For Sara Kehaulani Goo — a journalist turned senior news executive at The Washington Post — the call to write her book “Kuleana” started with an email from her father.
He reached out to Goo and her siblings notifying them that the property tax on family land in Hāna had increased by more than 500% in a single year. Located on the rugged shores of East Maui, it was given to the family by King Kamehameha III in 1848.
“This land has been in our family for more than 175 years,” Goo told Aloha State Daily. “And our grandmother made it clear to us for many years that this was our kuleana to protect, to steward, to maintain not just that land but the heiau, as well.”
Goo’s debut memoir launched as a hardcover book on June 10, 2025. This summer — almost a year after that release — it is now available in paperback.
“I did record the audio book, as well, if some people prefer to listen,” she said. “But I really encourage people to support their local bookstores.”
Goo started her career as a reporter for The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal. She held editor positions with increasing responsibility at The Washington Post, Pew Research Center, National Public Radio and Axios, according to her LinkedIn. Now, she is president of the Creator Network at The Washington Post, which is a platform that is independent of the newsroom and focused on content partnerships with creators and the responsible use of artificial intelligence.
Her book “Kuleana” is available on Amazon, as well as at Barnes & Noble and Target. It is also for sale at local book stores including Beach Dog Books and Kona Stories on Hawaiʻi Island; Native Books in Honolulu on Oʻahu; and Talk Story Bookstore on Kauaʻi.
The writer visited Aloha State Daily’s offices in Downtown Honolulu in July as part of her summer book tour, which included stops on Hawaiʻi Island, Oʻahu, and Kauaʻi.
Did you write this book in Washington D.C.? Or did you write it here? What was that process like? I took many, many trips to Hawaiʻi to report. I interviewed family members, experts, and did research over many years to do the work that led to this book. … As a reporter, you do all the reporting you can through paper trail — through document search, finding old newspaper records, old land records, court records. In our case, the heiau as part of the National Park Service, it's a National Historic Landmark. ... I was lucky to have a lot to work with on paper but then marrying a lot of that evidence and data with family story. In a way, it was just a large reporting project. It just was the biggest one I've ever done.
What inspired you to write “Kuleana”? Was there a moment where you knew it was time to tell this story? I've wanted to tell this story for a long time. Honestly, this book took 15 years to report, research and write. Along the way — because I had so many questions about different parts of the story — it took me down a lot of rabbit holes of genealogy, anthropology, archeology, land history of Hawaiʻi, and all the context around each of those things. Language history. Hula history. Each of those became fascinating pieces of the puzzle to put together — a lot of it in ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi. Some of it harder to find answers to than others. I was doing this also on the side of working full time and raising kids and all of that. … But I also knew I had one chance to do it right. I really felt committed. All my life, I had been telling other people's stories, and I always wanted to have something a little bit more lasting that would help contribute to a better understanding of Hawaiʻi — for both the people from here, as well as some of the millions of people who come to visit.
Can you talk about your family land on Maui’s east side? What was your first visit like? What do you remember? I grew up in Southern California, not Hawaiʻi, but I came for the first time as a child when I was 8 years old. That was a visit I'll never forget because we went and drove the Road to Hāna highway, which many people are familiar with. I got sick, of course, on the way because the road there takes forever with the many twisting turns and single-lane bridges. Once we got there, I was introduced by my Uncle Take to the heiau. At the time, it was hidden in the Hāna forest, and we really had to kind of hike our way through to get there. We had to make our way through the mosquitoes. It was like a mosquito forest, to be honest. And I could only see a part of it. The heiau is enormous. It's four stories tall. It is made of stacked lava rock. It was crumbling at the time, in disrepair, and I'd never seen anything like it. … It had no books I could read about it. It was just a mystery, and so it always bothered me that a place like that had to have a story and had to have answers. And I think even then — when I was eight — I knew that I would try and find those out.
Without giving too much away, were there some things that were surprising in this journey to write this book? The main piece of the journey that is important to me was the fact that I set out to help my family resolve one thing about the land [and property taxes]. But this really isn't a story about taxes. That would be very boring. I learned of this property tax problem while I was 5,000 miles away from Hawaiʻi. I'd been living that far away from Hawaiʻi for 20 years. I was raising my children that far away and had always felt that sense of distance and yet yearning to return. That call to finish learning the story of my people. That sense of duty. This called me home to do that. And that was a journey of self-discovery, of identity and asking uncomfortable questions of myself. I realized that I wasn't alone in this. More than half of Native Hawaiians today live outside of Hawaiʻi, and I am one of them. I had to ask questions that were hard about how Native Hawaiian am I if I live this far away? How can I claim this identity if I'm raising my children so far away? How will they identify? And how do I keep our culture and that sense of identity alive through the distance? A lot of people in our community in the diaspora are asking these same questions.
What else do you want to tell readers? My story is not a sad story. I want it to be educational. But I also want people to see that the Hawaiʻi story is an inspiring story because we're a very small population and a place often out of sight, out of mind, but the culture is so infectious and so rich and so deep and anyone who's been here knows that. What inspires me is to see the cultural revival. My great grandmother's first language was Hawaiian. My grandmother was not allowed to speak it because it was forbidden in schools by the time she was a school-age child, and now you hear ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi. It's been revived. It's taught in schools around the state. It's the official state language. It’s on the radio. It's in the airport. It's beautiful that some thousands of people speak it and know it, and that's because people fought for it.
Find “Kuleana” at public libraries and local bookstores, as well as Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Target. Follow Goo on Instagram.
Katie Helland can be reached at katie@alohastatedaily.com.
For the latest news of Hawai‘i, sign up here for our free Daily Edition newsletter.
