Unlike our recent production trips to Siberia and Australia, where we did extensive research at our home base in California and then just went in shooting, the possibility of making a film about Native Hawaiians restoring Kaho`olawe is going to be a long and delicate process. The issues in Hawaii are old, deep and complicated. Across eight different islands are community leaders who have created a variety of groups to deal with both local and state-wide issues, and alongside and woven in are diverse families with different histories, priorities and agendas. There are alliances and there are rivalries. There are so many sensitive, painful issues involving land rights, disturbance of burials, tourist insensitivity, military power, national parks, cultural preservation, resort development and the marketing of the sacred that it is truly a minefield.

The Protect Kaho`olawe `Ohana (PKO) has established a wonderful alternative model to the standard Western environmental activist/protest group. Soon after the occupation of Kaho`olawe began to get international media attention, Hawaiian elders advised the young activists that they should establish their group as a traditional Hawaiian family, or `ohana. All of the values and cultural practices that govern the family would thus be built into the politics and spirituality of the movement and would inform its process, decisions and policies.

PKO’s mandate thus was to take care of the island as a family would — caring unconditionally for both people and land — aloha aina.

Adding to the complexity is the overlay of state power and money that came with victory. When the U.S. Navy transferred the island back to the state of Hawaii a new entity was established to manage the island, the Kaho`olawe Island Reserve Commission (KIRC), which Emmett Aluli now chairs, and which was created so that the PKO could play a key role.

Emmett has guided me through more than twenty meetings with the many different Native Hawaiians who have been involved with Kaho`olawe for decades and who now navigate in uncharted waters aboard the PKO and the KIRC. It’s their decision whether they want to tell their story in a film.

On Maui, I spent eight hours with Uncle Les Kuhilio, an elder and a lifelong fisherman with deep experience on Kaho`olawe. He’s slightly older than the generation that occupied the island, and that means that the truth dawned for him in a different way. Les said that his generation never learned in school that the U.S. military overthrew Queen Lili`uokalani in 1893 — that fact only came to light after the Kaho`olawe struggle and other battles over development sparked a new hard look at history. We had a long, interesting, conversation, delving into the nature of the sacred and the dangers of fighting political battles over sacred places.

Here, in essence, is what Les Kuhilio said about Kaho`olawe: “So man calls it sacred? Whatever man sees, man destroys. If it’s sacred, it’s secret. Once known, everyone wants to leave footprints or fight over it. ‘Mauna Kea is greater than Mount Sinai — mine is better than yours!’ Everyone wants knowledge about sacred places, to fight and control ‘the sacred.’ It is not land in isolation; it’s everything in balance. The island can protect itself — that is sacred. The island stopped the bombs, not us. The chants tell the story — and it is not written down. The power of meaning, the power of knowledge, the wisdom of meaning, that is the sacred!”

Everyone I talked to acknowledged the unique power of the island and the magical quality experienced there. `Ohana member and State Film Commissioner Donne Dawson put it this way: “An island so devastated, that needed to be healed, has ended up healing those who come to help heal it…”