These Women Will Change the Way You See Hawaiʻi

It’s extraordinarily easy to take Hawaiʻi at vacation value: the water really is that blue, the views really are that good, and an alarming amount of personal resolve can disappear in the vicinity of an infinity pool. But it is also a place whose culture, land, and history have been packaged for visitors for generations, often with much of their complexity edited out. Which leaves the conscientious visitor wanting to see more than the version designed for them—without turning that effort into its own self-congratulatory checklist.

Perhaps the first rule of being a good tourist, then, is accepting that you are, in fact, a tourist. You are there briefly, you will leave eventually, and you are not “discovering” some secret version of the place available only to sufficiently thoughtful travelers. With that in mind, I decided on a more realistic ambition for my week-long trip to Hawaiʻi this spring: to pay closer attention to what was already in front of me.

As it turned out, the trip gave me plenty to pay attention to. I split my time between Oʻahu and Maui: three days at The Ritz-Carlton Residences, Waikiki Beach, in Honolulu, and three at The Ritz-Carlton Maui, Kapalua. The Waikiki property is fresh off a multimillion-dollar renewal, marking its tenth anniversary with a new collection of experiences rooted in Hawaiian culture and place. Kapalua, set on 54 acres of Maui’s northwest, has been doing its own version of this for decades, with programming built around Hawaiian history, culture, and the surrounding landscape.

Over the week, I spent time with three women whose work at the properties offered three very different ways of understanding where I was: cultural specialist Alaana Seno, who taught me to weave lauhala; naturalist Allison Strassburg, who led me by bike through West Maui; and recreation cultural supervisor Kapua Zarrin-Taj Whitford, who introduced me to a history that quite literally changed where the resort was built.

I remained, of course, a tourist. But by the end of the week, I was at least looking in the right direction.

About halfway through learning to weave lauhala, I became acutely aware that Alaana Seno and I were working with the same number of hands and achieving dramatically different results. Fortunately, perfection was not really the point. Seno, a cultural specialist at The Ritz-Carlton Residences, Waikiki Beach, was teaching me lauhala weaving, a Hawaiian practice that uses the dried leaves of the hala tree, prepared into long strips and woven into intricate patterns. The weaving itself was only one part of the lesson: where the material came from, who had taught her to work with it, and why teaching someone else mattered too.

Born and raised in Hawaiʻi, Seno found her way into cultural practice through hula and learned from teachers, kumu, and other practitioners over the years. “It’s much more than weaving an object,” she told me. “It’s about weaving people together through a tradition that has been practiced in the Hawaiian Islands for generations.” As your hands settle into the repetitive over-under rhythm, she explained, the practice connects you to the land the material came from, the people who taught it, and the generations who worked with it before you. Seno describes that responsibility through kuleana: the idea that learning something also comes with an obligation to care for it and carry it forward. The finished piece is still something pretty to bring home. But, as Seno put it, “What they hold in their hands represents generations of knowledge, care, and connection to this place.”

Waikiki had more than one way of making the lesson stick. I woke up to sweeping views of the Pacific from my room, with the bustle of one of Honolulu’s busiest neighborhoods just below. I learned to make poke with Executive Chef Reid Matsumura, tracing a dish that has absorbed influences from across the Pacific while remaining distinctly Hawaiian. At a private lūʻau, dinner unfolded alongside Hawaiian music and hula. I also submitted very willingly to a Mānoa-inspired lomilomi massage incorporating ʻolena and lehua blossoms. Each offered another way to understand the place through food, tradition, and what the land and water provide.

By the time I got to Kapalua, the entire place seemed to be on Do Not Disturb. Waikiki’s buzz gave way to acres of greenery, chickens wandering the grounds with no apparent agenda, and the ocean flashing blue at the end of nearly every view. Still ahead were live bands in the lobby each evening, the Tales of the Kapa Moe Lūʻau (a night of Hawaiian storytelling, hula, and chant), and dinner at Banyan Tree, where Chef de Cuisine Ignacio Carballo draws on his Argentine roots in dishes cooked over the restaurant’s charcoal-fired Josper oven.

But before any of that, apparently... cardio!

Naturalist Allison Strassburg led me on one of the hotel’s e-bike tours through West Maui, pointing out wild guava beside the trail and the pines overhead. As we rode, she started filling in the history behind the names around us. Centuries ago, the Maui chief Piʻilani began building a road system to connect communities across the island, a project his son would later extend around Maui’s coast. His name still runs through West Maui in Honoapiʻilani Highway. I asked Strassburg whether the old road had been protected. Not exactly, she said. Piʻilani’s name is still all over West Maui, but the road itself survived only in fragments.

We stopped at Coconut Glen’s ice cream truck at the Napili Farmers Market and sat at a nearby picnic table to talk. Strassburg has a background in zoology and spends her days helping guests notice the flora and fauna of West Maui, on hikes and bike rides like ours and in programs for kids. But naming what we passed was only the beginning. “From the mountains to the sea, everything is connected and therefore needs to be sustained and protected,” she told me.

At Kapalua, one of the first things you learn is that some land is meant to be left alone. The resort had to learn that lesson, too. Between the hotel and Honokahua Bay is the Honokahua Preservation Site, where more than 1,000 Hawaiian kūpuna rest. When ancestral remains were uncovered during construction in 1987, Native Hawaiian activists fought to stop the excavation and return the kūpuna to their resting place. Then-Gov. John Waiheʻe intervened, and the resort was ultimately redesigned farther inland. Among those who spent years advocating for the burial ground’s protection was Clifford Naeʻole, a Maui-born Hawaiian cultural practitioner who would later become the resort’s longtime cultural adviser. Today, guests are told plainly not to enter it.

Recreation cultural supervisor Kapua Zarrin-Taj Whitford helps guests understand the history behind that boundary. She helps carry forward the resort’s Sense of Place program, begun more than 33 years ago by Naeʻole. Every Friday, guests are invited to watch Then There Were None, a documentary about Indigenous erasure and Hawaiian history that Naeʻole chose when the program began. Whitford prepares guests beforehand: the material, she says, can be heavy and emotional. For her, asking visitors to sit with that history is part of the hotel’s responsibility to the place it occupies. “We cannot change what happened, but we can learn from it and move forward in empathy,” she told me. “We can always do better, even from one day to the next.”

Whitford’s words reminded me of something my cab driver had said on the way into Kapalua, where the Ritz is now the longest continuously operating major hotel in the area. Decades after Native Hawaiian activists forced the resort to reconsider where it could stand, the 2023 fires devastated Lahaina just down the coast. The hotel itself was spared, but more than 150 employees lost their homes, and the property became a hub for food, supplies, and emergency personnel. In the cab driver’s telling, the hotel had stepped up for the community, and somehow that care had come back around.

Maybe that’s the better way to think about tourism: as a circle rather than a checklist. You show up for a place, and sometimes, if you’re paying attention, it shows up for you.