In July 2019, 30-year-old Yvonne “Von” Mahelona took her place on the access road to Mauna Kea, a dormant volcano on the island of Hawai‘i and one of the most sacred sites in the entire archipelago. The O‘ahu-based activist and grief worker was there with a group of her friends and fellow Native Hawaiians to protect Mauna Kea from unwanted construction and development.
Since 2009, a group called the Thirty Meter Telescope International Observatory had been trying to build a $1.5 billion Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) on top of Mauna Kea, which they said would give scientists an even better opportunity to observe the emergence of new planets, stars, and galaxies than the telescopes that are already there. But throughout history, Native Hawaiians have held sacred ceremonies on the mountain to bury their most beloved ancestors as well as the ‘iewe (placenta) and piko (umbilical cord) of their newborns—so to them the mountain is family. And tradition. And love. And that’s why many, including Mahelona, activated to protect it, setting up camp to block the access road developers would need to take to start construction.
“As Native Peoples, our land and our stories and our traditions have been ripped away from us,” she says. “And that’s because, for Western imperialism and their systems, nothing is sacred. The message of colonization is: You are not sacred, and this land is not sacred. Whatever you do to take care of yourself and your land is invalid. That’s why we’re always going to be fighting for land justice and water justice and climate justice and liberation.”
True to her word, four years later, Mahelona is continuing to fight for a variety of causes—including water justice around the Red Hill water crisis on O‘ahu and land and climate justice following the devastating Maui fires on August 8. But her way of fighting these injustices is a little different from what you might expect. Inspired by her time on Mauna Kea, Mahelona left her job as a bank accountant to become a grief worker who uses ceremonial rituals to help people process their emotions and heal. And to her, grief work is activism work; the two are inextricably linked.
“Being immersed in such large-scale frontline action on Mauna Kea helped me realize that community organizing is nothing without ceremony,” she explains. Mahelona ended up camping out on the road to “the Mauna” for six months, where she participated in three traditional Hawaiian ceremonies a day, including oli (chanting) and hula (traditional Hawaiian dance). And although conditions were difficult—it gets cold and windy up there, and she was sleeping in a tent the whole time—she remembers it as a beautiful chapter in her life, when she learned just how powerful ceremonies can be.
“On the Mauna, I came to understand just how much fighting for justice takes out of us, both spiritually and emotionally,” she continues. “And that’s why it was so important for us to be in ceremony every day while we were there and when we got home too—because it’s too much to fight for our land and our bodies and our communities without it. We give our time and our energy and our hearts and our love, but we also need to allow ourselves to be taken care of in return. And ceremony does just that.”
In that way, Mahelona’s grief work echoes equal-rights advocate Audre Lorde’s belief in self-care as a radical act and a form of activism. Lorde once said that, to her, self-care is not self-indulgence; it’s self-preservation. Mahelona’s ceremonies have similar undertones, in that they help her community persevere and keep fighting. “We’re working so hard to survive under capitalist patriarchy, under these systems that were created to make a profit for certain people and institutions and systems—but not for us,” she says. “And if we’re not leaning into community and ceremony, we’re just going to burn out, to run ourselves into the ground…and that’s kind of what the powers that be want, isn’t it? They want us to be so tired and give so much that we have nothing else to give anymore.”
The Hawaiian word for grief is kaumaha, which translates to “something heavy is going to be lifted,” and that’s ultimately what Mahelona considers herself today: a vessel to help people lift their spirits. Maybe by doing so, she hopes, they will always have a little more room to give. Hawaiians believe that grieving is meant to be done in a community, not alone, and so Mahelona currently holds virtual community grief circles and facilitates in-person ceremonies for people at Mākua Beach, a sacred valley currently occupied by the US military, or at their own wahi pana (sacred place). Taking up the call from her great-grandmother, who raised her and was a grief worker herself, she helps people through all sorts of life events and loss, including abortions, miscarriages, birthing, and, as mentioned above, climate issues like the devastating Lāhainā fires and the Red Hill water crisis.
It is not easy work, given the heavy legacies of colonialism and patriarchy that underpin it. The ongoing Red Hill crisis, for example, reached a critical point in May 2021 when the US Navy’s underground fuel-storage facility leaked 19,000 gallons of fuel, some of which contaminated the island’s water supply, thus poisoning thousands of people—and illustrating once more how both Hawaiian land and culture are often pushed aside for the benefit of capitalist enterprise. “Historically speaking, the military, the state, big (and usually foreign) developers, and land-grabbing agriculture corporations have not stewarded our land and natural resources in ways that will ensure their longevity or the longevity of Native Hawaiian people and others who have grown to truly love Hawai‘i,” Mahelona explains. And sadly, the recent Maui fires have similar colonialist roots. Lāhainā was once the capital of the Hawaiian Kingdom, with rich soil and loads of fresh streams. But in the 1800s, American colonists altered the area’s natural landscape in order to start sugar and pineapple plantations followed by luxury resorts. They diverted streams and brought non-native, invasive (and therefore flammable) grasses to the area—and that exploitation ultimately paved the way for the fires to spread as quickly as they did last month.
As tough as these truths may be, though, Mahelona considers it her kuleana (responsibility) to step up and help her community members through the pain. “This is why grief work is so important for land and water protectors…because we’re dealing with intense issues like this all the time,” she says. Even before her time on Mauna Kea, she’d joined an anti-imperialist transnational grassroots feminist organization called AF3IRM Hawai‘i, whose mission is to spread awareness about how the desecration of land justifies patriarchy and the desecration of women. With the help of her community, Mahelona and her organization successfully pushed to pass legislation to identify the issue of missing and murdered Native Hawaiian women, girls, and māhū (queer or gender-nonconforming Native Hawaiians), and also a bill making it easier for someone to remove a prostitution conviction from their record.
Looking ahead, Mahelona is focused on continuing to help loved ones through the Maui fires, as the collective sorrow is still so fresh. Though she has not traveled to Maui herself since that tragic day, she and some Native Hawaiian cultural practitioners and kumu hula (hula teachers) have all led Zoom ceremonies from O‘ahu to help Lāhainā families process their deep, nuanced, and layered grief. And she knows those ceremonies are only the beginning. “The grief that they’re holding, the anger and the frustration and the sadness, is going to take so long to come back from…but these ceremonies are a good start,” she says. “We are able to feel we have sovereignty in the ways that we carry whatever it is that we carry in this life.”
Published exclusively on Vogue, Tokala is a photography series spotlighting the next generation of BIPOC climate activists. It is spearheaded by creative director and stylist Marcus Correa and photographer Carlos Jaramillo, who have worked with Future Coalition to provide each subject with additional funding (up to $5,000) to continue their activism.
Photography: Carlos Jaramillo
Creative Direction and Styling: Marcus Correa
Production Manager, Styling Assistant: Thomas Lopez
Producer: Kaylah Brathwaite
Visual Editor: Olivia Horner
Hair
Makeup: Hi
ilani MeleAloha Pila
Photo Assistant: Shiloh Perkins
