After the Fire: Lahaina Mutual Aid and Community Organizing

On August 8, 2023, a deadly fire fueled by corporate negligence, government failure, and decades of land mismanagement ravaged Lahaina. Born from the ashes of this catastrophic event, After the Fire offers the first sustained, ground-level account of how ordinary people kept one another alive when the systems charged with public safety collapsed. While official sirens stayed silent, power and communications failed, and roads became traps, West Maui residents constructed lifesaving networks in real time.

This edited volume argues that the supply hubs in parking lots, improvised communications systems, and community kitchens in West Maui were not “charity” or inspiring “improvisation.” This was mutual aid: reciprocal, community-governed care rooted in solidarity. In Hawaiʻi mutual aid is deeply connected to histories of ʻāina stewardship, plantation exploitation, settler colonialism, and a tourism and real estate economy that has left working families permanently precarious. The Lahaina disaster could have been avoided; instead, it was intensified by structural conditions emblematic of these issues. Abandoned plantation lands were overtaken by flammable invasive grasses, infrastructure and emergency systems were shaped to protect assets more reliably than people, and housing for displaced families was artificially scarce due to the abundance of short-term vacation rentals.

Across vivid case studies and personal accounts, contributors show mutual aid as both survival strategy and political practice. Chapters trace sea-based supply chains organized by kānaka o ke kai, the rise of cultural leader-anchored hubs such as Nā ʻAikāne o Maui and Nāpili Noho, battles over water rights and the weaponization of tragedy, and the Maui Fires People Locator as a community-built digital lifeline. Other chapters examine the internal tensions and hard lessons of hub governance, language-access among Filipino communities, and Indigenous healing infrastructures like the Maui Medic Healers Hui that braid clinical care with lāʻau lapaʻau, ceremony, and trauma support.

For scholars of disaster, colonialism, labor, and social movements, and for general readers asking what genuine resilience looks like, After the Fire is both documentation and demonstration. It offers a bracing indictment of institutional abandonment and a hopeful, practical map of how communities build power, dignity, and a different future when it matters most.

• Lance D. Collins, Editor

  Lance D. Collins is a Maui-based attorney, historian, and writer focused on the histories of Hawai‘i and the Philippines.

• Bianca K. Isaki, Editor

  Bianca K. Isaki is an attorney on Oʻahu and holds a PhD in political science. She is the president of the North Beach-West Maui Benefit Fund.

Contributors

• ku‘ualoha ho‘omanawanui
• Sydney Lehua Iaukea
• Ke‘eaumoku Kapu
• Rachel Kapu
• Kaipo Kekona
• Jacqueline Lasky
• Brian Richardson
• Ty P. Kāwika Tengan
• Louward Allen Zubiri