Protect Pololu

Protect Pololū is a community project under the North Kohala Community Resource Center. It brings together lineal descendants, cultural practitioners, and the broader Kohala community in stewardship and education to care for this land.

I connected with Protect Pololū after creating a petition that gathered over 800,000 signatures to stop development at Pololū, and a phone call from a kūpuna telling me to come home to Hawaiʻi. At the time, I was living in California working with a nonprofit focused on removing the Klamath dams in California and Oregon—the dams came down in 2024.

Pololū is a wahi pana, a sacred and storied place with deep history. For me, it is also home—connected to my mother’s side of the family and to Kohala, where I was raised.

I am part of the Protect Pololū hui and helped present a resolution for the Pololū Stewardship Program at the Hawaiian Civic Club Convention in Seattle, where it was adopted unanimously. On the same day it was adopted, the kūpuna who called me home passed away. I returned to Hawaiʻi shortly after and am now living back home.

The Pololū Stewardship Program has been in place going on 6 years now.

This work is deeply personal to me, and it continues to guide how I show up in community today.