Tourism Impacts West Maui

West Maui has been the site of rapid, drastic changes to landscape, communities, governance, and economy. This collection addresses the ways tourism both changed West Maui and how changes brought to West Maui made a tourist economy viable. Each chapter tells a story of the ways different communities experienced the transformation of West Maui from an agrarian area into one dominated by industrial tourism. While focused on site-specific histories of West Maui, this volume is of significant interest to tourism studies, regional and urban planning, and Hawai‘i and Hawaiian historians.

• Lance D. Collins, Editor

  Lance D. Collins is an attorney in private practice on the island of Maui. He also holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. He was the compiler and indexer of the seventeen-volume Proceedings of the Charter Commissions of the County of Maui (1966–2012). He coedited Tourism Impacts West Maui (2016) and Social Change in West Maui (2019) and edited Civil Society in West Maui (2021). His research interests focus on the Philippines, Hawai‘i, American colonialism in the Pacific, and legal and political history.

• Bianca K. Isaki, Editor

  Bianca K. Isaki is a writer, solo legal practitioner, community activist, and a director of the North Beach-West Maui Benefit Fund. She received her PhD from the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa Department of Political Science for research on Asian settler colonialism and plantation labor organizing, completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, returned to Hawai‘i to teach Women's Studies, and then graduated summa cum laude from the William S. Richardson School of Law. She has contributed to the following West Maui oriented books: Tourism Impacts West Maui (2016), Social Change in West Maui (2019), Civil Society in West Maui (2021), and Water and Power in West Maui (2021).

Contributors

• Lance D. Collins
• Charles Devaney
• Jonathan Malonzo Dial
• Abraham R. Flores
• Bianca K. Isaki
• Sydney Lehua Iaukea
• Marie Jocelyn U. Marfil
• Brian Richardson
• Lilia Quindoza Santiago

• Tourism Impacts West Maui is an excellent case study on the ways an area has been transformed into a world-class tourist destination. Significant attention is paid to the collaboration between political elites and large land-owners and their lack of regard for those most affected—the workers. This volume examines changes in the landscape and in the occupations of West Maui residents.
  —Dick Mayer, Professor Emeritus, Geography and Economics, Maui Community College
• Tourism Impacts West Maui brings together stunning essays that illustrate the settler colonial production of tourism, despite the ways that tourism is often presented as ‘inevitable.’ The essays provide us with incredibly valuable insights into traditional economies that predate tourism and challenge the artifices of tourism-driven ‘restoration and preservation,’ honoring instead community-based restoration projects growing out of practices of aloha ʻāina. Having grown up on Maui, I find this book speaks profoundly to all of us, telling stories of the unique wahi pana (celebrated places), cultural traditions and practices of the people of West Maui as well as sharing strategies with other communities across Hawaiʻi working to protect the natural and cultural abundance of the land and the people from the devastating consequences of tourism and overdevelopment, allowing for more pono futures.
  —Candace Fujikane, co-editor with Jonathan Okamura, Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawaiʻi.