. So Kamehameha needs to have a baby with Keōpūolani to legitimize his reign. So there's stories of him crawling on his belly to approach her. She was between 9 and 12 years old when her father finally acquiesced. That was after the Battle of Kepaniwai. Captain Cook comes in 1778, so this is all post contact. Kamehameha lived there because that was the royal home of the Pi`ilani chiefly lines. Then it became the home of Kamehameha's and then it was buried and made into the baseball field! There's so much culture there.
Luakini Street is right behind it where they carried the royal coffins. So there's just, there's still layers - that palimpsest - that fancy way of saying lots of layers, the whaling days, the plantation days. There's remnants because some of the buildings are still structurally, perhaps, sound. And the one that's the most sound is [rock musician Mick] Fleetwood's, on Front Street. Fleetwood’s was the German Embassy during Kingdom Times.
The main thing I always want to hammer home when people say Lahaina is gone--yes, the playground of the Pacific, blah, blah, blah, the Mardi Gras things that had nothing to do with Hawaii—yes, a lot of those things are gone. The t-shirt shops, the aggressive cosmetic salesmen, the one that always smears cream on my face! And you know, a lot of the stuff that didn't really have much to do with the real Hawaii yet has always been celebrated--Whaling Days—but that's kind of the genocide of a beautiful species so that died off in the ‘70s and they always kind of celebrate Plantation Days. Meanwhile, the royal sacred capital of Hawaii is buried under a baseball field!
So next to Waiola Church is the Wainee Cemetery because it was originally the Wainee Church. If I can send you a picture, it's intact and the Hawaiian flag is flying and it's not even singed. That's wild. That's where Keōpūolani is buried. The woman with all the high, you know, top taboos, kapus on her.
HOT GLOBE: I believe certain Hawaiians are imputing some meaning to that irony--
Janet Six: There are many people that impute some meaning to that. It's what we call chicken skin. Right? Goosebumps. Chicken skin, because it's odd, and also, I always used to say when I was with the students because
Waiola Church had burnt down, blown down, burnt down, blown down. Talking about those Kaua`ula winds, maybe the Gods were trying to tell the Christians something, like maybe that's not the best place to put the church. That was the first Christian church and I’m not anti-Christian. I'm just saying you built it right on the sacred grounds of the royalty, and well, anyway--
So plenty remains. It's a huge, monumental effort to do things right. We can look at the Hilo tsunami, Steve, that took out the first three streets of Hilo in 1946 and killed 152 people. They didn't rebuild those first three streets where the camps were, where everybody drowned. They made that into a park. So the idea of rebuilding Front Street, the buildings that hang over the water on leased, submerged lands, the yacht club and so forth. With climate change, I don't think those buildings should be reconstructed. This is my personal opinion. I think we should have Fleetwood’s or excuse me, the German embassy, be the new Front, if anything. And it should be a walking district and it needs to be a memorial because there's going to be, there's a thousand people still missing. And at this point, we can assume that a good portion of those folks are not alive.
HOT GLOBE: Okay. It's a total tragedy in terms of the people, but in terms of rebuilding the town, is this an opportunity?
Janet Six: Utility lines, put everything underground, it'll save the view shed. Put in drought and fire-resistant plants. The grass was brought in for the cattle, who love it. Well, so the whole town is like bone dry. We've been in a five-year drought. And we have old houses and power lines! So put the utility lines in and put extra conduits while you're digging in there. And for future utilities that we don't know about, put your broadband and then we don't have it in the view shed. It's not susceptible to wind. They need to manage those fallow fields. They need to either cut them, have controlled burns, but they can't let that go. But what really caused it, people are like, oh, it's arson, It's Jewish space lasers. I mean, I've heard every kind of nonsense. The wind knocked down 29 power poles just like in California. Lines everywhere. And then things start to blow up. My ex-boyfriend lost three of his four boats. The real cherry of his fleet, luckily, was in dry dock in Kona. The fishing fleet all melted right in the harbor. So it's an environmental disaster in the water, too. Engine blocks and oil and melted fiberglass and the boats out on the reef, catamarans, trimarans melted. It's a phenomenal cleanup.
And then it's a chance to rethink how we do things to build buildings. Just so people will understand this, it's a landmark district. It's nationally recognized. They're not going to go in and re-make a landmark district, recognized in 1969. There are very strict rules of what you can do. You can rebuild, but you need to rebuild it to look the same. You're not going to be able to go in and put skyscrapers there. There are limits.
The footprint of the Pioneer Inn is still there. As an archaeologist, I’m curious to know what's under the Pioneer. It was brought there from Lanai in 1901 and it's right next to the Brick Palace.
HOT GLOBE: I thought Herman Melville wrote part of Moby Dick in the Pioneer House. But that doesn't make sense.
Janet Six: I don't know. But, no. 1901 is when it was in Lahaina. Only because I've been having to research all this, getting ready to identify where we want to go in and sift and actually try to find some stuff. Bishop Museum had artifacts on loan. We have 12 historic properties in Lahaina that were run by the Lahaina Restoration Foundation, Bailey House Museum, or Hale Ō`ike`ike. They have stuff there. So we're trying to identify lists. A lot of them will not be recoverable like feather leis, but poi pounders, things of stone, we may be able to find them. We also wanted to sift to see what's left because there will be some kind of interpretive [project to commemorate the] Lahaina fire of 2023.
But my main message is Lahaina is still there and it's a chance to rethink density. We need escape routes. People were incinerated in their cars. They couldn't get out. They were trapped. It was gridlock. So we need to think when we rebuild about all those things. And then, you know, it just was a perfect storm of five years of drought, 60 to 90 miles an hour wind. The fire demolished Lahaina in 17 minutes. Modern Lahaina, 17 minutes.
HOT GLOBE: It's just so horrible. But what would you do with all your knowledge and experience, how would you rebuild if you had major funds from everywhere?
Janet Six: Well, we'd have to have a number of charrettes. We want to make the community involved. We don't want to wipe away the “plantation” icons. I mean, the smokestack from Pioneer Mill still stands and that's a lot of people's history. So it's a really complicated question. I'd want to build it back more sustainable. It's a chance to redo all these cesspools that these houses had because they were built in the 1920s, some of the older houses. It's a chance to think about being on the shoreline, managed retreat, which we were looking at anyway. So as much as people might want to have these restaurants hanging over the water, that's not the best use at this point with current global warming and sea level rise. Also, coming up with lights that don't hurt the seabirds. There’s a lot of things like they do on the Big Island for the telescopes because a lot of times our lighting causes seabirds to become lost and we have our own albatross over here. We have lots of different types of seabirds that navigate by stars or by the moon. They get confused. Another thing just to think about is reusing as much as we can of the rubble, not put it in the landfill. We're going to have a lot of materials. I hope they will sort and be able to recycle what they can of metal. I would just like to see a thoughtful process and a thoughtful process needs good communication. It's really frustrating because the message isn't getting out. I'm having a hard time because, of course, everything's in complete chaos right now. The FEMA representative who is in charge of historic stuff arrives Wednesday and we're going to coordinate.
But I don't know when it's safe to go over there. People are wearing hazmat suits in some areas. You have to remember asbestos, these old buildings, were made with Canex impregnated with mercury. So we have we don't have so much gas leaks as we have to deal with other things left from old buildings. I was asking when we could go over and they're like, not only do they still need to go through 2700 homes and they are going to find these people and they're not probably going to find many alive. A few may be misplaced at the shelters, but most of these people by now, after almost a week, we can assume, and some will have got washed out to sea. They'll never find a body, you know, because people that jumped in, that drowned, or died of their burns.
HOT GLOBE: What about the opportunity to bring back some of the very old Hawaiian ways? What would you suggest now that it's burned down?
Janet Six: First, though, we have such a housing shortage. There were some rich people displaced. But for the most part, these are local families. These houses that burned, there's definitely some wealth in Lahaina along the coast and some beautiful homes. But what really burned were people. So we have to think about that. And the other thing, it's always tricky, like restoring. It's a cemetery. It's an necropolis. I don't think the Pharaohs ever imagined everybody walking around with an ice cream cone looking at the pyramids because it was a cemetery!
What we really have in our historic preservation is we call the Barnum and Bailey, you know, George Washington slept there. The Bailey house, the Baldwin house. It's what the White people did, the Seaman's Hospital. They don't really preserve a lot of Hawaiian stuff. I think one of the coolest ways to do it is if we could do almost a CGI, a model based on all the archaeology and what we know in the oral history of what Lahaina looked like and then keep as much as you can, but also people want to live with air-conditioning and they want to have Wi-Fi and they don't want to live in a pili grass hut probably.
I shouldn't speak for everyone, but I'm just saying there's going to be people even Hawaiians are going to want to be on the phone. So it's working with all those groups. On Friday we did a very preliminary meeting with the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, the State Historic Preservation Division. Private contractors are going to be doing the cleanup, just to talk about some of the logistics, like when you're going in and you're taking out the Kam III school, Kamehameha III School that was built in 1913, that's gone. You have to be mindful that when they did work in the bathroom, they found 16th century royal burials.
Right across from Moku’ula would be concentric circles. And the more important you are, it's like the Vatican, the closer you could be to the piko, to the entrance, the better. It would've been a little neighborhood. Very high-status chiefs that were buried there. So that's not open to the public. We need to work with the people that have that information. The State Historic Preservation Division, History and Culture display it spatially. So when they go in, they know areas that are going to have to be treated a certain way because of a high potential of hitting additional ancient, ancient burials.
HOT GLOBE: Janet, we first met when I did a story for National Geographic Traveler, “The Last Aloha Place.” You've had an unusual career, an exemplary one to many women listening.
Janet Six: I am never looking for it. It just falls in my lap. [laughs]
HOT GLOBE: Didn’t you start out as chief bartender at the Whaler, the most famous rock n roll bar in the Western United States, if not the world? And somehow you ended up as a PhD archaeologist from Columbia and Penn.
Janet Six: I started off at the Maui Surf as a bus girl in 1978 when I was 18. I used to roller skate around Lahaina in a bikini. I worked at a bikini store. I was 18 years old. I was a dive master on the glass bottom boat. I dove. I worked on the dinner cruises. My ex-boyfriend ran a fishing company. I used to fish all the time. And then I decided when I was 33--you know, I went through a breakup--and I thought, I'm going to go back to school.
The professors at Maui Community College, now it's my college, were saying, you need to go somewhere and you need to get out of here. And because I was going through a breakup, I ended up moving to New Jersey and going to New York University and then to Columbia. And then when I was doing my PhD at Penn, I met you. But yeah, no, I literally am like flotsam. I just go with the flow and if people tell you you're too old, don't listen to that. People tell you you can't do it. All they can say is no. You just got to ask, right? We have had some adventures, but yeah, I've had a very weird life.
HOT GLOBE: Though now you're one of the leading archaeologists in the country, if not the world.
Janet Six: I wouldn't say that at all. But I will say this. I am the first ever county archaeologist of Maui! They created this position pre-COVID and the job description was ten pages long. So one of my friends said to me, they're not asking for much here, are they? And I thought, no one's ever going to apply for this. I was 60 years old. I'm like, you know what? I'm going to apply for it. I was the only applicant during COVID and there was no model. So I just got to make it up as I went along. I saved the county lots of money and I streamlined processes and I made a lot of connections. And we're making this beautiful cultural overlay map that's going to display sites both in the present and the past, because with GPS you can do that palimpsest, you can do those layers, you can turn off “the plantation” and then show “the whaling” and then turn off the whaling and show “the royal compound.” That's where archaeology is great because we look across space and then we look over time, going down.
That’s why I'm adamant about telling people Lahaina is not gone. It is just another transformation of the landscape, not unlike the 1906 fire and quake in San Francisco or any of those things.
HOT GLOBE: Lahaina will come back. And you're the right woman for the job.
Janet Six: You're very kind, Well, you know what? I got a lot of energy. Thanks to caffeine. And also I truly, you know, spent most of my life on Maui. I live on the Big Island now. I work remotely, go over all the time.
But who knew this would happen? I went to bed on a Tuesday night, and I woke up--so, yeah, it's something personal. I'm happy to help. It's not just a job. It's really personal for me.
HOT GLOBE: I'm sorry about your friend.
Janet Six: You're a good person. I'm a good person because
I'm dealing with people right now that do not understand the sensitivity. They're kind of almost excited like how the weather people get excited when the weather's really bad. So some preservation people are like, oh, it's our big chance. It's like you need to back off. And remember, we're dealing with people who have lost everything.
And while you are excited to get in there and save the day, we need to really manage the message and calm people down because people are land-speculating now. They're calling and trying to buy people's land while they're not thinking straight. With Hurricane Iniki, they incentivized people that didn't have long time attachments by offering a substantial amount of money to relocate either to another island or back to the Mainland. I think that'll happen. You know, you're the girl that moved there six months ago. You were working at the t-shirt shop. You don't have a place to live anymore, and you don't have a t-shirt shop to work at. Time for some people to rethink. We’ll see something like that.
It's going to take years. The cleanup is going to take a year at least, because, like I said, all the melted boats, the damage to the reef, the oil spills, the fuel dock blew up. People aren't talking about the environmental disaster. It's a natural and cultural disaster. Right now it ain't pretty, Steve.
HOT GLOBE: Okay. Well, we better wrap it up. And I'm sorry for the loss of your people.
Janet Six: That's number one, the loss of people. We can build back livelihoods and homes.
HOT GLOBE: Hot Globe signing off with the famous Dr. Janet Six of Lahaina.
Janet Six: Aloha, Steve. #
