A few days before heading to Honolulu on book tour for “Lost Kingdom,” I got a phone call from the assistant to Her Royal Highness Princess Abigail Kawananakoa, the woman who is the most direct descendant of the last queen of Hawaii. If the monarchy had not been overthrown in 1893, Princess Abigail today might well have become Hawaii’s queen.

I’d interviewed Princess Abigail by phone for a page one story I’d written last year for the Wall Street Journal. The story was about how the Friends of Iolani Palace, a group of volunteers founded by Princess Abigail’s mother, had been on a decades-long search to recover lost furniture and artifacts that disappeared in the months and years after a small group of businessmen deposed Queen Liliuokalani at the end of the nineteenth century.

While I’d visited Iolani Palace many times in the course of researching Lost Kingdom (the palace is on the same grounds as the Hawaii State Archives) I had not met Princess Abigail. Known by her Hawaiian name “Kekau” (pronounced kay-kow) the Princess is in her eighties and divides her time between homes in Honolulu and California. The last time a journalist had interviewed or spent any time with the Princess was for a Life magazine profile of her in 1998.

I was thrilled – and also a little terrified – when her longtime assistant, Maggi Parker, invited me to join the Princess for lunch at the Mariposa, the restaurant in the Nieman Marcus at Honolulu’s Ala Moana shopping center. What would I wear? What gifts should I bring? How should I address her? I wasn’t such a hard-bitten reporter that I didn’t fret over the etiquette required – even though our luncheon was taking place not at a palace, but at an all-American shopping mall.

I chose a conservative light -grey pants suit, which turned out to be a good pick for the occasion. I’d raced to a nearby stationery store before the lunch to buy a bright orange gift bag and pink tissue to wrap a bottle of Robert Mondavi cabernet I’d brought her from California, as well as a signed copy of my first book, “The House of Mondavi.”

As I rode the escalator up several floors to the restaurant, past hundreds of gold-colored butterflies suspended from the ceiling, I was damp with perspiration and worried I’d be late. As it turned out, I arrived before almost everyone else. The table was still being decorated with cuttings of delicate black-stemmed ferns – Queen’s Ferns, as it turned out —  from a guest’s garden, along with fuschia-colored orchid lei.

We sipped on blood-orange spritzers as we waited for the Princess’s chauffeur, driving her deep blue Rolls Royce, to drop her off. When she arrived, a ripple of excitement passed through the restaurant, as the manager and staff made a fuss over her, escorting an elegant octogenarian with carefully coiffed blonde hair who was wearing a flowing, cream and white silk pants suit to our long table. We sat with our backs to the wall where a large mural portrayed of hula dancers in grass skirts were dancing on a beach behind us. (The Princess later commented that the dancers didn’t look particularly Hawaiian to her.) Our view through the Mariposa’s windows was of the vast Pacific.

The occasion, as it turned out, was a celebration of her assistant Maggi’s birthday, which she had modestly forgotten to mention to me on the phone. Luckily, I’d brought her a small gift too. But Maggi had very kindly seated me next to the Princess, where I had the treat of hearing about her days as a boarder at Notre Dame High School in Belmont, Ca., a Catholic girls’ school outside of San Francisco.

The Princess was not entirely pleased by the service at the Mariposa: more than once, she extended her index finger at the overworked waitress, arched her eyebrows, and commanded her to bring drinks and menus to the table right now! I was secretly pleased to see that the Princess acted like, well, a princess. Later, Maggi explained to me that the Princess typically demanded excellent service and, in turn, was known for tipping generously.

Before the slices of Valharona chocolate cake arrived, Maggi’s friend Ann McCormack gave us a nice surprise. In the 1950s and 1960s, Ann had sung in the Honolulu nightclub that she had owned with her husband and toured with Frank Sinatra as his opening act in Las Vegas and elsewhere. At lunch, she sang a special birthday song for her long-time friend.

Ann and Maggi also swapped stories of appearing in small roles in the original “Hawaii Five-0″ and the movie “Hawaii,” based on James Michener’s 1959 novel. Ann and Maggi, it seems, were quite the girls-about-town in Honolulu during the 1950s and 60s. The funniest story involved Maggie once appearing onstage at the nightclub wearing a Playboy bunny’s outfit as a gag, and they reminisced over the filming of Hawaii, including one of the scenes shot at the Princess’s Honolulu home.

What a treat for me – and a big mahalo (thank you in Hawaiian) to Maggi for including me at such a lovely luncheon. After having spent the past four years digging through archives to write a book about the Princess’s family (she is the great-grand niece of King David Kalakaua and Queen Kapi’olani.) I was deeply honored by their interest in my book.

I couldn’t resist asking Kekau (yes, she invited me to call her that) whether she’d seen “The Descendants,” the Oscar-nominated movie starring George Clooney which is based on the novel by local writer Kaui Hart Hemmings (It’s out on DVD on March 13). She hadn’t – and while I offered to take her to the movies to see it – she was decidedly cool to the idea. It seemed that she hadn’t been to a commercial movie theater to see a film in a very long time.

To deepen the mystery, however, one of the other guests, Teri Stroud, seated to the other side of the Princess, leaned towards me. In a conspiratorial whisper, explained that the Princess was the real descendant  – in other words, the person upon whom the George Clooney character, Matt King, in “The Descendants” was based. In Kaui’s novel, Matt King was descended from Hawaiian royalty on one side and white sugar plantation owners on the other. The Clooney character describes himself as looking like a haole – the Hawaiian word for a foreigner, but generally used to describe a white person – even though he is part-Hawaiian.

Princess Abigail, likewise, does not resemble what  some think Hawaiian princess would look like. She told me at lunch that when she first arrived at her boarding school in California, she overheard some girls talking about her and wondering how fat and how dark-skinned she would be – not realizing they were being overheard. For the record, the Princess is light-skinned and slender with blue eyes. Like Matt King, she could easily be mistaken for a haole herself.

And like the Matt King character,  Princess Abigail is a member of a powerful family – the Campbells – which held many of their assets in a trust. Princess Abigail played a crucial role in 2007 in deciding what should happen to the Campbell Estate when it ran into a Hawaiian law, the rule against perpetuities, requiring it to wind down twenty years after the last death of the direct descendants who had been alive at the time of the trust’s creation.

The thirty beneficiaries of the trust are descended from James Campbell, an Irishman who immigrated to the islands in the mid-nineteenth century and who built his fortune as a partner in a Maui sugar plantation. According to the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, she was the largest beneficiary of the trust and her proceeds from it were close to a quarter of a billion dollars. She has used some of that wealth to help fund the Abigail K. Kawananakoa Foundation to support the preservation of Hawaiian culture.

That said, “The Descendants” author Hart Hemmings told me she’d based her fictional characters on a number of families and family trusts in the news at time she wrote her book – not just the Campbells. Another family that went through similar experiences were the Wilcoxes (whom the author Hart Hemmings is related to) according to friends that I met later in my trip and had drinks with at the Outrigger Canoe Club, one of the settings of Hart Hemmings’ novel. While the novel was based on an amalgam of powerful local families, it was still a great honor to meet Princess Abigail, who was born long before Hawaii became the 50^th State and who’d lived through its tumultuous history.

How often, after all, does one have the chance to meet true American royalty?

Julia Flynn Siler is the bestselling author of “Lost Kingdom: Hawaii’s Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America’s First Imperial Adventure,” published by the Atlantic Monthly Press. For more information, please visit www.juliaflynnsiler.com

I was in Washington, D.C. to deliver a talk to a group of Treasury executives about my new book, Lost Kingdom: Hawaii’s Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America’s First Imperial Adventure. I’d booked a hotel near Dupont Circle.

The evening after the Treasury talk, I was on my way to a dinner party thrown by a group of college friends and stopped at Cairo Wine & Liquor, a small shop a few blocks away from my hotel, to pick up a bottle of wine.

The shop’s name caught my eye and I asked the man behind the counter whether the Cairo apartment building was nearby.

“Sure is,” he answered, motioning across 17^th Street, to 1615 Q Street, N.W. “It’s right around the corner.”

“That’s where Hawai‘i’s last queen once lived… “ I said, as I handed him my credit card.

Historic photo of the Cairo Hotel

I’d visited the building four years ago, early on in my effort to retrace Lili‘u’s steps. I hadn’t remembered where it was, but distinctly remembered the gargoyles on the outside and dramatic Romanesque entry arch.

“Before or after she was kicked off the throne?” he asked, shaking his head.

“Afterwards,” I said, a bit surprised that the man at the register, who was perhaps in his late forties, knew the history that had led to the end of the independent Kingdom of Hawaii. I am about his age and this episode of American history was never taught in any of my classes growing up.

I walked out of the shop, having found a connection between a U.S. Marine-backed coup that had taken place 119 years earlier in a remote island kingdom and a Washington, D.C. liquor store.

Lili‘u had arrived in the nation’s capitol in January of 1897, where she moved into what was then a chic luxury hotel. In her suite of rooms, she penned her autobiography, Hawaii’s Story, working closely with the American journalist Julius Palmer in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to regain her throne by swaying public opinion and privately petitioning President Grover Cleveland.

The next morning, I decided to revisit the Cairo – the building, not the liquor store. When it was constructed in 1894, it was the tallest building in Washington, at a soaring 156-feet. Concerns over its safety led the city to pass local height restriction legislation and for many years, it remained the capital’s tallest residential building.

When Lili‘u moved there in 1897, it had 350 rooms, suites on every floor, a dining room, a grand ballroom, a nightclub, a billiard room, a barbershop, a bowling alley, and (best of all) a tropical garden on its rooftop terrace. In her suite of rooms, Lili‘u would work most mornings in front of an open fireplace with a gas log, translating the lyrics of the hundred of so songs she had composed into English, as well as completing her autobiography.

The Cairo went downhill in the decades after Lili‘u lived there. As the neighborhood around it decayed in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, it served as a student hostel, a temporary shelter for the needy, and finally, a flophouse. It closed in 1972, was sold and renovated into larger apartments over three years.

In 1993 – the centennial of the overthrow and the same year that President Clinton issued a formal apology to the people of Hawai‘i – the Washington Post described the Cairo as sitting like “some massive Byzantine dream” in the midst of a bustling urban neighborhood.

My quick trip to Washington was so much richer for having rediscovered the Cairo. A heartfelt thanks (or mahalo in Hawaiian) to my new friend at the other Cairo (where I bought the bottle of Sonoma-Cutrer) for pointing out this wonderful building.

The Outrigger is a small, private club with an outsized history in Hawaii. Founded in 1908, it is the place where legendary surfer Duke Paoa Kahanamoku, a five-time Olympics medalist who competed as a swimmer and water polo player for the U.S. in the 1912, 1920, 1924, and 1932 games. A photo of Duke is mounted on the wood-paneled wall as you enter the dining room, with the words underneath it, “Ambassador of Aloha.”

Duke Paoa Kahanamoku on the beach in front of the Outrigger Canoe Club

Our host for drinks that evening was Puchi Romig, the outgoing chairman of the Friends of Iolani Palace, the group that supports the National Historic Monument through fund-raising and other activities. The highlight of her tenure may well have been last fall’s Renaissance Ball – the first formal ball at the palace in more than a decade.

One of the guests that joined us that evening at the Outrigger was Marvin “Puakea” Nogelmeier from the University of Hawaii’s Manoa campus, who is one of the world’s leading experts on the Hawaiian language. I’d had the opportunity to profile Puakea in a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal and had come to like and admire him very much. He has volunteered as a docent at the Palace since the mid-1980s.

Puakea, who had just returned from a trip to New Zealand, had brought with him a copy of his new book, Mai Pa’a I Ka Leo, which is about translating Hawaiian-language newspapers from the nineteenth century into English. He’s now deeply involved in a project to do just that – with some 2,500 volunteers pulling together to unlock this potentially huge treasure chest of information, which offers a much deeper look into the Hawaiian perspective from the times than we have today. Even non-Hawaiian speakers can help out: for more information, please visit the Awaiaulu project’s website.

Puakea had helped me better understand some of the subtleties of the Hawaiian language and had read and commented on the Note on Language that is at the end of Lost Kingdom. He has spent decades studying Hawaiian culture, language and history and, as a relative newcomer, I was grateful for his help, though I recognize that Lost Kingdom, as a popular history, could have benefited from using even more of the new Hawaiian language materials that he and other scholars are uncovering every day.

Puchi’s other guest was another true descendant, in her own way similar to Princess Abigail Kawananakoa, with whom I’d had lunch when I first arrived. She was Robin Midkiff, a Punahou and Stanford graduate who was a descendant of one of the most prominent missionary families. She is related to Juliette and Amos Starr Cooke, a missionary couple who taught Liliuokalani and other royal students at the Chief’s Children’s School in the 1830s and 1840s in Honolulu.

Robin Midkiff, Julia Flynn Siler, and Puakea Nogelmeier at the Outrigger Canoe Club

Robin is also related to Paul Neumann, an attorney who began his career in California but moved to Honolulu in the early 1880s, quickly rising to the position of the kingdom’s attorney general under King David Kalakaua.  Neumann represented the last queen, Liliuokalani, at her military trial in 1895 and witnessed her forced abdication. To honor him, the deposed Queen and her lady-in-waiting had stitched his name into the Victorian era crazy quilt that they worked on together during Liliu’s eight months of house arrest at the palace.

In addition to working as a senior executive at the First Hawaiian Bank and serving as a member of the Atherton Family Foundation, Robin is deeply involved in preserving the history of Hawaii in her role as chairman of the Washington Place Foundation, the group formed to support the gracious, white pillared home in downtown Honolulu where Liliu spent most of her life. The deposed queen died at Washington Place in 1917 and it long served as the official residence for Hawaii’s Governor. In 2007, it was designated as a National Historic Landmark.

We watched for a green flash as the sun sank into the Pacific. Puakea and Robin talked history about the early days of Kamehameha I and his bloody conquest of the island of Oahu. As I sat between them listening to their conversation, I thought to myself how I’d never known a place where history lies so close to the surface of daily life – with reminders every day in the street names reflecting the days when the islands were ruled by Hawaiian royalty.

Here’s  a Q&A from the Honolulu Weekly that I wanted to share with you. It’s in the current issue (Jan. 25-31) of the newspaper and I’ve  gotten a number of comments on it already.  Please let me know what you think.

***

Points to Ponder for Lost Kingdom

• Whose story is Lost Kingdom and who should be telling it? Do you think Julia Flynn Siler, a haole or white foreigner to the islands, does a good job of showing all sides of this story about nineteenth century Hawaii?  Do you think it is an important story?

• Is there a hero/heroine or villain/villainess in this story?

• How do you feel about Lili’u?  Could she have done anything to alter the course of historical events?  Should she have?  Do you consider her a tragic figure?

• How do you feel about King David Kalakaua?  How responsible was he for the course of events?

• How do you feel about the way the United States handled the annexation of Hawaii?  Grover Cleveland claimed “Hawaii is ours…as I contemplate the means used to complete the outrage, I am ashamed of the whole affair.”  Do you agree/ disagree with him?

• How do you feel about the way the Hawaiians handled the annexation of Hawaii?  Did you get a good sense from the book as to how and why they behaved as they did?

• What surprised you about Claus Spreckels?  What about Dole?  Are there other characters in the book that you feel played a pivotal role and you’d like to know more about them?

• What were the motives of  the original missionaries in coming to Hawaii, and then how do you feel about their descendents?  Was everyone generally well-intentioned, or was self-interest paramount?

• What is the relevance of this history for us today?

• Can you imagine an alternate history?  Where would Hawaii be today if the US hadn’t annexed it?  Where would the US be today without Hawaii?

• This was our non-fiction selection for the season.  Do you think this particular history of Hawaii could be better told as ‘historical fiction’?

That coincidence gave me some pleasure, since surfing, known as he‘e nalu or surf riding in the Hawaiian language, is one of the few aspects of ancient Hawaiian culture that have thrived beyond the reef – with Hawaiians themselves bringing the sport at the turn of the twentieth century to America. And one of the parts of my book I loved researching the most was the history of Hawaiian surfing, which was known as the sport of kings, also known as the ali‘i, or high chiefs.

Because commoners worked in the fields and tended the fish ponds, the ali‘i could devote themselves to sports. Their favorite pastime was surfing and they rode the waves on enormous, carved wood boards—some more than eighteen feet long and weighing 150 pounds. Both male and female chiefs also excelled at related sports such as canoe-leaping, in which the surfer would jump from a canoe carrying his or her board into a cresting ocean swell, and then ride the wave to the shore.

When the surf was high, entire villages rushed to the beach. Men, women, and children would paddle out to ride the rolling waves. While Tahitians and other Pacific Islanders also surfed, the Hawaiians took the sport to a higher level—standing fearlessly on their massive boards, often three times as long as those used elsewhere in Polynesia.

The Hawaiians were magnificent athletes. Some excelled at cliff- diving into the sea, from heights of many hundreds of feet. Even young women would strip naked and leap from the summit of high cliffs, diving headlong into the foaming water and bobbing up afterward. One can only imagine their dark hair streaming down their shoulders and their faces beaming with delight.

One of my finds in digging through archives was an engraving of ancient surfers, as well as nineteenth and early twentieth century photographs of the sport. But for those of you who don’t have the time or inclination to visit the State Archives of Hawaii in Honolulu but want to learn more about the history of surfing, I’d suggest a wonderful book called Surfing: A History of the Ancient Sport, which was co-authored by Ben R. Finney and the late James D. Houston. I found a copy in our local library.  I also loved DeSoto Brown’s Surfing: Historic Images from the Bishop Museum Archives.

As for getting out on the water, I’m more of an upright paddle or kayak girl myself – and maybe a boogie boarder if conditions are just right. But I’m heading to Honolulu later this spring and hope to finally take the surf lesson I’d been promising myself while I sat in darkened archives. Cowabunga!

Like · · Share

Attack on the USS Arizona on December 7, 1941 Photo courtesy of the National Park Service Archives

But nearly seven decades before “Remember Pearl Harbor” became a national rallying cry, the same waters were a battleground over Hawaiian sovereignty. In the 19th century, Hawaii was an independent nation — a constitutional monarchy modeled on Great Britain’s — as well as a reluctant bride in a contest among the era’s reigning and rising superpowers. In it, they saw the potential for a deep water port that would make Hawaii an ideal stopover for large ships traveling between North America and Asia.

Native Hawaiians rightly feared that they would lose their nation if they ceded rights to the Pearl River area, which they called Pu‘uloa. They found an unlikely champion in a tall, blue-eyed American adventurer named Walter Murray Gibson. A Southerner with a murky past, he had arrived in the islands in 1861 as a Mormon missionary. With a genius for spotting opportunity, he took up the quixotic cause of saving the Pearl River basin.

Walter Murray Gibson, from the Honolulu Advertiser

He entered the seething and unstable political scene of the island nation’s capital of Honolulu in 1872, the year of King Kamehameha V’s death. Fluent in Hawaiian, he had renounced his U.S. citizenship to become a citizen of the Hawaiian Kingdom. When impassioned debates over the fate of the Pearl River basin, an area which was about a day-long carriage ride to the northwest from Honolulu, became front page news, Gibson started using the pages of his own Hawaiian-language newspaper to espouse the populist message of “Hawaii for Hawaiians.”

The basin had deep cultural resonance for Hawaiians, whose ancient ancestors believed that the shark goddess Ka‘ahupahau guarded the Pearl River’s treacherous entrance, a narrow channel through coral reefs where saltwater mingled with fresh. It was the wealth of oyster beds that gave the area its English name and native Hawaiians had long dived for these prizes in the harbor’s waters.

But the Pearl River basin lured a succession of British and American naval officers carrying magnetic compasses and surveyor’s chains, and in 1873 a military commission under secret instructions from the US secretary of war William W. Belknap examined various ports in the Hawaiian Islands for possible defensive and commercial purposes. That same year, King William Lunalilo became the first Hawaiian monarch to give serious consideration to a proposal from the US offering the harbor in exchange for allowing Hawaiian sugar (which planters began cultivating in the 1870s) to enter the American market duty-free. Trade and defense were becoming inextricably bound, and in neither case were native Hawaiians reaping the potential benefits: The vast majority of the Hawaiian planters who stood to benefit from the agreement were, in fact, white foreigners.

Aerial view of Pearl Harbor, prior to attack. Photo courtesy of National Park Service Archives

In his public statements, David Kalākaua, who ascended to the throne in early 1874, had long been opposed to ceding rights to the Pearl River basin. Likewise, Gibson argued against giving the estuary to the United States, and in November of 1873, he printed a traditional Hawaiian chant, or *mele*, expressing Hawaiian opposition to the deal, which would give the U.S. exclusive access to the estuary in exchange for trade benefits. It ended with the warning:

Be not deceived by the merchants,

They are not only enticing you,

Making fair their faces, they are evil within;

Truly desiring annexation,

For several more years the basin remained in Hawaiian possession. But Gibson and King Kalākaua could only hold off the diplomats, politicians, and powerful sugar planters for so long. In 1887, in the midst of an economic depression and intense pressure from the nation’s businessmen, a Reciprocity Treaty was signed which gave the United States exclusive rights to the area in exchange for trade benefits for exporters of Hawaiian goods to the states. The editorial writers of the kingdom’s Hawaiian language newspapers reacted with dismay, particularly Joseph Nāwahī, a respected native journalist and legislator. He had predicted in 1876 that reciprocity “would be the first step of annexation later on, and the Kingdom, its flag, its independence, and its people will be naught.”

The king’s sister, Lili‘uokalani, was likewise distressed by the deal with the Americans. On Monday, September 26, 1887, she wrote in her diary, “King signed a lease of Pearl river to U. States for eight years to get R. Treaty.” Seeing the lease as an unequal swap for a treaty that benefited the island kingdom’s sugar planters, she concluded darkly, “It should not have been done.”

Gibson, meanwhile, fled the country amidst corruption charges aboard a San Francisco bound steamer owned by the kingdom’s leading sugar planter, Claus Spreckels. He had barely escaped hanging by an angry mob. Ailing and exhausted, he sought to commit his version of events to paper, since he felt the “reformers” who had chased him out of Honolulu had ignored his years of faithful service to the Hawaiian people and his brave, but increasingly unpopular, defense of their interests. He died a few months later in San Francisco. According to the newspapers who reported his death, his last word was “Hawai‘i.”

Gibson’s embalmed body returned to the islands covered with a Hawaiian flag. Once it arrived, streams of visitors came to view the body, including some of Gibson’s fiercest critics: Judge Sanford B. Dole, his brother George Dole, and Lorrin Thurston, who would later lead the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom. The three men joined the crowd moving past his coffin. Thurston was shocked to see that the embalming fluid had turned Gibson’s skin very dark, eerily contrasting with his long white beard and silver locks. They left the reception room and stepped out onto the street.

“What do you think of it?,” Dole asked his brother and Thurston. After a few seconds’ pause, George answered, “Well, I think his complexion is approximating the color of his soul.”

Today, Gibson is nearly forgotten. Pearl Harbor, as it exists today, was created following massive dredging of the basins coral reefs in the 20^th century. The US naval base at Pearl Harbor is headquarters to the commander of the Pacific Fleet, the world’s largest, responsible for patrolling a hundred million square miles of ocean.

Julia Flynn Siler is the author “Lost Kingdom: Hawai‘i’s Last Queen, the Sugar Kings, and America’s First Imperial Adventure,” published by Atlantic Monthly Press. For more information, please visit www.juliaflynnsiler.com.

Catherine Thorpe, who helped research both The House of Mondavi and Lost Kingdom, joined me at the opening reception, where we quickly spotted a bespectacled man wearing a lei, or garland, of green leaves. Making our way through the crowd, we introduced ourselves.

He was Jim Burke, the producer of that evening’s lead film, The Descendants. A down-to-earth and engaging man, he told us that author  Kaui Hart Hemmings had sent him her novel before it was published in 2007 and read it over a single weekend. As father himself, he was convinced that her dark comedy about a father struggling to cope with his two daughters following an accident that left their mother in a coma would make a great movie, with its themes of isolation, betrayal, and forgiveness.

Daws, the author of many very fine books about Hawaii, including Shoal of Time: A History of the Hawaiian  Islands,  helped by reading the script and by providing his thoughts with the filmmakers on music, which is entirely by Hawaiian artists. Indeed, one of the songs on the soundtrack was written by Liliuokalani, Hawaii’s last queen.

Roth, the co-author of Broken Trust: Greed, Mismanagement, & Political Manipulation at America’s Largest Charitable Trust, provided guidance on trust law to the filmmakers, particularly on the somewhat arcane subject of the rule against perpetuities (which is important to the plot, which involves the descendants of a Hawaiian princess and haole (white or foreign) banker who’ve inherited a piece of land, which is held in trust. They must decide whether to sell it because the trust itself, under the rule against perpetuities, must be wound down by a set date.

The back-story of a trust with large land holding in Hawaii echoes the realities of land and power in Hawaii. Although Kaui told me that she did not base her novel on any one real family, she drew from a number of family trusts which were in the news around the time she was writing her book. Indeed, large amounts of land are still held in Hawaii by what are known as the Ali’i trusts – the charitable organizations set up, in most cases, more than a century ago to hold the land and other assets of Hawaiian royalty. The most prominent of these was known as the Bishop Estate, until the scandal revealed in Broken Estate hit it and it renamed itself Kamehameha Schools.

Perhaps the strongest echo of a situation facing the George Clooney character was faced in real life a few years back by the trustees of Hawaii’s Campbell Estate. Under the terms of the trust, the 107-year-old Campbell Estate was required to dissolve in January of 2007, twenty years after the last death of the direct descendants who had been alive at the time of the trust’s creation. Some of the heirs took large cash pay-outs, according to an account in the Honolulu Advertiser (now the Honolulu Star Advertiser), while others chose instead to roll their assets into a new national real estate entity, the San Francisco-based  James Campbell Co. LLC.

Professor Roth says there have been perhaps a half dozen family trusts in Hawaii in recent years that have faced this same situation. The rule against perpetuities only applies to trusts where the beneficiaries are individuals, rather than charities – as in the case of the Ali’i trusts. “It’s a very realistic scenario,” he says about the decision facing the fictional Matt King character, played by George Clooney, and his cousins. “I was impressed that Jim and Alexander were so concerned about getting the details right, even small details that most people wouldn’t be aware of.” The filmmakers credited both Professor Roth and author Gavan Daws at the end of the film.

Matt King is a descendant of a Hawaiian princess, who was a member of the powerful Kamehameha dynasty, and an American banker. It’s a fictional lineage similar to that of founder of what was formerly known as the Bishop Estate — the American banker Charles Reed Bishop, who married the Hawaiian Princess Bernice Pauahi.

What producer Jim Burke calls the “link in the chain” scene in which Matt King looks at a series of black and white photos of his ancestors. He’s asking himself whether he’s doing the right thing by selling the land that had been entrusted to his family.  It’s a question that many of the descendants of Hawaii’s old families surely must have asked themselves in recent years, as much of what makes Hawaii so achingly beautiful has disappeared beneath resort developments and condominiums. These are the same people whose ancestors came to Hawaii to do good and ended up doing very well indeed.

After having spent the past four years examining Hawaii’s history of closely intertwined families and fortunes, this  movie resonates with me on many different levels. Go see it. It’s not only a very funny and moving family story, but also a very astute portrait of modern day Hawaii.

Prize-winning breadfruit tart at the inaugural Breadfruit Festival: Photo by Julia Flynn Siler

Beforehand, I’d talked to one of the world’s leading experts, the Breadfruit Institute’s Director, Diane Ragone PhD., who had told me she hadn’t cared for it when she first tried it. I’d learned from the Breadfruit Institute’s own website about the difficulties faced by Captain Bligh in fulfilling his mission of introducing breadfruit plants to the Caribbean (during the infamous mutiny on the bounty, the mutineers tossed the trees overboard.) I’d even found a discussion on the gardening website GardenWeb under lists of the “five WORST tropical fruits,” with one writer pronouncing breadfruit “nauseous.”

Diane Ragone, PhD., Director of the Breadfruit Institute, photo by Julia Flynn Siler

But when I arrived at the festival that day, my conversion began. Fragrant smoke rose from a fire circle where breadfruit roasted on burning coconut shells. (Watch video here) Women mashed the fruit with a pestle to make breadfruit poi, a traditional porridge-like food. The marvelously vivacious Chef Olelo pa’a Faith Ogawa, a Hawaii-born private chef, demonstrated several recipes to a rapt audience, passing out samples which were appreciatively wolfed down. A long line of people waited patiently that day to sample a special breadfruit lunch.

Chef Olelo pa’a Faith Ogawa, a Hawaii-born private chef, doing a cooking demonstration at the Breadfruit Festival, photo by Julia Flynn Siler

I’d bought a ticket to try a half dozen of the dishes entered into the cooking contest. To my surprise, several of them were delicious.

The one that comes immediately to mind was a recipe for Ulu Tart, (ulu is the Hawaiian word for breadfruit,)  which was made with two cups of cooked breadfruit, one cup of fresh coconut milk, Lehua honey, and a macadamia nut crust. It was superb – though the breadfruit itself was pretty much disguised by the coconut milk and honey.

I also tried a breadfruit casserole made with three different kinds of cheese as well as a very unusual ulu salad with cucumbers and dill, which, along with the tart, was also a prize-winner. I had the pleasure of meeting the person who came up with the salad recipe after he accepted his award for it.

His name was Nader “Nanoa” Parsia, who grew up in Persia before it became Iran. In the many years that he has lived on the islands, he told me he’d come to embrace the cooking and foods of his adopted home Hawaii. Smiling widely, he said “Some people have been baptized. Today, I’ve been ulu-cized!”

Nader “Nanoa” Parsia holding up his awards for breadfruit dishes, photo by Julia Flynn Siler

I felt the same way: I became a breadfruit believer that day too and greatly admire the work that Diane Ragone and her colleagues at the Breadfruit Institute as well as the Hawaii Homegrown Food Network are doing to introduce people to this nutritious food, particularly at a time when so many people are hungry. Mahalo for introducing me to it. I only wish I could have brought one of these beautiful trees home with me to California ~

Breadfruit tree sales at the inaugural Breadfruit Festival in Kona, photo by Julia Flynn Siler