Aʻoaʻo Sīwilia

This documentary tells the story of how Waikīkī was transformed from a self-sufficient Hawaiian community of taro fields and fish ponds into an economically dependent tourist destination — and how that change was engineered by a small group of powerful men, mostly by making and bending the law to serve their own interest.

It traces the whole arc: the abundant, well-watered Waikīkī described by early visitors; the population collapse from introduced disease; the Great Māhele and a penal code modeled on US slave states that stripped Native Hawaiians of their land; the 1893 overthrow of the Kingdom and a constitution written to keep a Western oligarchy in power; and the 1920s Ala Wai canal dredge-and-fill project — sold as “sanitation” — that drained the wetlands and remade Waikīkī into real estate. At the center of it all is the Dillingham empire, which profited at nearly every step.

It closes with the hard question: after all of that, is Waikīkī actually a better place to live? Watch for how “profit,” “sanitation,” and “progress” get used as cover stories — and who paid the price.

The full on-screen vocabulary is below, in the order it appears in the film. Use it to follow the story and pick up the words that carry it.

“I ka ʻōlelo nō ke ola, i ka ʻōlelo nō ka make” — “In language there is life, in language there is death.”

Ah Quon McElrath grew up poor in Iwilei, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, and became one of the most important figures in Hawaiʻi's labor movement. As a social worker for the ILWU — the dockworkers' and plantation workers' union — she helped organize the people the Big Five plantations treated as cheap labor, across every ethnic line, into a force that could bargain as one.

This documentary traces that history: plantation paternalism and starvation wages, the 1946 sugar strike and the 1949 dock strike, the Red Scare and the Hawaiʻi Seven, and the long fight for health care, pensions, civil rights, and political power for working people. It is the story of how organizing transformed Hawaiʻi — and a reminder that the struggle never ends.

The full on-screen vocabulary is below, in the order it appears in the film. Use it to follow the story and pick up the words that carry it.

In the late 1970s and 1980, the state moved to evict a Native Hawaiian fishing and beach community from Sand Island, on the edge of Honolulu Harbor. The residents had built homes and a way of life on land the state wanted to clear and develop.

This short documentary follows that fight: a community with deep cultural, people, and Hawaiian power going up against a government that held the legal, economic, and physical power to remove them. It is a close-to-home case study in who holds power, where they got it, and what happens when regular people organize to defend their place.

Watch for the different kinds of power on each side, and ask: how could the residents have grown their power enough to win and keep their land?