Sep 21, 2026 · 40 min · 11 segments
On today’s episode of Justice Matters, co-host Maggie Gates speaks with journalist Sara Kehaulani Goo about her new book, Kuleana, a memoir about her ancestral land in Hawaii that touches on themes of…
Okay, so your family's land traced back to an original royal land gift, a land grant.
from King Kamehameha III in 1848, which times right before the legal and political systems that ended up dispossessing most Native Hawaiians.
So how much of that larger colonial and legal history did you know, if any at all, as you started researching for this book and this work that you did with your family?
And I think that early on, this story to me was presented by my grandmother as our family land was from the king, and it once spanned from the mountain to the sea.
But I think even as a child standing on that land myself with my grandmother, I really wondered whether it was true or And I also yearned to really understand what mountain to the sea even meant.
And it wasn't only until later that I researched using all my reporting skills to kind of, you know, discover if that story from Grandma in the Attic was really true.
And that was really satisfying to find at some point in my research, you know, the actual document in handwriting in the Hawaiian language that had you know, made it very clear that her story checked out.
And indeed, our families, you know, my grandmother's 10 acres of land, I was astonished to find was actually part of a much, much larger land award originally that did span from the mountain to the sea.
And I think that really fascinated me from the beginning of my family story was I remember as an eight-year-old visiting our family land.
And we stood at the bottom of what was an enormous, it is an enormous structure of stacked lava rock.
I thought it was like walking into a movie set of like Indiana Jones or something.
And nobody could, provide answers in my family of how old is this? What was it used for? Just very basic questions.
Okay, so your family's land traced back to an original royal land gift, a land grant.
from King Kamehameha III in 1848, which times right before the legal and political systems that ended up dispossessing most Native Hawaiians.
So how much of that larger colonial and legal history did you know, if any at all, as you started researching for this book and this work that you did with your family?
And I think that early on, this story to me was presented by my grandmother as our family land was from the king, and it once spanned from the mountain to the sea.
But I think even as a child standing on that land myself with my grandmother, I really wondered whether it was true or And I also yearned to really understand what mountain to the sea even meant.
And it wasn't only until later that I researched using all my reporting skills to kind of, you know, discover if that story from Grandma in the Attic was really true.
And that was really satisfying to find at some point in my research, you know, the actual document in handwriting in the Hawaiian language that had you know, made it very clear that her story checked out.
And indeed, our families, you know, my grandmother's 10 acres of land, I was astonished to find was actually part of a much, much larger land award originally that did span from the mountain to the sea.
And I think that really fascinated me from the beginning of my family story was I remember as an eight-year-old visiting our family land.
And we stood at the bottom of what was an enormous, it is an enormous structure of stacked lava rock.
I thought it was like walking into a movie set of like Indiana Jones or something.
And nobody could, provide answers in my family of how old is this? What was it used for? Just very basic questions.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.
