As the Mahele Project has grown over the years, it’s a good time to restate the purpose of this project as of 2024.

The main goal of the Mahele Project is to place the testimony of the Mahele (1846-1855) that defined personal claims to land in the Hawaiian Kingdom into the Google Earth landscape, to give us some insight into the 1850’s Monarchy social landscape to give us a better understanding of our past.

The Mahele Testimony consists of 16 “Foreign Testimony” volumes and 13 “Native Testimony” volumes. The Foreign Testimony volumes are a mix of English and Hawaiian (especially in the later volumes) but the majority of claimants were Hawaiian, even if testimony was in English. The Native Testimony volumes are exclusively in Hawaiian. Most volumes run from 200-400 pages in length. Just as a note it’s oftentimes forgotten that all the secretaries taking testimony were fluent in both English and Hawaiian, in fact two of the secretaries were members of the Royal Family and later became Monarchs of the Kingdom.

The testimonies are very detailed snapshots of life in Hawai’i in the 1840-50’s, as not only do they include land description and use, but most also include patterns of inheritance, who your bounding neighbors were, how you acquired the land, and who controlled the land. This is a unique historical resource, as it is fixed in one point of time, and is inclusive of an entire society. Elsewhere (say Ohio or Suffolk England, etc.) testimony is individual, based on taxes, inheritance or maybe legal issues. It’s based on family or an individual, not societal at one point in time. Nor is it almost ever as detailed in social nuance, as it usually involves property or ownership. So the Mahele is unique both in type of detail, short period of time and nationally (the entire Kingdom).

The period from 1840-1860 was a period of massive shifts in values and attitudes, as everyone from the King on down, had to constantly make choices on the personal position towards personal ownership, personal success, the importance of community, and how much you hold onto tradition (which of course had been already changing constantly since the late 1600’s, long prior to European contact).

Just like our current world, change was happening, your only choice was deciding how you wanted to deal with it: to you embrace change, or do you fight to hold on to the ‘old ways’? And every day you have to revisit those choices. This is the context of the Mahele testimonies, and once you start to read (and our case transcribe) them to start to get more insight into the struggles that everyone was going through, with no collective sense of guidance and direction (again just as in our contemporary world) since no one can see the future clearly. We frequently get bogged down into critiquing the past based on our view from the present, but rarely do we actually look at ourselves in the mirror and seriously consider how we are also trapped into our narrow perceptions of potential and opportunity when we make daily and life choices. The Mahele reminds us that to the claimants this testimony was part of their PRESENT, and as such they could not understand the ramifications of their decisions into the future.

Google Earth is a free to use app, available both as download (download the Pro version) and also as a web-based app. It is a simple geographic information system (GIS) database, combining graphics (maps) with data into a visually-based system.

In this project we are adding the Mahele land court award locations, boundaries and testimony into Google Earth. Since both the app and our Mahele files are free to access, this means anyone can see the Mahele world of the Monarchy in the 1850s overlaid on our world of the 2020s.

We have intentionally kept all locations approximate (in part simply due to the difficulty of linking hand-drawn 19th-20th century maps into Google Earth), and of course since the testimony is directly transcribed from the original script into usable text (pdf) there are errors. Since the Testimony volumes are available for free download (as scanned pdf files) we recommend that anyone using our material of further analysis have the actual volumes in front of them so they can correct any errors or omissions from our transcriptions. We are largely avoiding transcribing the Hawaiian language testimony into the our pdf transcriptions as we have great difficulty in accurately converting to original script into text-understanding Hawaiian and transcribing Hawaiian are two very different skill sets.

If you are interested in becoming involved in the project, we have several major needs at present:

1. The first one getting folks that have the background and are willing to take on the Hawaiian language transcription, and possibly also translating those to English.
2. A second issue is the need to expand our area of mapped claims-currently we are limited to the small number of detailed 19th-20th century maps that detail the LCA claims (such as Waititi, Lahaina and Pearl Lochs). But the vast majority of the islands don’t have such maps, so LCA claims are limited to indicators in the State Land Tax Maps. This process is very labor-intensive (not least of which due to the small scale of each LTM) but soon we will have to expand into resource. Especially with West Maui outside of Lahaina we haven’t been able to locate any other detailed LCA maps, so as we expand from central Lahaina up towards Ka’anapali and down to Kihei we will have to shift over to LTM location maps.