Hawaii FYI - Installment 2: Units of Land

 The Great Mahele

 The mahele was the Hawaiian land redistribution act proposed by King Kamehameha III in the 1830s and enacted in 1848. This was part of a sweeping set of modernizing social changes following the death of Kamehameha the Great, including the drafting of a constitution and a bill of rights. Although not directly redistributing land, it called for the establishment of an arbitration committee to iron out disputes.

The mahele abolished the practice of ahupua‘a. This was an informal division of the islands into sectors, controlled by chiefs extending from the mountain to the ocean. Boundaries of sectors were usually undemarcated determined by geographical features such as ridgelines; each sector was agriculturally self-sufficient due to the varied ecosystems contained within.

About 3 million acres of land went to the crown, and one million acres to chiefs and the government.

The most noted provision of the great mahele was the kuleana act (1850); under this provision, about 30,000 acres of land were set aside for distribution by the committee to 10,000 commoners. Eventually most of this land found its way into the hands of foreigners.

AHUPUAA

A division of land within the Hawaiian Islands, next in size to the district. Although often mentioned as the "unit" of land, the ahupuaa was not a measure of an area, as is the acre, for the ahupuaa varies in size. It is generally a large parcel of land extending from the sea to the mountain and bounded by natural features, such as gulches, streams or ridges. The ideal ahupuaa extended from the mountain to the sea, thereby enabling the chief and his followers to obtain fishes and seaweed from the ocean, raise taro and bananas in the lowlands, and to take forest products from the mountains. Many of the smaller ahupuaa were divided into smaller units of land called "ili".

KULEANA

The small area of an ahupuaa or ili which the tenants or common people had improved or cultivated and used for their own purposes, and to which they substantiated their claims and perfected their right, securing from the Land Commission an award of title in fee simple. Today, it generally refers to a tract of land within a larger tract of land.