When you hear the words “Pearl Harbor,”
you probably think of one of the U.S. military’s most devastating tragedies.
At 7:55 a.m.,
hell broke loose.
But to many Native Hawai‘ians,
the events of Dec. 7, 1941,
are just one part of the story.
This place has suffered a long history of cultural erasure.
Long before Pearl Harbor became an important military outpost,
it was the island’s breadbasket.
- I think a lot of people don't realize
the amount of food that was produced in this region.
This is where people ate and fished, and now the signs tell us
it's not safe.
Hawai‘ians once got all of their food from the land and sea,
but today more than 80% is imported.
How does it feel for you as a Native Hawai‘ian to see
what has become of Pearl Harbor?
If I think too hard about it,
it's devastating.
This is the story of Pearl Harbor that you haven't heard.
- We want to be able to farm the food of our ancestors.
The more that-
Sorry, I had to stop.
- You’re used to that, huh?
Yeah.
- That’s the military?
Yeah, so we’re about 100 yards from Pearl Harbor right now.
Ashlee is Kānaka Maoli, or Native Hawai‘ian.
She’s bringing back the farming practices of her ancestors -
the way they lived and ate here on O‘ahu
before the U.S. Navy showed up.
We really wanted to understand what the landscape was so long ago.
And our goal is to turn it back to what it was.
Because what Pearl Harbor was before the U.S. military arrived in Hawai‘i
is nothing like it is today.
Native Hawai‘ians call this place Pu‘uloa, meaning "long hill."
Hawai‘ians used to draw a significant amount of food from these waters,
including pearl-producing oysters and fresh seaweed.
Pu‘uloa was the food basket of O‘ahu.
The pearl oyster was so plentiful. That's why it was named Pearl Harbor.
That’s professor Kyle Kajihiro.
He gives tours of Pearl Harbor that challenge the textbook narrative.
Many come here to pay their respects
to the 2,400 Americans killed by Japanese bombers in 1941.
But Kyle says there’s a whole other story behind that tragedy.
- So this was Pu‘uloa years before t was Pearl Harbor.
And so that story needs to be told.
- Do you think being at Pearl Harbor,
obviously there’s so much reverence that our country pays to what happened here,
is there also a space to be critical?
Absolutely. I think that the point is not to disrespect the lives that were lost.
We want to pay honor to everyone who died,
including the Hawai‘ians who were here before.
Right? Respect this was a sacred place.
Today, Pearl Harbor is home to about 25 active battleships and submarines.
But before the U.S. Navy arrived,
Pearl Harbor was home to fishponds like these.
It was part of a whole system of production intensification.
Hawai‘ians were able to figure out how to enclose the walls,
allow the young fish to enter, grow too big to exit.
That brought the food in,
in terms of the seaweed.
The smaller fish fed the bigger fish.
And it was this system that could be sustained.
When the British explorer Captain Cook first arrived to the Hawai‘ian Islands in 1778,
there were at least 360 fishponds feeding more than half a million people.
By 1985, there were only seven fishponds left.
- The level of self-sufficiency that you were describing in Pearl Harbor
is a big deal when you're an island nation in the middle of the ocean.
That’s I think hard for people to understand today -
that they lived and survived off of this land,
and not 80% to 90% of imports coming in on ships.
You know, the idea of being able to support ourselves
and how much the military has compromised that,
it's maddening, you know?
How did the construction of the naval base change the area?
- I mean, it changed the very geography of it,
right? And the geology of it.
It killed the life that was in that harbor.
The story goes that a legendary fisherman built the first fishpond on Maui hundreds of years ago.
Pu‘uloa had around 20 fishponds before U.S. settlers arrived.
The U.S. first used Pu‘uloa to resupply their ships with coal as they sailed the Pacific -
and the military soon took note of its value.
In 1840, one high-ranking naval officer called it
“the best and most capacious harbor in the Pacific.”
In 1873, the U.S. sent Major General John Schofield on a secret mission
to investigate a possible naval base in Hawai‘i.
He concluded that Pu‘uloa would make a perfect “harbor of refuge in time of war.”
In 1887, the Hawai‘ian monarchy gave the U.S. permission to build a naval base there.
The U.S. Navy, they started to realize how important it could be to their Pacific control.
And then they started to deepen it so they could fit the ships.
They figured whoever controls Pearl Harbor controls the world.
In 1893, the U.S. Navy helped white sugar planters overthrow the Hawai‘ian government.
By 1908, this naval station was established -
and with it the rapid development that brought an end
to the abundance of Pu‘uloa’s fishponds.
Why is it that you think we know about one story and not the other?
I think the erasure of the Hawai‘ian story
is necessary for this other story of American innocence to be told.
If you look at what really happened in Hawai‘i,
the overthrow, the occupation of Hawai‘i, the taking of land,
it's not a pretty story.
Pearl Harbor is now on a federal list of polluted areas that are prioritized for cleanup.
The infamous Japanese attack released hundreds of thousands of gallons of oil
that burned for three days.
Today, the sunken USS Arizona attracts tourists,
who pay their respects to the nearly 1,000 American crewmen
who remain entombed aboard.
But it’s estimated that the ship still leaks about 2 gallons of oil a day,
and could continue to do so for another 500 years.
There are also more than 100 known hazardous areas in the Pearl Harbor Naval Complex.
Over the decades, toxic chemicals have been found in the water, soil and sediment.
And while the EPA says there's no immediate risk to human health or the environment,
the U.S. Department of Health says the fish and shellfish are not safe to eat.
The military is this toxic machine.
Here in Hawai‘i especially. Unexploded ordnance,
the chemicals in the water, chemicals in the land -
these things will be here for generations.
Camille lives just half a mile from one of those polluted areas -
a graveyard of decommissioned ships.
- It's crazy to me that we were just at your farm literally over there,
and then now we're looking at a retired battleship.
Like right there.
- Right. It's right in our face.
All of these sites are right in our proximity of where we're trying to live.
Despite all of this, and in the face of all of this,
we're working, we're coming back and we're here.
And we're not going away.
- We want our community to be able to know that they can come here,
to know the names of this place, right? That it's Pu‘uloa!
That many things happen there, right? That it’s not just
Pearl Harbor. It's not just military.
Ashlee is part of a revival to bring fishponds back to the islands.
We want our own people to
be ‘ono for these types of food again,
to crave these types of foods again, because I feel like there's this
generational gap of where we're not eating the foods of our ancestors anymore.
It took Ashlee and her family 10 years to transform a vacant lot into a thriving farm.
Her fishponds are inland since she doesn’t have access to the shore -
where the original fishponds were.
There are only three partially functional fishponds left in Pearl Harbor,
and the Navy is helping restore one of them.
- Do you think most Native Hawai‘ians have ever seen something like this?
- I don't think so.
There aren't a lot of systems like this that still exist in Hawai‘i.
It's something that, as Kānaka, we have to fight for.
Hey guys, it's Dena, right in the heart of Pu‘uloa,
and behind me is Pearl Harbor.
Thank you for watching this video.
How much did you know about
the history of Pearl Harbor?
Let me know in the comments,
and make sure to check out the rest of our videos
in this series looking at the U.S. military in Hawai‘i.