Edit: He Watched His Island Get Sold. So He Bought It Back, One Tour at a Time.

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## The Summit Before Sunrise

The alarm goes off at 2 a.m. and Keali'i Kahananui doesn't hit snooze. He hasn't hit snooze in seven years.

By 3:30, he's standing at 10,023 feet at the summit of Haleakalā, the dormant volcano that forms the eastern half of Maui, watching a group of nine visitors pull their jackets tight against a cold that surprises every first-timer who expected a tropical island to be warm all the way up. Keali'i doesn't rush them. He lets them stand in the dark a moment — the stars still out, the world below invisible, the wind carrying something ancient and indifferent.

Then he begins to speak. Not about geology. Not about visitor statistics or photo overlooks. He talks about his great-grandmother, Lehua, who walked this mountain every year of her adult life and who told him once that Haleakalā doesn't belong to anyone — it permits us to be here. He talks about the Hawaiian word for this moment before dawn: *wanaao*, the quiet just before light. He talks about why Hawaiians don't say they *own* land. They say they *kia'i* it — they watch over it.

By the time the sun breaches the horizon and the clouds beneath them catch fire, at least two people in his group are crying. They always are. Nobody comes to Maui expecting to feel something that deep. That's what Keali'i Kahananui has built his entire company around.

## The Island That Tourists See

Maui receives roughly 2.8 million visitors per year. They come for the beaches, the whale watching, the road to Hana, the sunrise at Haleakalā. They spend, collectively, billions of dollars — on resorts owned by mainland corporations, on helicopter tours operated by out-of-state franchises, on luaus staged for audiences who can't tell the difference between performance and ceremony.

A 2022 study by the University of Hawai'i estimated that roughly 78 cents of every tourism dollar spent in the state flows back to the mainland. Native Hawaiians, who make up about 21 percent of the state's population, capture a fraction of a fraction.

Keali'i grew up in Ha'ikū, on Maui's windward north shore, watching this economy from the outside. His family had farmed kalo — taro — on the same land for four generations. His grandfather lost most of those fields in the 1970s to a resort development deal that the community had no real say in. His father worked maintenance at one of those resorts for thirty years. Keali'i worked there summers through high school, cleaning pools, hauling luggage, smiling at guests who asked him what it was like to live in paradise.

"I didn't answer the way I felt," he says now, sitting on his front porch in the same Ha'ikū neighborhood where he grew up. He's 36 years old, with his grandmother's wide-set eyes and the kind of stillness that suggests he's been paying attention to something longer than the conversation at hand. "What I felt was: you're standing on my family's taro fields and calling it paradise. But what I said was, *it's beautiful*. Because I was seventeen and it wasn't the time."

The time came later.

## What Tourism Took

To understand what Keali'i built, you have to understand what was already there before he built anything.

Hawaiian culture is not a collection of artifacts. It is a living practice — of language, of navigation, of land stewardship, of ceremony, of story. For much of the twentieth century, those practices were actively suppressed. The Hawaiian language was banned in public schools from 1896 until 1978. Traditional land rights were extinguished through a combination of colonial law and corporate development. The hula, which is a form of historical record, was reduced in the tourist imagination to decoration.

Keali'i's great-grandmother Lehua was part of the generation that refused to let it disappear entirely. She taught him 'ōlelo Hawai'i — the language — in her kitchen. She walked him through the significance of what he was seeing on the mountain. She told him the names of things: the rain that comes from the east, the wind that comes from the north, the taro that grows in moving water versus still. When she died, when Keali'i was twenty-two, he spent six months sitting with that grief before he understood what he needed to do with everything she'd given him.

"She didn't want it archived," he says. "She wanted it lived."

## The First Tour Was Free

He started in 2017 with $12,000 borrowed from his uncle Kalani — money his uncle had been saving to repair his truck — and a neighbor's truck that needed no repair.

The first Na Pali Cultural Journeys experience wasn't a product. It was an act of reclamation — an attempt to give visitors the version of Maui that had been withheld from them, and in doing so, to take back the narrative. Keali'i posted about it on a sustainable travel forum. He charged $95 per person. He took four people on a six-hour journey through the 'Iao Valley, speaking about the watershed, the battles fought there, the meaning of the stone formations that tour buses photograph and keep moving.

"Three of the four people cried at some point," he says. "One of them — a woman from Minneapolis — asked me afterward where she could donate to Hawaiian land trusts. I hadn't mentioned land trusts. She just... felt the weight of it."

He did twelve tours that first year. Then forty. Then a hundred and twelve.

Word spread the way advertising cannot manufacture: person to person, through messages that said *this is different from anything else I did in Hawai'i.* Travel bloggers with large followings took his summit tour and described it in terms that made other travelers feel they'd missed something essential. By 2019, Na Pali Cultural Journeys had a waitlist.

## The Business He Didn't Expect to Build

Keali'i will tell you, without embarrassment, that he had no intention of building a company. He wanted to tell his grandmother's stories. The company arrived as a consequence.

By early 2020, he had four guides — all Native Hawaiian, all 'ōlelo Hawai'i speakers, all deeply versed in what they were teaching — and twelve distinct experiences ranging from a taro farming workshop in Ha'ikū to a three-day cultural immersion retreat on the western slopes of Haleakalā. He'd hired a part-time operations coordinator named Haunani who turned out to have a gift for logistics that Keali'i freely admits he does not. He'd moved out of his kitchen-table office into a small commercial space in Pā'ia.

Revenue in 2019 was $340,000.

Then March 2020 arrived, and the visitors stopped.

## Shutdown

The state of Hawai'i imposed among the strictest travel restrictions in the country — a mandatory fourteen-day quarantine for all arrivals that effectively ended tourism overnight. For Na Pali Cultural Journeys, revenue fell from $340,000 in 2019 to $31,000 in 2020. That $31,000 was merchandise: books, prints, and cultural education kits that Keali'i pivoted to selling online in a single week.

He kept every guide employed through federal PPP loans and a crowdfunding campaign that raised $67,000 from former guests in three days. He spent the shutdown doing two things: deepening the curriculum, and building what he now calls the infrastructure of reciprocity.

The infrastructure of reciprocity is, in practical terms, a series of formal partnerships with Native Hawaiian nonprofits, land trusts, and cultural preservation organizations. Every Na Pali tour now includes a mandatory contribution: $15 of every ticket goes directly to a rotating roster of partner organizations, a network that has grown to fourteen. Keali'i negotiated access to certain protected cultural sites in exchange for providing free educational programming to local schools twice a year.

"The shutdown gave me time to think about what kind of company I actually wanted this to be," he says. "Not just: *does it succeed?* But: *if it succeeds, who wins?*"

## What $3.8 Million Looks Like

When tourism returned to Maui in 2021, Na Pali Cultural Journeys came back different.

The three-day immersion retreat — which had been good before the pandemic — had been redesigned into something travel writers struggled to categorize. *Outside* magazine ran a feature in October 2021. *National Geographic Traveler* included Na Pali in its "Best of the World" list the following year. The waitlist, which had been months long before the pandemic, became a year long.

Keali'i raised prices. Not because he wanted to — he worried openly about who he was pricing out. But the economics of keeping twenty-two people employed at living wages in one of the most expensive places in the country required it. The three-day immersion retreat now costs $2,200 per person. The summit experience is $195. The taro farming workshop — which he has kept deliberately accessible — is $65.

In 2023, Na Pali Cultural Journeys generated $3.8 million in revenue. Keali'i employs twenty-two people full-time, all Native Hawaiian, at an average salary of $68,000 — well above what the same workers would earn in hotel or resort positions. The company has contributed more than $400,000 to partner organizations since the reciprocity model launched.

"People ask me what success looks like," he says. "It looks like Makoa." He gestures toward one of his lead guides — a twenty-six-year-old from Kahului who studied marine biology and now leads ocean and reef literacy experiences for Na Pali. "He's twenty-six. He speaks his language every day. He teaches people about the place his grandparents loved, and he owns his car. That's the whole thing, right there."

## The Problems That Don't Go Away

Keali'i is careful not to make his story tidier than it is.

He operates in an industry with a complicated relationship to the very place it depends on. Maui's overtourism — traffic, water stress, pressure on natural resources, the displacement of local residents through short-term rental housing — is real and worsening. Na Pali Cultural Journeys, however thoughtfully structured, is still a company that brings more visitors to a strained island.

He thinks about this constantly. He's capped total annual capacity at 4,000 participants — a ceiling he's turned down significant revenue to maintain. He participates in coalitions advocating for statewide visitor impact fees. He funded, personally, a six-month residency for a Native Hawaiian writer to produce an oral history of the Ha'ikū watershed.

"I'm not going to pretend I've solved tourism," he says. "I'm trying to show what one version of doing it better looks like. If ten companies copy this model, something real changes. If I'm the only one, I'm just a good story."

## The Conversation He Keeps Having

Every few months, Keali'i gets an offer. Usually from a larger travel company — a cruise line, a resort group, a private equity-backed "authentic experiences" platform — wanting to acquire Na Pali or license the brand. The offers have grown larger. Last fall, he turned down a number he won't disclose but describes, with characteristic understatement, as meaningful.

He turned it down for the same reason he's turned down every offer: he doesn't believe what he's built survives becoming a line item in someone else's portfolio. The thing that makes Na Pali Cultural Journeys work is the specific human beings who show up at 2 a.m. and stand on that mountain and tell the truth. You can't acquire that. You can only dismantle it by trying.

"I grew up watching my family's land become someone else's investment," he says. "I'm not in a hurry to do that to anything I've made."

## The Summit, Again

It's just past 6 a.m. The sun has been up for forty minutes. The group is descending the mountain — quieter than they were going up, in that particular way of people who've been given something and are still figuring out what it is.

Keali'i walks at the back. He has done this several hundred times, and he still watches his guests' faces. He's looking for the moment — he can almost always identify it — when they stop being tourists and start being witnesses.

He found it today in a couple from Portland, holding hands and not speaking, looking back at the summit. He finds it differently every time: in the person who asks the right question, in the silence that falls when he finishes the story of the *wanaao*, in the woman from Minneapolis who asked about land trusts without being prompted.

His great-grandmother walked this mountain every year. She told him it permits us to be here.

He is still figuring out how to say thank you. This is, for now, his best answer.

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*Na Pali Cultural Journeys is based in Pā'ia, Maui. The taro farming workshop runs Saturdays and accepts walk-ins when space permits. Fifteen dollars from every ticket goes directly to Native Hawaiian cultural preservation organizations.*

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