Sara Kehaulani Goo’s journey to save her family’s land on Maui began in 2019 with an email she read at her kitchen table in Washington, D.C.
“Sara, the Hāna property taxes went up 500%,” her dad wrote. “If we can’t find a way to pay, then the trust funds will be depleted in 7 years and we may be forced to sell it.”
Goo, who is Native Hawaiian, said it was the moment she realized she had to fight for her ancestral home, or risk it being lost forever.
In her new memoir, Kuleana — a Hawaiian word that loosely translates into both “privilege” and “responsibility” — Goo describes the efforts she and her relatives undertook to fight the tax increase and ensure that the land would remain in their family. But Kuleana is more than a story about rising taxes in Hawai’i, it’s about what it means to be Indigenous and reclaim identity in diaspora while highlighting the costs of colonial land theft and its continuing harm to Hawaiʻi. Goo challenges readers to think about what their responsibility to Hawaiʻi... Read more
