Another Look at Place

What is Real? Property or ʻĀina

Aloha kākou, greetings everyone! Thank you for joining me again this week, or for joining me for the first time. Having hundreds of readers is truly an honor, one I did not expect when I began writing, essentially for myself because a writer has to do what a writer has to do, which is to write.

NOTE: Feel free to skip this introductory section if you are only interested in my distinctions between land as “real property” and land as ʻāīna. In that case, you can start reading the text below the photo.

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There is a thread, an underlying plot to my writing, but every week I seem to find another subplot or detour wants to be explored. This week, it is because one of my few readers brave enough to regularly comment, gave me so much food for thought that I realized I have not said enough about the topic I ended on last time. Namely, who the hell is this old haole lady mahaʻoi enough to think she can write about Hawaiʻi.

I trust I have a few readers out there who will check me if - more likely, when - I overstep. I said last week I write as an ally¹, not as a source or expert. I am in constant training. First, because circumstances in the world keep evolving, and so what is being asked of all of us evolves. And also the more we are in conversation, the better we understand what what is needed. Which is not for me alone to say. It is only for me to understand my role - what my commitment to this place, being the particular person I am, asks of me.

I am not a fluent speaker of ʻolelo Hawaiʻi. My grasp of sentence structure is weak and my vocabulary spotty. As is likely true for many of us with the other languages we study, I understand both written and spoken ʻolelo better than I speak. But as explained in the memoir portion of this Substack, I have had intensive instruction and practice in what you might call indigenous ways of thinking, a relational epistemological framework, a way of thinking that understands the natural non-human world as relatives, that understands people as inseparable from their places.

One place with which I have a specific pilina - a relationship with reciprocity

Which brings me to a set of distinctions I was planning for todayʻs essay, a topic I have written about before on my real estate blog, and which is referenced in the subtitle “What is Real? Property or ʻāina?” In particular, I am going to explain the word ʻāina in a way that is not a definition you will see in a Hawaiian language dictionary or Wikipedia entry².

I started talking about ʻāīna in this way a couple of years ago, as part of my real estate practice in Conservation and Legacy Lands. I had to figure out how to explain the fundamental disconnect between the introduced way of thinking about land and its ownership, and the way people in Hawaiʻi thought of their Places at the time of Western contact, and continue to think of their Places today. In this blog post on the Hawaiʻi Life website, I credit two mentors for pieces of understanding I was putting together as I puzzled over this.

There is no word in ʻolelo Hawaiʻi for “property” in the sense of real estate. The translation of ʻāina as “land” misses the layers of meaning in the construction of the word itself, which refers to the nature of land as feeding/nourishing/sustaining us, as we care for and nourish and sustain it. It is by definition Place with relationship to People - there is another word that indicates geographical/geological location without relationship to people.

To copy a bit of my blog post: legally “real property” is defined as a bundle of rights. Try this with me. Hold up your right hand with the palm facing you and turn down one finger at a time, each finger represent a right that could be given up by deed restriction, for example to protect conservation values. You can retain or give up the right to build a home, or the right to subdivide, or the right to use for anything but agriculture, as examples.

Now hold up your left hand with the palm facing you and the fingers held together tightly. Instead of consisting of a bundle of rights, ʻāina is a bundle of relationships and responsibilities.

The thing is that rights can be bought, sold, transferred (and are subject to governmental land use restrictions such as zoning or building codes). But for people in Hawaiʻi connected to a Place as lineal descendants or by virtue of a cultural practice associated with that Place, their relationships and responsibilities continue whether or not they have any legal property rights. ³

There is also a way for a newcomer to a Place to establish pilina to that Place in such a way that Place - and the People of that Place - come to recognize and be in relationship with the new Person . It becomes ʻāina.⁴

And of course this process is critical for all of us in considering Belonging.

Please take some time for yourself, rest and digest, and I hope to see you again next week.

1. OK - one of my main kumu just told me I should not use that word “ally” to describe my role, but it communicates to my readers and I did use it last week. I will stretch in the direction of new distinctions for my role from here on out.

2. I just checked, and Googleʻs AI Overview on “what is ʻāina” is pretty darn good IMHO. My very humble opinion.

3. Property law in Hawaiʻi recognizes this to a limited extent by protecting the use of land for traditional and customary practices as a right.

4. I am indebted to Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio and her book Remembering Our Intimacies for this understanding of how malihini become kamaʻāina through establishing pilina and kuleana.