The Suppressed Rage at the Heart of the Haleakalā Hearings

Across both hearings, one of the most consistent and least-covered themes was the explicit acknowledgment of suppressed rage — and the exhausting labor of converting that rage into the language of public process. This is not a story unique to Native Hawaiians. It is a story about what civic discourse demands of communities who have been saying the same thing for decades and being ignored.

What emerged across both nights was a community that has learned to perform civility as a survival strategy. Speakers explicitly named the code-switching, the poetry-writing, the careful sentence-building — not as expressions of their actual state, but as the toll the process exacts. Several made clear that the restraint was conscious and deliberate, not natural or comfortable.

The Labor of Polite Resistance

Lokahi Antonio, who has been in opposition with his wife for forty years, chose not to speak to the Air Force officials at all. He turned away from them and spoke directly to the community. What he described was a kind of political fatigue that goes beyond ordinary discouragement:

"We put our words together, we code-switch, we talk nice English, we get our reasoning, we justify why it's wrong, why we right. We talking our ʻoLelo. We do everything. We write poetry, we write songs, we do this, we do that."

The words ‘code-switch’ and ‘talk nice English’ carry a specific weight. They describe the work of translating indigenous grief and sovereignty into the register that bureaucratic process recognizes — a translation that Antonio and many others have concluded is both futile and diminishing.

The Decades of Sorrow Declared

Trinette Furtado, who has attended multiple Air Force cleanup meetings following the 2023 diesel spill, was one of the first testifiers in Pukalani. She named the anger and sorrow explicitly — and crucially, she pre-emptively explained it to the officials in the room:

"It has been too many decades that you hear from us, and so you will hear anger and you will hear sorrow, and I hope you don't take that personally because it is not meant like that in any way."

The act of apologizing for future emotion before it appears — explaining it, contextualizing it, asking officials not to take it personally — is itself a form of emotional labor. Furtado was managing the room's reception of feelings that the community has every right to have.

A Non-Hawaiian Community Witness

One of the most striking voices in this story was Stacey Moniz, who opened her testimony by declaring she is not Hawaiian. Her ancestors came from Japan and Portugal in the late 1800s. She has children and grandchildren in Pukalani. She came because she believes sacred places need protection. And she named what she saw around her:

"I also feel frustrated, like someone said, that you limit the time that people have to share this deep pain and anger and frustration that goes generations — that are justified and completely make sense, like it's visceral. If I'm honest, I'm surprised there aren't more people dropping F-bombs. The rage that I'm feeling — and I am just one person."

Moniz also named the dynamic directly: "We've learned how to interact or we'll get kicked out. We've learned how to speak this language." The implicit contract of the public hearing — speak calmly, stay within your time, use the register of policy — was being named as a structural constraint, not a neutral setting.

The Music Teacher's Warning

The music teacher from Haiku School — a non-Hawaiian educator who teaches children a song about the earth as their mother — testified for the second time across these hearings. She spoke specifically to what she was witnessing in the room, and what she believed would follow if the project continued:

"Everybody is holding back their fire. They are containing their fire, but they will show up. I'm pretty sure that is what is going to happen. You see the amount of fire here."

Her framing was explicitly predictive, not normative. She was not endorsing confrontation — she was describing what she observed as a teacher who reads communities of people, and projecting it forward. The comparison to Mauna Kea and the death on Kahoʻolawe was spoken plainly, without drama.

The EIS as Misappropriation of Aloha

In Kīhei, a community member named a specific grievance that connects to this pattern: that the Air Force's environmental review document had taken the community's own cultural values and used them as evidence of softness or consent:

"The way you guys characterize what we say in your EIS is bullshit. The way you interpret our aloha for this land and twist it into — oh, we're an aggressive mob — is unreal."

This is the structural violence that runs beneath the anger-repression story: aloha — a complex value that encompasses love, reverence, relationship, and responsibility — being redefined in a federal document as passivity, acquiescence, or welcome. The community's restraint interpreted as acceptance. Their patience interpreted as consent.

Why This Is Wider Than Haleakalā

What the hearings documented is not only a Hawaiian story. It is a story about what happens to communities who engage in sustained, multi-generational democratic protest and are systemically ignored. The speakers at Pukalani and Kīhei represent one of the most consistent and articulate civic opposition records in contemporary Hawaiʻi. They have testified at scoping meetings. They have submitted legal analyses. They have written poetry. They have attended cleanup meetings. They have been to Mauna Kea. They have buried their piko (placenta umbilical cords) in the summit.

The anger that surfaced in both hearings is not irrational. It is the product of a political situation where the only available mechanism for resistance is the very process that has repeatedly failed. When Lokahi Antonio turned his back on the officials and spoke to his community, he was not being impolite. He was being honest about where power actually resides.

The music teacher from Haiku School saw it clearly: the fire is there. It is contained — for now — by the structure of the public hearing format. The question the story raises is not whether the anger exists, but what happens to it if the process continues to absorb it without responding.