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…”

In their endless struggle to regain federal recognition, the Winnemem Wintu traveled to Sacramento today to lobby for passage of a non-binding resolution — AJR 39 (Assembly Joint Resolution 39) — which would urge the U.S. Congress to look into their situation and take corrective action. We filmed the Winnemem’s day in the halls of power to document the energy it takes to fight for recognition and to illustrate the bizarre process the Winnemem endure as they patiently tell their story over and over and over again in search of political support and justice.

Sponsored by California Assemblyman Jared Huffman (D, Marin County), the resolution ran into predictable Republican opposition at a hearing of the Committee on Governmental Organization. Assemblyman Kevin Jeffries from Lake Elsinore said, “I guess the 800 pound gorilla that hasn’t been mentioned by anybody here so far is the concern that there are supporters of your effort whose goal it is to either tear down or stop the continued existence of Shasta Dam. That would appear to be some of the groups that are endorsing this effort. I totally respect your rights as native people to fight over the use of your historical lands. I do not like the idea of other people using your tribe as pawns in a game that has to deal with statewide water issues.” Others accused the Winnemem of seeking a casino. With tribal leader Caleen Sisk-Franco sitting behind him, Headman Mark Franco handled all the questions carefully and with characteristic humor.

The key moment came when African American Assemblyman Mike Davis turned the tide with an offer of solidarity: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere… Errors occur all the time and I think it should be our honor to move this motion in the right direction.” AJR 39 passed the committee by a vote of 11 to 1, with 2 not voting. It now goes to the floor of the Assembly, and then on to the State Senate.

Committee Chair Alberto Torrico said that just before the hearing started the committee received a letter from a tribal member that disputed Caleen and Mark’s roles as leaders of the Winnemem Wintu Tribe. A woman who has been tossed out of several tribal groups, and who has been curiously associated with a Republican PR firm, Gorton and Moore, wrote in the letter: “Caleen and Mark want absolute control over traditional Winnemem Wintu lands and sacred sites to keep other Winnemem from having access to them…One of the strategies Caleen and Mark often use is to get guilty white Americans to support them financially and politically…They have stolen the history of all our people.”

The nasty letter attacking Caleen and Mark got me thinking about identity and history. I looked at some old photos from the Smithsonian’s National Anthropological Archives and asked Mark and Caleen who the people in the photos were. Caleen replied, “That’s my great-great-grandfather, Charlie Pitt, also known as Theodore Charles. He was married to Judia Charles, Tunalulimet,” who according to anthropologist Peter Nabokov was “a noted medicine woman.” Mark added, “Charlie Pitt was disinterred when Shasta Dam flooded the McCloud River villages and he was reburied next to the big tree in the new cemetery.” Charlie Pitt was also the late Winnemem healer Florence Jones’s grandfather, and Florence probably handled the re-burial, moving her salmon-fishing ancestor to a site close to where she had also reburied her own parents, near where Florence now rests.

Rising gracefully out of the ocean south of Maui is a presence everyone feels. It’s the island you cannot visit. Littered with “unexploded ordnance” courtesy of the U.S. Navy, access is restricted. Yet the island is the site of a cultural renaissance with international implications. Native Hawaiians control visitation to this sacred place and are working with the wounded land to bring it back to life while reviving spiritual traditions and healing a culture as abused as the island itself.

Kaho`olawe is also known as Kanaloa, which makes this the only island in the Pacific that bears the name of a Polynesian god. Kanaloa is the deity of the ocean, and the power of the sea touches all who make the journey.

In 1979 I was visiting the home of my Hopi friend and mentor, the late Thomas Banyacya. You never knew who you were going to meet at Thomas’s house. One morning at the kitchen table I found myself listening to a young Native Hawaiian man describing how he and a group of eight others in January 1976 had occupied a small island that the U.S. Navy had been using for bombing practice since shortly after Pearl Harbor. Dr. Emmett Aluli of Molokai had been drawn to see what was on the assaulted island and the experience changed his life. The island spoke to him. It came to him in dreams. Emmett consulted his Hawaiian elders and they encouraged him onward. His quest led him to Hopi country in Arizona to consult with other native leaders about strategies to defend land, water, sacred sites and cultural beliefs and practices against determined, well-armed, and often violent adversaries.

I crossed Emmet’s path again in 1990 when I went to film a demonstration in the Wao Kele O Puna rainforest on the Big Island of Hawaii. He and Palikapu Dedman had formed the Pele Defense Fund and they were fighting against geothermal drilling in the domain of the revered fire goddess Pele, who inhabits the active volcano at Kilauea. Roads were being bulldozed into the forest and drill rigs were probing for power. The activist movement spawned on Kaho`olawe was applying lessons learned to try to save another sacred place. One hundred and forty one people were arrested that day defending their culturally significant forest, and we edited a segment on Wao Kele O Puna into our 1991 film, Voices of the Land.

During that shoot we talked a USGS scientist into taking us out to film the flowing lava. The sounds, the heat, the drama were unlike anything I have ever experienced. Earth flowing. Rivers of fire. Fear of getting too close proved unnecessary as I kept walking into a wall of air so hot I had to retreat. Our sound recordist, Andy Black, wearing stereo headphones, at one point had a total panic attack because hearing the crackling lava through both ears suddenly gave him the impression he had committed a fatal error and was surrounded by lava.

Emmett and I went our separate ways for another decade, until November 2006, when we found ourselves standing next to each other in a lunch buffet line at a conference on Stewarding Sacred Lands at the Kumeyaay Nation in the southern California desert. We each had more gray hairs on our heads, but we enjoyed catching up and the spirit of camaraderie was still strong. After I described our new Losing Sacred Ground film series, Emmett said, “You might be interested in what we are doing to restore the island of Kaho`olawe, both ecologically and spiritually.”

He sure got that right…