Betty Hay Freeland with Dr. Scott Fisher. Waihee Refuge is a 277 acre property owned by the Hawaiian Islands Land Trust. The Waihee site is deep in history with Hawaiian archaeological sites and structures from the plantation era. HILT bought the property in 2004 to preserve the archaeological sites, restore the native plants and animals, and outdoor recreation for locals
About this video
Landscape painter Betty Hay Freeland — born on Hawai’i Island, painting Maui in oils for decades — chose the 277-acre Waihe’e refuge for this collaboration, guided by two people who know it best: her daughter Denby Freeland, the refuge’s education coordinator, and Dr. Scott Fisher of Hawai’i Land Trust. Walking the land, she kept turning away from the ocean toward the sand dunes and the West Maui mountains — and those became her painting.
The video tells the refuge’s layered history: the fishing village and the loko i’a kalo, an ingenious dual-use pond where fish were raised among planted taro mounds; Maui’s largest fringing reef offshore; and the dunes — the last remnant of a system that once ran eleven and a half miles across central Maui, known as Mauna Ihi, the sacred mountain, said to have been built by the goddess Haumea to shelter a sacred tree. Fisher explains why the wetlands matter — they work like the land’s kidneys, and shelter Hawai’i’s endangered waterbirds — and why the Land Trust’s motto holds: we protect what we love, and we love what we know.
