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LISTENING: to my cat cry for his next meal
FEELING: like I need a coffee
SEEING: a mess everywhere I go

Three years ago, almost to the day, Maui erupted into flames. The wildfire that tore through the historic district of Lahaina remains one of the deadliest to ever hit the U.S. The tragedy of lightning, fire, smoke, and despair is one the world is getting to know painfully well across the globe.

In Maui, however, a deep web of mutual aid is helping the community rebuild and reconnect. In the upcoming issue of Loam, which I guest edited, Loam Co-Editors Kate Weiner and Kailea Loften are in conversation with Noelani Ahia, Autumn Ness, and Nicole Huguenin, three organizers whose lived experiences have shaped the way they move and give to the world. It's a gorgeous conversation — heartbreaking and urgent.

We increasingly live in times where we must show up for one another. No one else will come to save us. These three give us some models for how to truly be in community in crisis.

I am sharing an excerpt below. It's the portion of the story where these three incredible individuals introduce themselves, but these are the experiences that shaped them and brought them to their work in Maui.

We can't forget where we've come from.

Preorder Issue 9 of Loam here, and check out "Compassion in Crisis: Building Disaster-Resilient Communities," a book from Loam where this interview first published.

KAILEA LOFTEN
Since the 2023 fires in Maui, you have each poured your heart and soul into mutual aid. Autumn, I met you when you moved to Maui after living through the 2011 tsunami in Japan and subsequent Fukushima nuclear disaster; Nicole, you’ve devoted much of your life to community organizing; and Noe, your work is a direct bridge between land protection and healing justice.

Can you each share more about the experiences that brought you to this work? Was there a moment or moments that solidified your path?

NOELANI AHIA
I don’t think there was any one specific event. It was more of a spiritual journey, and it was led by my ancestors.

I grew up away from Hawai‘i, in the diaspora in California, and then later lived in New York City for eleven years. While I was in school for Chinese medicine, I made my way to upstate New York and met an Indigenous woman who invited me into her ceremonies. The first time I was in one of her ceremonies, my ancestors came through me. They were wailing, telling me that I needed to come home. At that time, I still had three more years of grad school to get through. But as soon as school ended, I packed up all my stuff and moved from New York to Maui — my ancestral land. I knew a little bit about my culture and the illegally occupied kingdom, but because of assimilation and land dispossession, I didn’t have access to much of my history and culture. So when I came home it felt like an identity crisis: I had to figure out who I was as a Hawaiian, what my values were, and what it meant to be Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian). It was really a process of decolonizing.

I knew that my people were suffering. As an acupuncturist, I started to connect the dots between my patients’ illnesses and our loss of land and the state violence and oppression. The historical trauma ran so deep, my own included. I started to quickly realize that it wasn’t going to be enough to just treat patients; I had to involve myself in trying to change the systems that were making us sick in the first place.

It was a painful journey. During that time, my niece, who I was taking care of with my sister and brother-in-law, passed away at two and a half years old. After she passed, I started to get some signs that she was with those ancestors that led me home in the first place and that she had been informing my journey since before she was even in a body. She continues to inform my journey to this day.

I’ve talked to a lot of other Kānaka Maoli from the diaspora who have had similar experiences where they received some sort of message that called them home. For me, it really is a spirit- and ancestor-led path that I walk. It’s to them that I’m obedient. I stopped making goals for myself because there’s no goal or plan that I could make that would lead me to the places my ancestors have led me. I could not have dreamed this life in my wildest dreams.

AUTUMN NESS
The 2011 tsunami was very defining for me. Before I moved to Japan, I had been a political person — it was right around the time the Iraq war was happening and politics and the related conflict lived in my body and my spirit. But after I moved, my mindset shifted. I wanted to move out of that state of being into one that was more simple. I was surfing a lot, working in the garden, making plant medicine. I prided myself on being apolitical, on living a “good vibes only” life. That’s how I lived for eleven years. And then shit hit the fan.

You read articles about how the earthquake in Japan was so strong that it knocked the Earth off its axis a little bit. And I actually feel that that’s what happened to me. My internal axis got knocked off by those events and all of a sudden I could really see how collectively we had gotten to a situation where nuclear power plants could be built in tsunami zones in the most earthquake- and tsunami-prone country on the planet. I think almost daily about how naive I was to think that I could live as this apolitical being, just tending to my plants. Because once I became a pregnant refugee from radiation, I started to understand on a cellular level how interconnected we are. How everything is political. And that’s what informs everything I do today — as a parent, as an organizer, as a community member. 

NICOLE HUGUENIN
I grew up in Silicon Valley, in the heart of capitalism, and there were a few events when I was really young that shook my world and shaped my values.

I used to live in this neighborhood where everybody knew everybody, and everything was within five minutes; I could walk to the library, I could walk to school. My parents were working two or three jobs, and I was babysat by the streets. But it was safe. And then when I was eight, they built a highway through the neighborhood, and suddenly everything required a car and took forty-five minutes to get to. This was really my first heartbreak story. I felt like I lost half my family. I lost access to the uncle who ran the Italian sandwich shop where I could go by myself to get a sandwich and he would know what our family’s order was. So I got to experience community, and then I got to experience the total flip side of that, which is development.

And then when I was in the sixth grade, I lived through the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. I was a mile away from the epicenter at sixth-grade science camp. I remember being on a hike and watching redwoods touch the ground and bend. The roads were split open and smoke was coming out.

During the earthquake, we were cut off from everything. There was no way of getting out, and the camp was deemed unsafe because of all the propane. So the two directors drove us to an open field and we stayed there until the National Guard drove over boulders in these big, huge trucks to come and get us the next day. I remember that moment as a sweet spot right after disaster, when the best of us comes out, and we drop all these stories that disconnect us. 🌀

Read the full interview in the upcoming issue of Loam. Preorder here.

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