‘The piko’
Of all the places where water once flowed in Lahaina, none was more important than a 17-acre area near the center of town, not far from the Pacific Ocean.
This was a fishpond known as Loko ʻo Mokuhinia, and in the middle of it sat a small island called Mokuʻula, which measured about 40,000 square feet. Both are now buried beneath feet of dirt, but cultural practitioners and archaeologists say it is one of the most sacred sites in all of Hawaii. Following the fires, it has become the focal point of the ambitious wetland restoration effort.
“As we rebuild Moku‘ula, we rebuild Lahaina,” said Archie Kalepa, a legendary waterman and local community leader.
For Hawaiians, Moku‘ula contains layers of religious, political and cultural importance, sustained by oral history and spiritual tradition. Over the centuries, Moku‘ula was said to be the palace of kings, home to a powerful lizard goddess and used as a sacred burial site of Maui royalty.
Well before Europeans arrived, according to traditional accounts, Moku‘ula was the domain of Kihawahine, the freshwater deity who lived in the pond and protected the island.
In the 19th century, when Lahaina was the capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom, King Kamehameha III lived on Moku‘ula in a complex of grass and stone buildings. The kingdom’s first constitution was signed there, in 1840.
“This was the center, this was the jewel, this was the piko,” said Janet Six, Maui County’s archaeologist who spent years working at Moku‘ula, using the Hawaiian word for umbilicus, the place where life begins.
Fed by both underground springs and a network of streams, Moku‘ula and Mokuhinia anchored a wetland system that conveyed water through Lahaina town. In this lush environment, taro patches thrived and native fish swam freely. Overhead, breadfruit trees provided shade from the punishing sun that gave Lahaina its name. The wetlands, scientists say, probably provided protection from fires and floods.
Then came the sugar plantations.
Founded largely by the families of American Christian missionaries, sugar companies quickly began to dominate Maui. And, as Carol Wilcox outlines in her book “Sugar Water,” the cane is a thirsty crop.
It takes 500 gallons of water to produce one pound of sugar, a million gallons per day to irrigate 100 acres, and many thousands were being farmed. From the mid-1800s into the 1900s, increasingly powerful plantation corporations siphoned a prodigious amount of surface and groundwater, building a booming economic empire while the wetland ecosystem suffered.