By K. Latronic – Every acre of Makapuʻu is a burial ground. Beneath the concrete of Sea Life Park lies the record of three distinct eras: an ancestral balance rooted in reciprocity, a century of foreign extraction, and the current efforts in reclamation.
Before foreign arrival, long before the Hawai’ian Lexicon Committee coined the word in 2016 to define an enduring state of sustainability, mauō governed the Makapuʻu coastline.
Above the valley rises the ridge of Kalapueo, named for the pueo that perched along the heights. This ridge anchors ka moʻolelo o Kāpoi. When a man called Kāpoi found pueo eggs at Kewalo, he gathered them to eat. But when the mother pueo wept, he returned them unbroken, choosing compassion for an animal over his own hunger. That compassion collided directly with arrogant authority. When Kāpoi followed the owl’s explicit command to build a heiau, High Chief Kākuhihewa ordered him executed for building a kapu before the king had. In response, pueo gathered from across the islands, darkening the sky over Kalapueo to break the execution. Kākuhihewa humbled himself before Kāpoi’s fearsome ʻaumakua, sparing his life and declaring the pueo to be revered.
This story establishes a fundamental truth: when authority enforces arbitrary decrees over someone acting in true reciprocity with the living world, the collective defense of the land awakens.
North of Makapuʻu Point, terraced loʻi once ran across the valley floor, fed by mountain springs and flowing streams. In a translation by Mary Kawena Pukui from Hōkū o Hawaiʻi, two waters nourished the area: Kupunakāne, “Grandfather” high in the cliffs, and Kupunawahine, “Grandmother” on the lowland plain. On calm days, their sound carried across the flats like a woman mourning. Aliʻi kept retreats throughout the valley, where grass houses stood among groves of breadfruit, mountain apple, kukui, and coconut. Along the shoreline, fishing communities worked nearshore waters, including the village of Kaupō on the rocky peninsula directly opposite Mānana Island—the exact footprint where Sea Life Park operates today. Here, Kānaka Maoli lived in direct symbiosis with the sea, knowing every reef pass, seasonal fish run, and limu bed.
Nearby is Pāhonu, a great stone turtle enclosure five hundred feet long and fifty feet wide, built directly into the intertidal reef flat. Aliʻi who loved turtle meat ordered the wall constructed to keep captured honu from swimming back into open water. Eating that meat was reserved for aliʻi under penalty of death. Pāhonu remains the only known surviving structural example of early Hawai’ian aquaculture dedicated specifically to green sea turtles on all of Oʻahu. It was not a roadside menagerie; it was a physical manifestation of kapu, dictating how a sacred food source was controlled and consumed within an ordered social hierarchy.
In November 1819, Liholiho and Queen Kaʻahumanu initiated the ʻai noa by eating together, deliberately shattering the kapu system. While intended to adapt to Western ideals and safeguard sovereignty amid foreign pressures, dismantling that ancient religious structure opened the door for foreign traders, missionaries, and commercial industry to turn spiritual conversion into economic leverage.
Foreign extraction quickly reshaped the ahupuaʻa. In 1840, cattle, sheep, and dairy herds were introduced; by 1847, the land was leased to foreign business interests, leaving native tenants with small lots. Unfenced livestock trampled irrigation networks and crumbled loʻi walls to rubble. The Waimānalo Sugar Cane Company followed, stripping the topsoil. Mormon missionaries arrived to proselytize while disease devastated the population; the 1853 smallpox epidemic hollowed out the area, reducing church branches to just two surviving members. Commercial harvesting for restaurants and tourist markets caused honu populations to plummet until modern state and federal endangered species statutes stepped in to ban harvesting entirely.
In 1964, that same extractive thinking poured concrete over the coastline. Sea Life Park pumped seawater into holding tanks, capturing wild dolphins to sell as roadside entertainment. For six decades, corporate owners treated marine life as inventory, overseeing more than one hundred dolphin deaths while extracting commercial profit.
Now: Reclamation
On August 11, 2026, the Hawai’ian Council, led by CEO Kūhiō Lewis, acquired Sea Life Park from mainland operator Herschend Family Entertainment—the first time Hawai’ian hands took control of the area. They inherited a 62-year-old facility and eleven bottlenose dolphins: ten born in captivity, and Laka, captured from the wild in 1979.
The concern driving animal welfare organizations today mirrors the alarm that arose when honu populations plummeted: an understandable recognition that intelligent, social beings do not belong in concrete basins. Yet directing immediate ultimatums toward the Hawai’ian Council is fundamentally misplaced and logistically flawed. Captive-born dolphins know only human care and cannot simply be released into open water.
Under corporate ownership, that pressure was regulatory. Before the ink was dry on the transaction, mainland advocacy groups began issuing public ultimatums and abandoned that regulatory critique. PETA sent a letter directly to Kūhiō Lewis, demanding immediate relocation of the dolphins and wrapping their demands in the concept of aloha. Outside organizations had targeted prior owners for decades—filing USDA complaints, monitoring pool depths, and protesting along Kalanianaʻole Highway against operators like Palace Entertainment and Herschend.
Kānaka Maoli understand ocean stewardship, they engineered sophisticated loko iʻa and sustained nearshore fisheries for centuries.
Like Kākuhihewa’s decree against Kāpoi, this pressure misunderstands true Hawai’ian stewardship. As Dr. Marion Kelly documented it as one of the most sophisticated aquacultural traditions in the Pacific. Pāhonu was a past part of that system: food production embedded in a reciprocal relationship between people and the sea. The Dolphin Lagoon represents the opposite—animals captured for display, confined for profit, and managed by corporations with no ancestral ties to the water. Demanding an immediate transfer ignores the unyielding biology of animals who know only human care and would not survive in open water. More profoundly, it misjudges the relationship between the stewards and the site. Native Hawai’ian leadership did not build the tanks, capture wild pods, or profit from sixty years of ticket sales. They stepped forward to assume responsibility for an inherited liability that mainland corporations walked away from.
True kuleana cannot be rushed by performative urgency; it requires time, space, and trust to untangle a half-century of captivity on Hawai’ian terms.
The council responded by breaking that extractive cycle:
Ending the Circus: Captive breeding is ceased: this generation of dolphins will be the last and tanks transition into quiet spaces of veterinary care.
Coastal Restoration: Tossing corporate commercialism to replant native sand-dune vegetation and rebuild seabird habitats.
Grounded Science & Education: Partnering with Hawaiʻi Pacific University to teach nearshore marine science and authentic moʻolelo on-site.
The transaction won’t erase sixty years of concrete. It ends the pattern of exploitation, returning Makapuʻu to the principle established on Kalapueo: authority over this land must answer to reciprocity, true kuleana, and mauō.