LAHAINA >> On a crystalline morning, with humpback whales leaping in the indigo waters offshore, a group of archivists, curators, conservators and volunteers gathered in a makeshift field station at the Lahaina Jodo Mission, a once-magnificent Japanese Buddhist temple compound that was largely obliterated in the wildfires of Aug. 8, 2023. They were there to take on a “CSI”-like challenge: identifying, cleaning and cataloging the surprising array of artifacts that survived the fires, some nearly unrecognizable beneath flaking metal, scorch marks, ashes and soot.
LAHAINA >> On a crystalline morning, with humpback whales leaping in the indigo waters offshore, a group of archivists, curators, conservators and volunteers gathered in a makeshift field station at the Lahaina Jodo Mission, a once-magnificent Japanese Buddhist temple compound that was largely obliterated in the wildfires of Aug. 8, 2023. They were there to take on a “CSI”-like challenge: identifying, cleaning and cataloging the surprising array of artifacts that survived the fires, some nearly unrecognizable beneath flaking metal, scorch marks, ashes and soot.
Theirs was a daunting and humbling task.
On Sundays, Nancy Fushikoshi, one of the volunteers, used to come to the mission with her grandchildren to visit the three-tiered pagoda holding the cremated remains of her husband, Lane, who died 24 years ago. She would slide open the niche’s doors so the grandkids could say “Hi, Grandpa!” before lighting a stick of Japanese incense and saying a prayer.
On the day wind-whipped embers turned the mission’s coconut palms into torches, the Rev. Gensho Hara and his family attempted to stave off the flames with garden hoses, trying desperately to save the main temple and the pagoda, with its hand-laid copper shingled roof. The only structure to emerge unscathed was a monumental statue of the Buddha; at 12 feet tall, it was the largest such statue outside Japan. He sat serenely on his stone pedestal through it all, bronze hands folded on his lap.
The pagoda’s wooden shelves had collapsed in the inferno, sending the 187 metal urns housed there careening to the ground. The Fushikoshis were among the families volunteering on that recent morning, hoping that somehow curators and conservators would be able to discern the shallow engravings in Japanese of loved ones’ names all but lost in charred and mottled metal.
The wildfire of Aug. 8 killed 102 people, including five members of Hara’s congregation. It displaced thousands and destroyed or damaged much of the town’s historic core, with rebuilding estimated at $5.5 billion. The tragedy has resulted in increased rates of poverty, higher unemployment and skyrocketing housing costs.
The loss of life and abrupt disappearance of the familiar have since been echoed in Altadena and Pacific Palisades in California. Nearly two years later, to drive around Lahaina town is to encounter ghost gas stations, mailboxes without houses and rogue bougainvillea enlivening piles of rubble.
Yet there is a lesser--known and more heartening narrative afoot: the thousands of cultural artifacts that made it through the fires, with more being discovered by archaeologists and cultural practitioners nearly every day. They have been uncovered from sites where buildings and even a wooden ocean boardwalk once stood, and rescued from the fragile recesses of embattled landmarks with shored-up walls.
Among them are early Native Hawaiian artifacts that predate Western colonial occupation, including a cowrie shell octopus fishing lure and stone poi pounders used for preparing a traditional food made from taro. “They are artifacts, but a little more,” said Tanya Lee-Greig, a Native Hawaiian archaeologist who has led the work of identifying sacred sites. “Our generational memories are present in these objects.”
The town’s leveled commercial core is both a National Historic Landmark District and a site with profound spiritual significance for Native Hawaiians. For the first time, Hawaiian cultural monitors steeped in Indigenous knowledge were recruited to officially stand watch over “debris removal” to make sure resources were not disturbed. These could include artifacts, legally protected burial sites and even trees, which can mark important life events, such as the tradition of burying the umbilical cord (piko) and placenta (iewe) beneath a sapling after a baby’s birth. The 62 monitors, locals all, were trained by the Na ‘Aikane o Maui Cultural Center, which coordinated emergency assistance right after the fire, even though its premises burned.
“Under normal circumstances, we use bulldozers and take all the debris away as soon as possible,” said Jessie A. Pa‘ahana, an environmental coordinator for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, who is of Japanese, Filipino and Native Hawaiian descent. “That doesn’t work here.”
The curatorial crusade at the Jodo Mission was led by Hawaii’s two National Heritage Responders — Malia Van Heukelem, an art archivist, and paper conservator Liane Na‘auao, both of the University of Hawaii at Manoa. They are part of a volunteer network of cultural heritage specialists under the Foundation for Advancement in Conservation, whose expertise and 24/7 hotline is in increasing demand as the ferocity and frequency of wildfires and other disasters escalate.
“I’ve struggled over the importance of saving physical items given the heartbreaking challenges people face,” Van Heukelem said. “But I keep assuring myself that having tangible items that hold memories and stories will be important to healing.”
The mission, founded in 1912, was one of Lahaina’s three Buddhist temples — all decimated — that served Maui’s large Japanese population, the earliest arriving as sugar laborers. Hara, now 88, came from Japan as a graduate student; he and his wife, Setsuko, raised their four children there.
Van Heukelem’s expertise in salvaging material after disasters was honed in 2004 after a flash flood damaged or destroyed thousands of documents, maps and photographs in the university library. Days after the fire, she and Na‘auao launched into action, connecting organizations with professional expertise and producing webinars on object recovery.
That morning they set up an ad hoc assembly line, with curators and conservators in magnifying headgear in the lead. First came the ornamental bells from the temple, one by one, followed by a two-dimensional Bodhisattva figure from Hara’s home, each object tagged and numbered and a dossier created for every one.
When the first of the metal urns started down the line, the 27 participants grew quiet. They treated each urn tenderly, using hand-held air puffers and paintbrushes to dislodge debris. Some urns had collapsed, spilling their contents. The smallest contained the ashes of children. Maya Hara, the minister’s eldest daughter, zoomed in with her smartphone to illuminate and magnify inscriptions invisible to the naked eye. “We’re grateful for the help,” she said. “If we had to do this ourselves, we’d be crying.”
Nancy Fushikoshi was there with her two daughters, Carly Fushikoshi and Lisa Keene. Two grueling 10-hour days later, the professionals and the Hara family were able to identify most of the urns, including Nancy’s husband’s and those of his grandparents, aunties and uncles. “It was a good day today,” Keene said. “Now we have peace of mind.”
In a shipping container, Yayoi Hara, another of the minister’s daughters, has gathered copper roof tiles, temple pillars turned to charcoal, a smashed floral chandelier and other detritus from the temple grounds. She has put out flyers inviting local artists to use it as their raw material. “It’s the story of everyone’s lives,” she said.
For native Hawaiians, an abiding attachment to place is reflected in the phrase wahi pana — storied and sacred landscapes informing beliefs and cultural practices. “Land is not viewed as a commodity but as a living thing, a part of the family,” said Kepa Maly, a cultural ethnographer.
On that horrific August day, Keolahou Hinau, executive director of the Pilikahakai Foundation, a coastal environmental organization, drove up mountain roads and through coffee fields searching for cell reception to contact his daughter in Wailuku. In one direction, he saw “all the golf courses full of water, all the sprinklers going, as green as can be,” he said. In the other direction, he saw Lahaina burning.
In the late 18th century, Lahaina was considered “the Venice of the Pacific,” fed by forest streams cascading down slopes that created an abundant freshwater wetland. For centuries, it was the royal seat of the Hawaiian Kingdom, situated on Moku‘ula, a small human--made island set within 17 acres of freshwater fish ponds known as Loko o Mokuhinia. The complex was the kingdom’s political and sacred center, its piko, home to the royal mausoleum and Hawaii’s most revered chiefess, Queen Keopuolani. Her son Kameha-meha III initiated the kingdom’s first constitution there.
The flourishing of native staples like taro, breadfruit and bananas was curtailed with the arrival of the foreign sugar and pineapple industries in the early 1860s. To make way for sugar cane, a thirsty crop, plantation owners subsumed huge tracts of land and diverted the streams that fed the sacred wetlands. It’s no coincidence that the Hawaiian words for water, wai, and wealth, waiwai, are related.
In disregard of local history, plantation managers backfilled Moku‘ula Island and Loko o Mokuhinia in 1917, first to get rid of mosquitoes and then to build a baseball field for employees. Later, a parking lot was constructed over Moku‘ula. “It’s like burying the Vatican,” said Janet Six, chief archaeologist for Maui County.
After the major sugar operation closed down in 1999, private developers steered much of the diverted water to resorts, golf courses and high-rise subdivisions. Fallow sugar cane fields became a welcome mat for invasive grasses. The fire occurred during a long- standing drought, with hurricane-force winds barreling down the slopes and knocking out power lines that ignited the tinder-dry land. A brush fire evolved into the fatal firestorm that one survivor likened to “a freight train coming down the mountain.”
The destructive force severely damaged or destroyed eight historic sites and buildings preserved by the Lahaina Restoration Foundation, their venerable facades and walls clinging to life. The only structure spared was the Hale Pai Printing Museum, an 1837 coral and lava rock cottage where the first Hawaiian--language newspaper was published. It is now the foundation’s cozy headquarters.
“Ash and water make lye,” Kimberly Flook, the foundation’s deputy executive director and an archaeologist, said of the corrosive mixture that coats hundreds of recovered objects pulled from the wreckage — victims of rain, sea spray and humidity.
Through Van Heukelem, Flook and her colleagues connected with the Smithsonian Institution’s Cultural Rescue Initiative, which provided equipment for artifact recovery and sent a conservator, Kent Severson, formerly of the Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art, Culture & Design in Honolulu, to train the foundation’s staff. “You can save a lot more than people realize,” Severson said.
The 1,600 or so recovered objects offer vivid glimpses of Lahaina’s textured past. A scrimshaw domino set and a tripot for rendering blubber represent the original extractive industry — whaling — which peaked in the 1850s.
That era coincided with the arrival of Christian missionaries including the Rev. Dwight Baldwin, who moved with his family into what became the oldest house on Maui, one of many now--skeletal structures awaiting rebuilding. Baldwin was something of a Renaissance man: a missionary, doctor, dentist and veterinarian whose vaccination program was credited with saving thousands of lives during the 1853 smallpox epidemic. A silver filigree calling-card case and a Victorian tooth extractor are two rescued treasures of the Baldwin home. The Wo Hing Society museum yielded antique Chinese coins, ivory mahjong pieces and other items salvaged from a once--exquisite Chinese Victorian hall.
Six, Maui’s chief archaeologist, and her team uncovered whaling harpoon cannons and anchors, Japanese--style rice bowls and a “canoe basher” designed to poke holes in enemy vessels. They also found numerous coral blocks believed to have been used for Hawaiian Kingdom burial ceremonies. Hundreds of these objects are being stored in county offices for safekeeping. “Our biggest fear was we didn’t want to see them on eBay,” Six said.
The resurrections of Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris and the National Museum of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro are eloquent testimonies to what can be achieved after devastating fires. Closer to home, the Pacific Tsunami Museum in Hilo, housed in a former art deco bank, examines the catastrophic effect of tsunami on Hawaii island.
Many who have lived on the land for generations regard the fire’s aftermath as a time of hulihia — a turning, a chance to radically shift directions and return Lahaina to its native landscape. It offers an opportunity to redefine a beloved town beyond cruise ships and other tourism.
The National Historic Landmark District was designated in 1962, a mere three years after statehood, largely to highlight colonizers — the missionaries, whalers and sugar planters. Ke‘eaumoku Kapu, a prominent Native Hawaiian leader and executive director of the Na ‘Aikane o Maui cultural center, has been part of a long-standing movement to restore Lahaina’s historic wetlands and the royal island of Moku‘ula — revered places that “got erased,” as he put it.
He was speaking from the center’s temporary quarters, in a shopping center. Destroyed by the fire, Na ‘Aikane o Maui was once a lively cultural hub, with classes in martial arts, hula workshops and a focus on land rights issues. (Kapu’s family battled in court for 20 years to successfully reclaim ancestral lands illegally taken by plantations.)
The center also housed a formidable trove of artifacts, notably the life’s work of the 86-year-old master carver Sam Ka‘ai, a recognized Hawaiian Living Treasure. More than half Ka‘ai’s carvings went up in smoke, along with his extensive personal collection of shark tooth war implements, among other objects. They were gathered during Ka‘ai’s frequent stays on Samoa, Easter Island, Rarotonga and other islands — “the chain of vertebrae that make up the lei of ancestors,” he said.
The son and grandson of canoe-makers from Hana, Ka‘ai has a profound understanding of local knowledge that allowed Hawaiians to thrive on isolated islands, including how to use grinding stones and other traditional implements to craft fish hooks from whalebones and cordage from coconut husks. He can coax exquisite tunes from a bamboo nose-flute and a conch shell.
Of all his losses — or what he modestly calls “my crybaby stories” — Ka‘ai was most distressed to lose two carved figureheads, or ki‘is, designed for Hokule‘a, the double-hulled voyaging canoe that set sail from Hawaii to Tahiti in the 1970s and revived ancient Polynesian navigational techniques. The ki‘is, one male and one female, symbolized Hawaiian spirituality and cultural resurgence.
Ka‘ai was living at Na ‘Aikane o Maui, the cultural center, and providentially moved out a month before it burned. “It was hard to get with him and tell him nothing survived,” Kapu, the Native Hawaiian leader, said.
Since the fire, glimmers of the sacred wetlands that once defined Lahaina have started reappearing, in small streams ebbing and flowing where buildings used to be. Restoring Moku‘ula and Loko o Mokuhinia as places of “reverence and honor” will be “a complex process led by the community,” said Kapono‘ai Molitau, director of the Maui Department of ‘Oiwi Resources. The first priority, he pointed out, has to be “getting folks back into their homes.” Only 40 houses have been rebuilt so far, and about 770 building permits have been issued or are being processed. Knitting history back into the landscape will take years — which is as it should be, Molitau said. “In a project of this magnitude, we really only have one great shot at it,” he said.
After the fire, Kapu found himself rummaging through the ruins and spied a little lizard head carved out of stone. “Finding that gave me the will to carry on, to make sure I never forget our mission: to be persistent,” he said. In trauma’s wake, he added, “we need reminders of who we are.” Even the tiniest object offers a rarity: hope.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
© 2025 The New York Times Company
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