Communication No. 2019-10- NKCDP RR Trail Plans

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Government Lands. In 1862 a Boundary Commission was established to settle boundary questions regarding the ahupua'a and 'ili kupono that had been awarded by name only19. The final action in the Mahele process was for the maka'ainana. The Kuleana Act of August 6, 1850 authorized the Land Commission to award fee -simple title to native tenants for their plots of land20. Tenant farmers could apply for their own plots of land, called kuleana. A kuleana parcel could come from lands of the king, government, or chiefs. While the kuleana lands were generally among the richest and most fertile in the islands, there were a lot of restrictions. The kuleana could include only the land that a tenant had cultivated plus a house lot of not more than a quarter of an acre. The native tenant was required to pay for a survey of the land and bring two witnesses to testify to the tenant's right to the land. In the end, only 28,658 acres, much less than 1 percent of the total land, went to the maka'ainana through this process. There were a lot of different reasons and theories as to why maka'ainana did not secure more kuleana parcels. This was a very different land tenure system, many did not understand or know about the law, some lacked money to pay for a survey, and others felt that to claim land was an act of betrayal to the chiefs, and still others feared reprisal from the chiefs. 21 The 1850 Kuleana Act also protected the rights of tenants to gain access to the mountains and the sea and to gather certain materials. However, an early Hawaii case, Oni v. Meek (1958), held that the rights enumerated in the Kuleana Act were the full extent of native tenant rights within the ahupua'a. This meant that other traditional rights, such as the right to grow crops and pasture animals on unoccupied portions of the ahupua'a was not allowed. In 1845 an act was created to authorize the sale of Government Lands, and within four years over twenty-seven thousand acres of land had been sold. In 1850, a second major piece of legislation permitted any resident of Hawaii to own and convey land regardless of citizenship. 22 These changes created drastic changes to land ownership. When the Land Commission dissolved in 1855, approximately 1.6 million acres of land had been distributed to the chiefs or konohiki, another 1.5 million acres had been set aside as Government Lands, almost 1 million acres had been retained by the king, and only 28,658 acres had been claimed by the people. The fifty-year period after the Mahele brought the growth of large-scale plantation agriculture, especially sugar, and the steady loss of lands from Hawaiian control. Professor Neil Levy describes the situation as follows: With a permanent population of fewer than two thousand, Westerners took over most of Hawaii's land in the next half -century and manipulated the economy for their own profit. They had already stripped the land of its only readily exploitable resource, sandalwood. After the Reciprocity Treaty of 1876, which allowed Hawaiian sugar to enter the United States duty-free, Western -owned sugar plantations dominated the Hawaiian economy. That the local population did not participate in this economy proved no obstacle; laborers were imported and by the turn of the century, Hawaiians were a minority in their own homeland.za As the construction and use of the Hawaiian Railroad is a product of this time after the Great Mahele when sugar plantations dominated the land and economy, it is important to 11 Act of Aug. 23, 1862 Laws of His Majesty Kamehameha IV, King of the Hawaiian Islands 27, referenced from http://Punawaiola.org 20 Act of July 11, 1851, Statute Laws of His Majesty Kamehameha III, King of the Hawaiian Islands 21 Davianna Pomaika'i McGregor, NaKua'aina: Living Hawaiian Culture. 22 Act of July 10, 1850 2s Neil M. Levy, Native Hawaiian Land Rights, 63 Calif. L. Rev. (1975) Ej