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257 C H A P T E R 1 4 The Fall State and City public planning agencies have expressed concern for maintaining the element of choice in the selection of homes and lifestyles. It would appear, however, with projected development in the Study Area, choice would merely become limited to a rather narrow range of price alternatives. The spacial imperatives of traditional lifestyles and subsistence patterns of communing with nature could not survive in such an environment. . . . Further, with encroaching residential development and related higher housing costs and land and tax values, a portion of the Study Area residents would either be tempted or forced to abandon their traditional ways of life and employment and accept the historical and tragic trend of welfare or menial city jobs and the high density urban squalor of public housing. —Eckbo, Dean, Austin, and Williams, H-3 Socio-Economic Study: The Effects of Change on a Windward Oahu Rural Community, 1973 When the bombs started raining down on her family’s Waikāne land just after Pearl Harbor, Percy’s great-aunty Ellen Roberts heard more than just the earth-shaking explosions. The blasts announced yet another offensive in the invasion her own father had begun fighting off just after the Great Mahele, when the 1,756.8-acre “Ahupua‘a of Waikāne” kuleana was purchased from the government by former missionary E. O. Hall, whom historian Jon Osorio quotes as having argued publicly that the “so recently barbarous” Hawaiians were not ready for “all of the liberties that can properly be bestowed upon them.” The valley’s thirty-five original resident families—all Hawaiian—spent the next twelve years scraping up 258 Chapter 14 enough money to buy the land back from Hall. They formed the Hui Kuai ‘Aina o Waikāne, complete with a constitution and by-laws to preserve their traditional common land use practices. But then Lincoln McCandless began picking off the thirty-five hui shares one by one. By 1929, he claimed to have grabbed thirty-one and a half shares, thus forcing Aunty Ellen to sue him in Land Court to quiet title on her family’s two original shares—a suit yet to be settled in 1942. McCandless had long since begun leasing common valley land out to Japanese tenant farmers, less for profit than to stake a more tangible claim for himself. And then when Aunty Ellen saw hundreds of American soldiers literally invading her ancestral land ostensibly for the same reason, McCandless’s daughter having leased out the rest of the valley for the Waikāne Training Facility, she knew that a dragged-out lawsuit would not be enough to save the Roberts legacy. So she ordered Percy’s grandfather Manuel and his seven children to move into the valley. “That was his favorite aunty,” Percy’s uncle Henry Roberts told me. “I rememba going down to the Kamaka residence with her—and those days they neva had truck, four-wheel drive, or whateva, so she told the boys to go saddle four horses. I was ten at the time, and I was always on my fadda’s side. So we went up in the valley, and she said ‘Manauela, this is our kuleana. Fence ’um up, and work the land.’” The thirty-one-year-old Manuel may have thought to move elsewhere or to do something other than farming—his options back then not limited to being a “ten-dolla whore” greeting affluent tourists—but he knew that when Aunty tells you to do something, you don’t ask questions. You do what she says, even if it means changing your last name from that of your stepfather to Roberts. “The next day—the next day—we was up there with sickles cutting the California grass, the honohono grass,” Uncle Henry went on. “By the end of the week we was planting taro.” “Percy knew all this, but he could not do notting,” his mother told me. “Day in, day out, he sat on that hill looking down on that land.” That was why a couple of months after the funeral, on Percy’s birthday, his family made the trek up to Grandpa’s Hill. There they waited for a good stiff breeze to spread his ashes out far over the rugged jungle that had once been the Roberts farm that Mrs. Kipapa described in the ten pages of memoir she’d written the night before I came to talk about her...

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