“People aren’t waiting on FEMA, or even the state and county,” said Professor Kapuaʻala Sproat, Associate Director of the Ka Huli Ao Center for Excellence in Native Hawaiian Law, in an Aug. 18 Democracy Now! interview. “Relief organizations are springing up in people’s homes, in their garages, and supplies are coming in by boat, by plane, by vehicle when the roads are opened.”

In the same interview, Professor Sproat called attention to the disaster capitalists already exploiting the suffering and devastation inflicted by the fires. Mere hours after residents evacuated, some reported getting calls from real estate developers pressuring them to sell their damaged property. “There are realtors and there are others who are making offers to people in their most desperate time of need … People are getting offers on their ancestral homes.”

Although Hawaiʻi’s settler governor, Josh Green, has promised to prevent such land grabs, his state administration has taken no concrete action. Without such action, tens of thousands of Kānaka Maoli residents remain at disproportionate risk of extortion by property developers.

Capitalist real estate markets imposed on Kānaka Maoli lands have already made Hawaiʻi the most expensive place to live out of all the territories ruled from Washington, forcing many Kānaka Maoli to go unhoused on their own lands.