Lahaina Business Owners Dive Into Busy Travel Season

Late April brought the start of a busy travel season for U‘i Kahue-Cabanting and Mario Siatris, who’ve committed to teaching a half-dozen Hawaiian cultural workshops on the mainland through July.

The workshops aren’t money-makers. But Maui Grown 808 is more than a business. It’s a mission, a way to help people deepen their connection to Hawaiian culture.

In three days, the business partners taught coconut-weaving workshops in three counties across Southern California.

At the end of the visit, the trip sponsor, Pacific Island Health Partnership, surprised U‘i and Mario with a jumbo-sized check made out for $10,000 to help further their business recovery. More than 300 employees of PIHP and the health insurer Blue Shield of California contributed to the donation.

“We were fortunate not to lose anyone family-wise, but we come from Kuhua Camp,” U‘i explained as she and Mario accepted the unexpected gift. “We lost 40 neighbors and friends out of the 101 identified.”

Their neighborhood, which was once a housing camp for sugar plantation workers, was the hardest hit by last August’s wildfire in terms of the number of deaths.

A few days after their return to Maui, U‘i boarded a plane to a small village in Alaska to host a series of weaving demonstrations in a visit organized by Naupaka Pacific. She also met with Indigenous leaders to share strategies for combating overtourism that have been successful for community organizers in Hawaii.

Last week U‘i and Mario went to Oregon to teach more weaving workshops and to see their newly assembled trailer for the first time. The business partners plan to ship the 26-foot rig to Maui, where it will become their temporary living quarters until the government gives Mario the green light to rebuild his destroyed Lahaina home.

Up next: Las Vegas, North Carolina, then back to California. Maui Grown 808 will also offer weaving demonstrations at the Festival of the Pacific in Honolulu in June. In the fall they plan to head back to Oregon for another round of workshops.

Yet while the cultural outreach component of U‘i and Mario’s business is soaring, the more lucrative side of Maui Grown 808 is sputtering after so many wildfire losses. 

There have been a few bright spots, however. 

In March, U‘i renegotiated her contract with the Westin resort, securing a $500 weekly revenue increase. 

The income boost helps cover a new business expense: supermarket flowers. Since the fire destroyed Maui Grown 808’s plumeria nursery, U‘i and Mario have had to buy flower bouquets in place of the fragrant plumeria blooms they used to source from their own trees, which all burned down in the Lahaina fire. 

The extra money also helps U‘i and Mario pay their workers higher wages in a tight job market.

Schools, open-air markets, cultural festivals and conferences have gradually started soliciting U‘i and Mario’s services again as Lahaina’s recovery advances. The business partners also joined the lineup of cultural practitioners at the Old Lahaina Luau, which reopened in mid-March. 

The fire spared the luau grounds, but it took months of extensive cleaning and repairs to ready the oceanfront property to welcome back guests for dinner and live entertainment, which now includes Mario’s coconut-weaving demonstrations.

Yet despite so much forward momentum, Maui Grown 808’s primary money-maker — its Lahaina plumeria orchard and native plant nursery — were wiped out by the fire. The blaze also incinerated the office space that housed more than a decade’s worth of business records. 

It will likely take years for U‘i and Mario to overcome these losses.

But the business partners are in good spirits, buoyed by so many new opportunities to share the disappearing art of coconut weaving with people in new corners of the country. 

“It’s at the heart of why we do what we do,” U‘i said.

Civil Beat’s coverage of Maui County is supported in part by grants from the Nuestro Futuro Foundation.