This story about cannabis and Hawaiian sovereignty arrived secondhand, mid-interview, at a cannabis expo.
Jonah Tacoma, the founder of Dabstars, was wrapping up a conversation about economic mobility and grassroots brand-building when he pivoted. “If you haven’t talked to the Kingdom of Hawaii people, you should get connected with Brandon.”
A community liaison Jonah called, Brandon, is connected to Puuhonua o Waimanalo, the sovereign village at the center of this story, and that pointer was the thread that led here.
His version of the history: “The local Hawaiians, back in the ’90s, occupied Sea Life Park for almost 2 years, shut down millions of dollars of tourist revenue. Ultimately, Bill Clinton came out and gave them 40 acres of land as a reparation. They have sovereign land inside of Oahu where they deny police access. They grow their own marijuana. They have their entire community. His name’s Bumpy. He was like from Hawaii Five-0. He’s a local celebrity. They call him King Bumpy.”
The details shifted in the retelling—as they do when a story travels far from its source. The location was Makapuu Beach Park, not Sea Life Park. The occupation ran for 15 months, not two years. The land negotiation went through the state governor, not the president. The acreage was 45, not 40. And Bumpy Kanahele appeared in both the 2015 Cameron Crowe film Aloha and a 2017 episode of the CBS series Hawaii Five-O.
None of that diminishes the instinct to pass the story on. It is powerful enough to travel by word of mouth through the cannabis community on the mainland, carrying the essential truth even as the particulars compress and shift. And the verified version—drawn from the Los Angeles Times, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, Honolulu Magazine, the Nation of Hawaii archives, and Wikipedia—is more compelling than any legend could be.
The Occupation of Hawaii
Dennis “Bumpy” Puuhonua Kanahele grew up in Waimanalo on Oahu’s windward coast. Dropped out of high school. Served time for theft and assault. Transformed into a sovereignty advocate, per his Wikipedia biography and multiple journalistic profiles.
The catalyst came in 1987. Kanahele saw homeless Native Hawaiians on a nearby beach—”in their own homeland,” as later accounts framed it. The Coast Guard had declared approximately 40 acres at Makapuu Point as surplus land. Under an agreement between government agencies, surplus land could be claimed by rightful Hawaiian heirs before being turned over to the state. Kanahele, claiming descent from King Kamehameha I, led his extended family in occupying the vacant houses and surrounding land on June 13, 1987, according to the Nation of Hawaii’s official account.
That initial occupation lasted approximately two months and ended with Kanahele’s arrest. He served 14 months in state prison—a period he later described as fruitful, recruiting fellow Native Hawaiian inmates to the cause.
In 1993—the centennial of the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom—Kanahele led a larger action. Approximately 300 people, mostly Native Hawaiians, occupied Makapuu Beach Park. The occupation lasted approximately 15 months, from 1993 to 1994. Then-Mayor Frank Fasi ordered the water shut off. When occupiers turned it back on, he had the controls encased in concrete.
Governor John Waihee intervened—not President Clinton, as Jonah’s retelling had it. The governor’s office proposed a deal: if Kanahele’s group vacated the beach peacefully, the state would grant them a 55-year lease on 45 acres of undeveloped, state-owned land above Waimanalo, in the foothills of the Koolau Mountains, for $3,000 per year. Kanahele accepted.
In June 1994, the occupiers disbanded and moved to the future site of Puuhonua o Waimanalo.
The separate event Jonah likely conflated with “Clinton gave them land” was the 1993 Apology Resolution—Public Law 103-150, signed by President Clinton on November 23, 1993. Congress formally apologized for the U.S. role in the 1893 overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii and acknowledged that the indigenous Hawaiian people never directly relinquished their claims to inherent sovereignty over their national lands to the United States. The Apology Resolution settled no claims and conferred no land, but its passage in the same year as the beach occupation created a powerful narrative overlap.
The Village of Puuhonua o Waimanalo
Gina Maikai, a resident, described the early days in the hills to reporters: “It was a forest. There was nothing but trees. At first, we lived in tents while the men made a road. Then we moved onto platforms while the men built houses. We had to find our own lumber. We did all the work.”
What emerged was Puuhonua o Waimanalo—puuhonua meaning “refuge” or “place of sanctuary” in Hawaiian. As of the most recent reporting, approximately 80 Native Hawaiians live communally on the 45 acres, in roughly 20 cottages with running water and electricity, per Honolulu Magazine and the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.
The Nation of Hawaii, the organization that administers the village, regards itself as a sovereign government under international law—a successor state to the Kingdom of Hawaii, not subject to United States jurisdiction. Kanahele was elected Head of State on March 6, 1994, by the Aha Kupuna—the Council of Elders—at Ka’anapali, Maui. He claims descent from the Kamehameha royal line. He is called “King Bumpy” colloquially, though the Nation of Hawaii does not use the title formally.
The village operates with a degree of self-governance. Regulated by a small elected council, residents pay $200 to $250 per month for infrastructure. Children raised in the village learn the Hawaiian language. Ancient Hawaiian remains—over 200 iwi, or ancestral bones—previously stored at Bishop Museum, are buried on the land. The community hosts cultural events that draw hundreds.
Kanahele appeared as himself in the 2015 film Aloha, directed by Cameron Crowe, playing opposite Bradley Cooper and Emma Stone. He also appeared as himself in the 2017 Hawaii Five-0 episode “Ka Laina Ma Ke One (Line in the Sand),” in which a fugitive takes refuge on the Nation of Hawaii’s sovereign land.
In 2002, Governor Benjamin Cayetano—the same governor who signed Act 228 legalizing medical cannabis—granted Kanahele a full pardon for his 1998 federal conviction stemming from his decision to harbor a Native Hawaiian activist who had refused to pay federal taxes.
Cannabis and Hawaiian Sovereignty
A longtime expo staff member and community voice offered his own commentary on the sovereignty question during his expo interview.
“They took over the state, took over the culture of Hawaii,” he said of the American presence. “They gave us homestead land—that we already own.”
The homestead land referenced is the product of the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act of 1921, federal legislation setting aside approximately 200,000 acres for Native Hawaiians with 50 percent or more Hawaiian blood quantum—a racial classification system measuring the fraction of a person’s ancestry that is Native Hawaiian. The waitlist for homestead land is notoriously long. Thousands of applicants have died waiting, a fact documented repeatedly in Hawaii journalism and policy analysis.
On the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, the semi-autonomous state body established in 1978 to manage resources for Native Hawaiians, he is blunt: “They only take care of the people that have money.”
His comparison: “Like how they did with the Indians—they gave them reservations. And in Alaska, they pay the people money.” The Alaska reference is to the Alaska Permanent Fund—established by constitutional amendment in 1976, with dividend distributions to residents beginning in 1982, funded by oil revenues. “In Hawaii, all they gave us is hard time.”
The Legality of Growing Cannabis in Puuhonua o Waimanalo
Cannabis cultivation within the sovereign territory of Puuhonua o Waimanalo exists in a legal gray area that neither state nor federal authorities have resolved. From the sovereignty perspective: if the Nation of Hawaii is not subject to U.S. jurisdiction, then U.S. drug scheduling—the federal classification system that places cannabis alongside heroin and LSD as a Schedule I substance—does not apply on its land. The counterargument: the 55-year lease is a state lease, not a recognition of sovereign territory, and the federal Controlled Substances Act applies regardless.
The legal architecture of this standoff involves three overlapping jurisdictional claims, none of which has been tested in court. The state’s position rests on domestic property law: a lease is a lease, and the lessee’s political identity does not alter the lessor’s regulatory authority over the land.
Under this theory, cannabis cultivation on leased state land violates Hawaii Revised Statutes Chapter 329 the same way it would on any other state parcel. The Nation of Hawaii’s position rests on international law and the successor state doctrine—the argument that the Kingdom of Hawaii was never lawfully dissolved, that the 1893 overthrow was an illegal act of aggression (a characterization Congress itself endorsed in the 1993 Apology Resolution), and that the Nation therefore retains sovereign authority over territory it administers. The federal government holds a third claim: the Controlled Substances Act applies to all U.S. territory regardless of state or tribal sovereignty disputes, and federal enforcement agencies retain jurisdiction even where state authorities defer.
The standoff has proven durable because no party appears to have an incentive to force a resolution. A federal prosecution of cannabis cultivation at Puuhonua o Waimanalo would require the government to litigate the sovereignty question—exactly the kind of test case that could establish unfavorable precedent for either side. The state faces the same risk.
The Nation of Hawaii, operating on a 55-year lease that expires in the 2040s, has reason to avoid a confrontation that could jeopardize the lease itself. The result is a legal equilibrium sustained by mutual avoidance—each party declining to assert its jurisdictional claim precisely because assertion would require adjudication, and adjudication could go badly for anyone at the table.
Cannabis and Tribal Sovereignty Across the United States
This pattern isn’t unique to Hawaii. Tribal nations on the U.S. mainland have encountered similar jurisdictional collisions when establishing cannabis operations on reservation land. In October 2014, the Department of Justice issued the Wilkinson Memorandum—policy guidance deprioritizing federal prosecution of tribal cannabis operations that met certain conditions drawn from the 2013 Cole Memorandum.
Both memos were rescinded by Attorney General Jeff Sessions in January 2018, leaving tribal cannabis operations without clear federal policy guidance. The Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe in South Dakota voluntarily destroyed its cannabis crop in November 2015 after DOJ officials, in a meeting in Washington, raised concerns about sales to non-tribal members and the origin of the tribe’s seeds, per reporting from the Associated Press and Leafly.
The Shinnecock Nation in New York moved forward with cannabis retail on tribal land, opening the Little Beach Harvest dispensary in Southampton in November 2023 under an assertion of sovereign authority and without a formal tribal-state compact. Each case turns on the specific legal relationship between the tribal or sovereign entity and the federal government—and in each case, the law remains unsettled because settlement would require someone to lose.
The broader context is the 1893 overthrow itself. Queen Liliuokalani was deposed by a coalition of American businessmen supported by U.S. military forces. The Kingdom was annexed in 1898. Crown and government lands—approximately 1.8 million acres—were ceded to the United States, then to the State of Hawaii upon statehood in 1959. Cannabis, criminalized by a government whose legitimacy the growers reject, grows in soil that was negotiated through occupation.
The Continued Fight for Cannabis and Hawaiian Sovereignty
Kanahele told the Los Angeles Times, gesturing north toward Waimanalo and a white-sand coastline beyond: “This is what sovereignty is to me. Standing here on your land, not owing anything to anybody, not being afraid of anyone, knowing you fought the right fight with attitude—and looking out at that.”
The cannabis story and the sovereignty story have been running parallel on this island for decades. Mainlanders hear the legend at the expo. The history is in the Koolau foothills.
