About

From a young age, Sara was drawn to journalism and the power to storytelling. That curiosity to better understand the world and record the news as it was happening led Sara east, from California to Minnesota to Boston and finally, the nation's capital of Washington, D.C. to work as a reporter and editor, at the nation's the top news organizations.

 

But as Sara settled in, she felt the calling of a story that she never fully got a chance to report: her own family's story. Long ago, her Hawaiian grandmother showed her the family's ancestral lands in the rainforest jungle in Maui. "From the mountain to the sea" were once all Kahanu family lands given to her ancestor by King Kamehameha III in 1848. On these lands, she encountered an ancient, overgrown temple known as a heiau. 

​

When a tax bill suddenly increases more than 500% in one year on her grandma's land, the family is spurred to action and Sara learns the truth about how the family had lost more than 90% of that land. Her family's story is that of the Hawaiian people, now displaced from their homeland and fighting to keep their culture alive.