Volunteer Spotlight: Lucienne de Naie
By Tara Apo-Priest | Reading time: 12 minutes
This month, we sat down with beloved Maui treasure, Aunty Lucienne de Naie. Water warrior, conservation advocate, social justice champion, author, and historian, Aunty Lucienne has been fighting for the protection of Maui’s environmental, social and cultural resources for the past 35 years. She has served on the boards of countless non-profit organizations - Maui Nui Resource Council, Surfrider Foundation, and Maui Tomorrow, to name just a few - and helped cofound the Hawaiian Islands Land Trust, as well as FACE Maui (now Stand Up Maui), an affordable housing advocate, among others. She is the kind, fiery spirit that is willing to step in and rise to the occasion where action is needed. She currently serves as the Chairperson of the Sierra Club Maui Group. Mahalo Aunty Lucienne for taking the time to share your manaʻo & your stories, and for all the work you have done to help care for the land and people of Hawaiʻi.
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, and what has made you so passionate about protecting the environment?
I was raised to really enjoy the outdoors in Southern California in the 1950s, which had a lot of beautiful places. My family loved camping, going to the beach, fishing, hunting, and just spending time out on the land. So I grew up with this being something that was really important to do. My family started out homesteading in Taos, New Mexico, near the Taos Pueblo, and my mom especially always impressed upon me the things she had learned from her neighbors, the residents of the Taos Pueblo, about leaving the land better than you found it. You don’t just disturb things and leave that disturbance, leave your mess behind, you actually take care of the land you use. That got me interested, when I was older, in environmental causes and organizations, and I’ve worked with a lot over the years to help protect special places and stop bad things from destroying the environment.
[Growing up] I was an avid surfer, and I wanted to make sure our waters weren’t polluted, so I started being an activist in high school. When I was in high school, environmental awareness was growing. We were concerned about civil rights and the war in Vietnam, a lot of things, so that was the basis. My first campaign was trying to stop a bad breakwater that was gonna be built in Newport Beach, CA where I surfed. I was 16 years old and I led a rally of high school students crying “No rock curtain in Newport!” That was my first exposure where I testified at the local city council.
How did you first get involved with the Sierra Club of Hawaiʻi?
In the 1970s I worked with Sierra Club groups in San Diego county to protect our local wetlands, the Batiquitos Lagoon, and so I had a really good feeling about the Sierra Club and what it stood for. After I moved to Hawaiʻi in the early 1980s, I met David Leese, who was on the board of the Sierra Club Maui Group. He was concerned with helicopter overflights, and we were too. He asked if I would like to get involved with the Sierra Club because they needed an Outings chair - He and I had hiked together [all over] tracking down where helicopters were flying over waterfalls and things, and he said “Hey, you love to hike, we need an Outings leader!” I was already familiar with and thought highly of the Sierra Club, so I became the outings chair for the Maui Group in 1995. I was fortunate to be mentored as a leader by the legendary Mary Evanson, who shared her vast knowledge of the East Maui streams and trail system with me. Then it turned out that no one wanted to represent the Maui Group at the state chapter, and so I volunteered, I was curious. There, I was mentored by Annette Kaohelauliʻi who freely shared her vast institutional knowledge. Because of Annette, I met all these nice people in Sierra Club of Hawaiʻi, and have served on the chapter executive committee off and on ever since.
You've been a champion for the restoration of streamwater to East Maui, which has been wrongfully diverted for generations. Can you talk about what motivated you to get involved and stay involved?
I live in East Maui, where there's no public water supply, and I’ve watched my neighbors struggle, many of whom are Hawaiian families that have lived in the Huelo area for generations, back to the 1700s and 1800s, and it was just so wrong. Most of my neighbors had no water security. I went to a meeting with a bunch of them, most of whom were Hawaiian families, and heard what they had to say. I made a statement, based on my knowledge, because I’ve hiked all over East Maui, and by that time I had been a Sierra Club hike leader for a few years and had hiked to many of these streams that were being severely diverted, and I’d seen the problem first hand. I’d stood there with a waterfall on one side and a dry stream on the other, and a big ditch in between! So I would give testimony like that, and several of my Hawaiian neighbors took me aside and they’d go, “You go Luci! You go tell them what’s happening here!” So I thought, “Ok, well, I should show up at these meetings!” They are not everybody’s cup of tea. Of course I do like to read, so I read a lot of reports!
Then, around the year 2001, long term leases were the topic of an important Land Board meeting. [At that time] I was on the Sierra Club board as well as the board of Maui Tomorrow. I went to the meeting representing Maui Tomorrow and asked for a contested case hearing, and other folks testified on behalf of the Sierra Club, saying that granting these 30 year leases to the sugarcane company, A&B, just wasn’t right because there were other people who deserved to share the water, and they weren’t having their voices heard. So this contested case was granted, and I got involved in it as the representative of Maui Tomorrow for many, many years. Maui Tomorrow ended up speaking for folks in the Huelo area who weren’t included under the Native Hawaiian Legal Corporation section of the case, so it became kind of my life's work. The fact that I live right here, can see what’s going on, can see the harm that it’s doing to my neighbors’ farms, and to their taro patches, and to the ability to transfer Hawaiian values to their kids. How can you teach your kids about taking care of the stream when the stream is dry most of the year? It’s basically cultural genocide, that’s what finally dawned on me. If you remove something that’s so important to someone’s culture and just say it’s all mine, you’re not allowing them a chance to have a big part of their culture, and that’s just not right.
So I’ve gotten involved and I’ve stayed involved, and having hiked over the past 25 years to most of these streams and trails, I just feel so passionate about it because I've seen what’s happening and I know that better things need to happen. Now that some streams have been restored, I’m seeing the start of a return of life, but there’s still a lot more to do. We have big dams in the way that aren’t needed and structures that should be modified. The system is not set up for the 21st century, so that’s my current goal: to have the restored streams really restored for the 21st century, not just restored by opening a gate from something that was built in the 1800s.
What are your proudest moments for the Club? What have been the Club's greatest accomplishments during your tenure on the Executive Committee?
Oh wow! I am very proud of the Sierra Club standing with the folks on the Big Island and standing up for Mauna Kea. Sierra Club stood with the Hawaiian organizations that were speaking for the sacredness of that mauna when no one else did. It wasn’t a popular cause, in fact it was very controversial even within Sierra Club because we have members who are astronomers who felt it was all about science and didn't really have anything to do with the cultural importance of the place. But we had dedicated members from all islands who felt it was important to stand with the folks on Hawaiʻi Island, who were being the voices in the wilderness against the whole state bureaucracy, against these multimillion dollar research grants and so forth, to say that this isn’t a commercial center, this is a sacred place where our Hawaiian legends connect to, and they’re not made up, they are things that are an important part of the culture of the people who lived here before all of you people came! So that was a very proud moment because, like I say, it was a thin green line holding that voice for the mauna. Now it’s so wonderful to see that so many organizations have gotten involved and there’s so much support, and there’s really a realization that you need to look at things through the lens of the people of this land, not just your own commercial needs, or your own predetermined scientific conclusions. That was a very special moment.
And of course, the work that we’ve done over the years for water. The Sierra Club has really been a committed ally at the legislature to make sure that bad water bills did not pass. I think, really, if it hadn’t been for Marti Townsend and a number of our board members, like Kauʻi Pratt-Aquino and others that just jumped in and got the word out statewide….[They] got statewide alliance to stand with the water warriors of East Maui - who really don’t have very many residents! East Maui is a small area, maybe less than 1000 people in that lease area (excluding Huelo). They had allies from all over the state, and that was because of the work and funding that was invested by Sierra Club, and by Marti Townsend and other members of the Sierra Club board - I was really proud to serve on that executive committee for that era. And of course there’s so many things - the work we’re doing with Red Hill, which started many, many years ago, before Marti came to the club, and the work we've done to clean up the waste water issues in Maui and Oʻahu, and now hopefully in Hawaiʻi Island. There’s been so many great things that the club has weighed in on that really help people, that are really making a healthier place for us all to live here in our state, so I’m very happy to have played some small part in that.
What do you foresee for the Club's future, and what are the biggest challenges facing our islands today? What role can the Club play in addressing them?
That’s a big question. I think that again and again, the biggest challenge for the future is that we have some good laws - but are they laws on paper, or laws that are really applied to everyday instances that make a difference in people’s lives? You know we have good laws about having a clean environment, but does that stop polluters, like the Navy at Red Hill, from knowingly letting very corrosive and damaging substances seep and leak into our water supply? We have some decent laws on Native Hawaiian burial protection, but does that stop every new development from just getting a few permits and putting in a few reports and pretending they’re not gonna find any burials, then going in and disturbing dozens and dozens of burials in the most hurtful way? Where these iwi kūpuna that have been set to watch over the land are just crushed to dust? Because monitoring is not enough - it’s avoidance, and it’s listening to people.
So these laws really need to be, I think, implemented by dedicated people at every level, whether it’s the state level or the county level. I think some of the most important roles the Sierra Club has to play is to try to encourage and give support to visionary leaders within our political structure. Sierra Club can endorse candidates and has an elaborate process of interviewing and endorsing candidates. That’s a challenge in this time of COVID - you don’t get the one on one, you’re doing a Zoom interview and it’s over pretty soon, and there aren’t a lot of events to see what a person’s like. We have to try our best to get a decent person elected as governor and get good people appointed to head our state Lands Division, our state Department of Health, and our divisions having to do with oversight of the implementation of the protection of historic resources. Those are very, very key steps to take if we want good laws to actually be implemented. Of course, we do need to tweak some laws too. We need better protection for our wetlands - we need our own definition of wetlands! And we do have Representative Wildberger working on this right now, consulting with folks on Maui.
There are so many improvements to our laws we need, and that's a challenge ahead because it’s hard to change laws for the better - but Sierra Club has done some great work there! We lead the nation in terms of our response to the clean energy transition, and we can be proud of some of the goals that the Sierra Club has set. We really stepped forward to ask for things that are tough to ask for, and even if we get them incrementally, they do eventually happen over time! We were one of the first to raise the alarm on climate change and all the modifications that are gonna have to be made. We’re really gonna need a program to retreat from our shorelines, and to protect our wetlands so that they can be our first line of defense as sea levels rise, rather than continually defending buildings that are just in the wrong place for the times ahead. So, there’s some big challenges we’ll face. Certainly challenges caring for our priceless heritage sites that have been bequeathed to us from Hawaiian culture, and that we’re just destroying right and left with very minimal review. And our resources, our native plants, animals, ecosystems; our streams, our rivers, our oceans, our reefs, all of these are irreplaceable - it’s not like God just makes you a new stream, you better take care of the one you have! So, I see that as a big challenge ahead for our Sierra Club groups on every island here in the state.