by Matt Weiland
“I’m related to the Robinsons, you know.”
Not eve n a teacher—a teacher’s aide. I remember her as bored, long haired, not attached to me or to anything else on the bus. She pretended not to hear.
“They’re my cousins.”
Bragging is shame: the Hawaiian equivalent of losing face, probably brought over by Japanese sugar workers in the 1880s, along with sashimi and taking one’s slippers off outside the house. Calling the Robinsons relatives was no small claim. Hawaii at the end of its plantation era was a provincial place, and Kaua’i, where I lived, was even smaller, dominated by the names of missionary families that had, as the old joke went, come to do good and ended up doing well. But although my great-grandparents lived on a plantation in Waimea, sugar was almost finished by the time I grew up (“the unions!”) and my family, Norwegians who’d arrived in the late 1800s, had gotten in the game late and could only secure a lease on their sugar acreage. Real “children of the land”—kama’aina—were supposed to breakfast barefoot at the Outrigger and own a sailing canoe. Only my grandmother was a member of the club, and none of us kids had a tab.
Maybe the Robinsons did; I don’t know. They kept to themselves. “Ni’ihau leans back firmly,” the saying goes, a reference to its position furthest west in the chain of Hawaiian islands, and also to its historic isolation. Only 600 people lived on the island in 1864, when Elizabeth McHutcheson Sinclair, a Scottish emigrant by way of New Zealand, bought it from the Hawaiian crown for $10,000 in gold. The family was severely private. Even the Native Hawaiians who lived on Ni’ihau weren’t supposed to talk: “The Ni’ihau people … are, legally, our guests,” Keith Robinson, heir of Elizabeth Sinclair, wrote in a 1997 op-ed in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin:
Unlike tenants, they pay no rent and there are no formal contractual obligations. For private reasons of our own, we have for decades given those guests free but revocable privileges that are probably far greater than those allowed by any other landowner in America. They are given free housing. They also have unlimited supplies of free mutton and pork, and beef is available to them at prices far below what the general public pays. … They have free hunting, fishing, camping, and sightseeing access to every part of a relatively unspoiled private island—probably the only place in all Hawai’i and maybe even the entire United States where this occurs. We have carefully maintained the privacy of their community, and also have not permitted the kind of immigration and settlement that has submerged and destroyed the Hawaiian language and culture everywhere else in Hawai’i. … To put it bluntly, I don’t know any other landowner anywhere in the United States who does nearly as much for guests as we do.
Today Ni’ihau is the largest private island in the world. Around 150 people officially live there, though the actual population is smaller. (Many Ni’ihau families reside on the west side of Kaua’i, in the town of Kekaha, or on O’ahu, in the beachside communities of Wai’anae and Nanakuli, where Ni’ihau’s most famous son, singer Israel Kamakawiwo’ole, grew up.) All, except for Keith and Bruce Robinson, Ni’ihau’s heirs, are of nearly pure Hawaiian descent, and the island is off-limits to visitors beyond the state-mandated access to shoreline. It is a seclusion that has lasted almost a hundred years, since Aubrey Robinson, a nephew of the original owner, prohibited steamboats from landing in 1915, and it is a striking, if not disturbing, arrangement. The residents of Ni’ihau agree to follow a sober, moral lifestyle as defined by the family (no drinking, cigarette smoking, or taking drugs). They agree not to talk—about the land, the Robinsons, or the radar first installed on the island in the 1940s as part of what has become the Pacific Missile Range Facility at Barking Sands on Kaua’i, testing ground for America’s expanding missile defense program. Ni’ihauans rely on the Robinsons’ boat, barge, and helicopter to get to Kaua’i, sometimes paying for their air travel by bartering valuable Ni’ihau shell lei, jewelry made from the island’s abundant and tiny kahelelani shells. (The barge comes once a week, depending on weather, to bring food, supplies, and water—the island collects less than seven inches a year—while the helicopter travels several times a week for tourist trips and as necessary for medical emergencies.) Up until the early 1940s Ni’ihau was isolated enough not to know when Pearl Harbor was bombed, though O’ahu is less than two hundred miles away. This allowed for a strange bit of history known as the Ni’ihau incident, whereby a Japanese fighter pilot named Shigenori Nishikaichi, heading back toward his aircraft carrier from the attack on Pearl Harbor, crash landed on the island, proceeding, with the help of two of Ni’ihau’s four Japanese residents, to take the entire island hostage. Aylmer Robinson, Aubrey’s son, was on Kaua’i at the time. A group of Hawaiians, led by a heroic man named Bene Kanahele, eventually killed the Japanese pilot, despite the fact that Kanahele had been shot and that the pilot was in possession of the island’s only gun. Kanahele’s companion, a woman named Aunty ‘Ela, smashed the head of one of Nishikaichi’s accomplices with a rock, killing him. The third Japanese man committed suicide. It has been theorized that the report of the Ni’ihau incident led, in part, to the American internment of Japanese under Roosevelt, though Hawai’i’s Nissei, for the most part, were not interned, as they were needed for labor on the sugar plantations.
“Life on Ni’ihau isn’t like it is on any other of the Hawaiian Islands,” Elama Kanahele recalls in a collection of oral histories, Aloha Niihau. “There is no hospital on Ni’ihau and no doctor. We leave everything up to God, even our very lives.” The island has no running water, no telephones (cell phones are not allowed, though Kaua’i’s towers often yield a signal), no Internet; power is provided by generators and solar panels, and houses in Pu’uwai village—the word pu’uwai means heart—are often lit by gas lamps at night. Only the Robinsons have indoor plumbing. The sheep and cattle ranch that provided employment for generations has closed; a few Hawaiians are involved in the special ops training that the military sometimes runs on the island, but most subsist on government money. While the Robinsons run their helicopter tours weekly, and occasionally host two-day hunting safaris, Ni’ihauans only rarely interact with visitors, and then usually only to sell shell lei. Since there is no money on the island, tourists must pay the helicopter’s pilot. The Robinsons later distribute the proceeds as goods.
A rare resident lives past sixty; there is still one part-Japanese man who is somewhere around eighty-five. Though Ni’ihauans are American citizens, with Social Security numbers, birth certificates, and passports—if they choose—they are also residents of a private island. If they leave, they may not be able to return. About half of every generation stays, maybe less. Since there are, at most, a hundred or so people who reside on Ni’ihau at any one time, in fifty years the island will probably be empty, denuded by the starving wild boar, sheep, and cattle that are descended from Mother Sinclair’s original stable.
Or not. Maybe it will become a state park. Perhaps it will be developed. Ni’ihau is quiet and beautiful and “unspoiled,” if unspoiled means no hotels or timeshares or big box stores, though plastic washes up here as it does everywhere. (The garbage dump of the world, a nearby vortex of currents called the North Pacific Gyre, is estimated to contain concentrations of plastic greater than three million pieces per square kilometer.) The island’s fate is entirely in the Robinsons’ hands, but since both Bruce and Keith are in their sixties, it would be more accurate to say that it is in the hands of Bruce’s children. Two from a first marriage live on the mainland. Four are half-Hawaiian by a Ni’ihau woman. They live mostly on Kaua’i.
So Ni’ihau is the Hawai’i of Hawai’i, or was, back when telling someone you were from Hawai’i made their eyes glassy. I have been to the island twice, the first time with my father, in 1980, when I was ten. We were guests of an adventurous Aussie named Doug Arnott, who, on the pretext of diving in the underwater crater of nearby Lehua Rock, swung us close to the island’s southern end, just outside the reef, where he encouraged my father and me and another couple to swim in to ha
ve a look around.
Maybe we spent an hour there. The day was so crammed with the classic features of adventure (Doug carried a spear gun when we went snorkeling, in case of sharks) that I have a hard time remembering what the experience actually felt like. We beachcombed. We found a human skull—many skulls, actually. The Ni’ihauans buried their dead in the dunes near the beach, my father told me, and I remember particularly a child’s skull, small as a grapefruit. Did I reach for it? To touch a bone, especially a Hawaiian one, disturbs its mana, the life force Hawaiians believe inhabits all things.
Over the crest of another small dune, the couple farther ahead gathered lobsters from the reef. My father and I searched for Japanese green-glass fishing floats. We were trespassers, where we were was forbidden, nearly magical in its isolation, yet I was related.
When there was a shout from the couple—“The Hawaiians are coming! The Hawaiians are coming!”—my father did not wait for me. He took the only pair of fins, ran into the water, and started swimming back to the boat, an eighth of a mile offshore. I followed him, of course. Today I would have been terrified: not of the Hawaiians, though the fear in that shout was real, but of the ocean. Sharks had gathered under the boat while we were on shore; the Australian had been cleaning fish we’d caught off Lehua Rock, and the blood had attracted them.
Onboard, we watched “the Hawaiians” in their Vietnam-era Jeep, probably the only car on the island. We had trespassed on their land. Did they think of it as their land? I seem to remember having the sense that their protectiveness was also a form of servitude. They were guarding their property, but also guarding it for someone else. But there they were in the Jeep and, yes, there was the rifle. I saw it through binoculars. I may have asked if they could shoot us from there. No, Doug didn’t imagine they could. The way back to Kaua’i was so rough that he wore a motorcycle helmet to protect himself from the crashing waves. The rest of us crouched along the sides of the boat, hunkering under towels, life jackets on.
Hawai’i is America’s last state. Growing up there, I liked to think I was as special as the tourists seemed to think I was. The need for this grew as I left, went to college in New Hampshire, and learned that not only did no one really think of us, but also their surprise and delight at my being from Hawai’i was based on a misapprehension of what it was actually like there. The ads had worked. People thought it was paradise. Which of course it was. I cavorted under waterfalls that splashed onto beaches; I saw live volcanoes erupt; I ate bananas, mangoes, and coconuts that I picked out of trees. But Paul Theroux was right when he observed that Hawai’i—“where senior prom was the social event of the year”—reminded him of a Midwestern state, with its delight in high-school football, American Idol, and Wal-Mart. We are special and we are just a regular old state, like Ohio (which I used to make fun of—something to do with sunburns) or North Dakota (which I could not even picture). This is a familiar feeling to an American. Are we really just another country in the world, like Paraguay and Mauritania? Of course not. We are a country, yes, but a little more equal.
The private fiefdom that is Ni’ihau encapsulates the problem of all of Hawai’i. When the U.S. acquired the archipelago it acquired its sugar tit, its holiday spot, and the best natural harbor east of Sydney, today able to berth the entire U.S. Pacific Fleet, the largest naval command in the world. “The Hawaiian pear is now fully ripe, and this is the golden hour of the United States to pluck it,” John L. Stevens, U.S. minister to Hawai’i, famously wrote on the occasion of Queen Lili’uokalani’s overthrow and imprisonment by a sugar-backed junta of white, mostly American, businessmen and politicians in 1893. A year later, a troubled Democratic President Cleveland would write: “Thus it appears that Hawai’i was taken possession of by the United States forces without the consent or wish of the government of the islands, or of anybody else so far as shown, except the United States Minister.” But Republican McKinley replaced Cleveland in 1896 and, two years later, the annexation of Cuba, the Philippines, and Guam drew Hawai’i firmly into the fold. It remained a territory for more than sixty years. America had become an empire.
At Camp Smith, up on Halawa Heights overlooking Pearl Harbor, sits the headquarters of PACOM, the biggest unified military command center in the history of the world. Over 60 percent of the Earth’s surface, from California to Africa, the Arctic to the Antarctic, and 50 percent of its population—China, North Korea, South Korea, Japan, India, and Russia, as well as their armed forces—is monitored, patrolled, and surveilled by the U.S. Pacific Command. Between now and 2010, 60 percent of America’s attack submarine fleet will move from Norfolk, Virginia, and Groton, Connecticut, to here. It’s China we’re preparing for, of course. This in addition to 7.4 million tourists in 2005, a record. When I drive the upper road from Kona to Waimea on the southernmost Big Island, a road I drove every day to school in ninth grade, rounding the bend under the old Greenwell property I swear I can see LA emerging from the lava plains. The golf courses are greening the black patch by patch, and around them will come the timeshares and housing developments, which need gas stations and Safeways and stoplights. By the ocean, the super-rich live on their private turquoise bays: Microsoft’s Paul Allen, Dell’s Michael Dell. They’ve opened the gate down at Kua Bay and made it a public park. I like this. It’s beautiful. There are turtles in the water. But man, it’s crowded.
Last year I went back to Ni’ihau. I am not sure why: some combination of curiosity and self-reflexive fascination. These were (sort of) my people, this was (not really) my ‘aina, my land. Or maybe I wanted to get to the bottom of things but I was too ashamed to ask. So I went on one of the tourist helicopter flights to the same beach my father and I snuck onto back in 1980. It cost $275 per person, including lunch. I went with my ex-stepmother, Debbie. My father had died surfing the year before; if he were alive maybe I would have gone with him.
The trip was uneventful: a beautiful beach that might have been anywhere in Hawai’i, with the junk-a-lunk concrete block sun shelter, the sheep skull perched on a rock, the long dunes, the lava rock tide pools, and the sunbleached plastic trash—though the sand, I found, was deeper and the water did seem cleaner. The sun was very hot; the island was dry and covered with mesquite. I found a perfect cowry. I found ‘opihi, the black-and-white cone-shaped limpet good for eating. I lay in the sand and covered myself, and fell asleep when the clouds came. I thought about my father. I didn’t even try to imagine what life was like here. It felt impossible—though this, too, seems like a failure of empathy. We ate lunch and got ready to leave. No one came down to the landing to trade shell lei that day, but Mr. and Mrs. Teixeira, our traveling companions from Las Vegas, did find the skeleton of a dolphin in a tide pool. Mostly I liked the ride there and back, over land that I knew. The Robinsons still own almost 45,000 acres in Makaweli and Olokele Valley on Kaua’i’s west side, six thousand of which is planted in sugar, some of the last in the state. There’s a plan to build an ethanol plant there now. My great-great-grandfather’s plantation used to be just down the road.
“All these kids nowadays have no idea what it smells like,” Debbie said as we approached, and it’s true. Burning sugar fields smell like caramel, but processing is mustier, with notes of rotten fruit and spit-up; to us it’s familiar and country.
The one time I saw a Robinson in the flesh was at a family lu’au in 1998. A great-great-great-uncle had married the original settler’s daughter, it turned out. Keith Robinson was as I had pictured him, a tough, ascetic man, with a faded cotton shirt and a defined jaw—a kind of human version of one of the pale blue, two-cent Missionary stamps, sent between Hawai’i and New England in the 1850s and considered among the most valuable in the world. My memory dresses him in palaka, the checkered cloth the plantation stores sold. Sun-speckled and graying, he showed us the flowers he was trying to seed, a personal project to bring back from near-extinction many of the endemics that had almost perished in the never-ending stream of foreign plants and animals that come to
Hawai’i, making these islands the home of the largest number of endangered species in the United States. On a tray lay a wilted white hibiscus with a scarlet stamen, Koki’o ke’oke’o, or Hibiscus waimeae, more delicate than the military-red hibiscus often associated with the state. He passed the tray around. It was twilight. He told us to smell it. It’s one of the few hibiscuses that has a fragrance, he said. In Eden nothing must have smelled very strong.
Next to it was a red flower, also wilted, but larger: the Kokia cookei. It was the last we’d see of the plant, he told us, one of the rarest in the world. At the time, he had been working on propagating it and other Hawaiian endemics at an undisclosed location, far up in Olokele Valley. I have seen the Kokia cookei just that once, but I know the Koki’o ke’oke’o; I have several of its cousins on my porch in Germany, where I live now, distantly related to this species that found its way to the most isolated group of islands in the world, dropped its seeds, and stayed. Endemic, from there and nowhere else. Like its more common cousins, the Koki’o ke’oke’o lives for exactly one day, doesn’t close until afternoon, and then, on or off the stem, in or out of water, it dies.
IDAHO
CAPITAL Boise
ENTERED UNION 1890 (43rd)
ORIGIN OF NAME An invented name whose meaning is unknown; possibly derived from a Shoshonean greeting meaning “good morning”
NICKNAME Gem State
MOTTO Esto perpetua (“It is forever”)
RESIDENTS Idahoan
U.S. REPRESENTATIVES 2
STATE BIRD mountain bluebird
STATE FLOWER syringa
STATE TREE white pine
STATE SONG “Here We Have Idaho”
LAND AREA 82,747 sq. mi.
GEOGRAPHIC CENTER In Custer Co., at Custer, SW of Challis
POPULATION 1,429,096
