Parker grew up on O’ahu surrounded by family. Her grandfather owned nine acres of land and had nine children, so each of his children later owned one acre of land surrounded by their siblings and offspring.

“O’ahu is my āina,” Parker said using the ‘Ōlelo Hawai’i (Hawaiian language) word for land. “This is my home.”

The āina is a huge part of Hawaiian culture, Parker said. It is a part of who the people are.

“It’s hard to explain to other people we’re indigenous, native Hawaiians,” Parker said. “If you think of it like a trinity, there’s like the akua — the gods, then there’s the āina and then, there’s the kanaka — the people — and we live in harmony together. So, there’s no separation between the three. We have proverbs that say, ‘the land is chief and we are its servants.’ And so, the idea of the indigenous person caring for the land is the polar opposite of the colonizer and their ideal of it. So it’s like, you cannot really remove the person from the āina if they are one with the land.”

Parker said that this cultural concept is hard for people who see land as money to comprehend.

“They see land as something that you own and that provides for you, and a Hawaiian sees it as something that you care for,” she said.

The idea of remaining close to your āina means that there are people who have been priced out of their native land but refuse to leave the islands because it would mean leaving behind a piece of themselves. These people make up Hawai’i’s unhoused community.

“Our extreme poverty is probably our houseless community and I don’t like to use the word homeless because a lot of our houseless people are native Hawaiian, and this is their home,” Parker said. “They just don’t have a physical structure — they’re living on the beaches or in the brush or there are these housing communities where they take care of each other. But to ask a native Hawaiian to leave is asking them to sever their like genealogical connection to something that is theirs. It’s cultural, it’s genealogical, it’s actually in our blood — our genealogy connects back to the land.”

Many people became familiar with the word ohana by way of Disney’s Lilo & Stitch. But in the non-Disney version of Hawaiian culture, the idea that nobody gets left behind or forgotten means so much more than blood relations.

“Ohana is a huge thing — [disenfranchised] people want to move away, but then they’ll be removed from their ohana,” Parker said. “Culturally, ohā is the stem from the kalo (taro) plant and Hāloa was the first man in our genealogical story, so that’s how we connect back to the āina. And that’s where the word ohana comes from, and so we are connected to the place, but we’re also connected to the people.”

This connection makes it impossible for some native Hawaiian people to leave their homes because it means betraying their culture.

“So people don’t wanna leave their family and I don’t blame them,” Parker said. “I don’t wanna leave my family — that’s why I’m here. If you move away, you don’t have any family and that’s another pillar.”

Ohana encompasses everything, Parker said.

“It’s like aloha, there’s so much meaning behind it,” she said. “And so when the cost of living in Hawai’i has skyrocketed to a point where ohana has to be broken up or be forced to live, not in homes to be houseless — you’re messing with our family structure.”

She said when families move away there is an obvious void.

“There’s just a void that we feel because we were raised so close-knit,” Parker said. “So when we are forced to be houseless or to make the choice of leaving, it breaks the system, and so it’s hard when people have to make that choice. But the systems in place here don’t allow us to thrive that way and really a lot of us are hopeless about what that might be for the future of Hawai’i.”

Both of Parker’s parents worked in the tourism industry — her mother worked at hotels and her father worked for airlines. Growing up, she said she always felt uneasy about Hawaiian tourism, but her parents taught her to be grateful because that money kept food on the table. As an adult, she said she is no longer choosing gratitude.

“Our culture has been prostituted for way too long,” Parker said. “They use our culture to draw tourism. You see it all over the advertisements, the hula dancers, the beach, you know, the grass skirts, the coconut bras, none of that is real. It’s this made-up fantasy that they’re selling people about Hawai’i and it’s wrong. They’re making all their money off of this culture that they’re selling. That is the indigenous culture of our place, but they’re not taking care of the people that have provided this culture. They’re basically using us and not taking care of us.”

She said she feels imprisoned by the tourism system.

“The working class has to go to work and serve these tourists,” she said.

When travel reopened during the COVID-19 pandemic, more American travelers began to visit Hawai’i, many of whom had never visited the islands and lacked respect for the culture.

“So, we were getting a lot of like bad tourists — tourists that were coming here and just like doing whatever they want,” she said.

A part of caring for the land is knowing when not to disrupt it, but more people living in Hawai’i means more homes need to be built.

“I’m on O’ahu, which is the most populated island in our chain, it’s where Honolulu is,” Parker said. “We have run out of land. I mean, you may look around and there may seem like there’s a lot of land, but once you put a house on that land, or once you rezone the land from agriculture to residential, it’s done.”

O’ahu is also inhabited by the military, which Parker said takes up a large chunk of the housing. Another big chunk is occupied by Airbnb rentals.

“So when you remove like 40-50 percent of the housing from the local community, where are they supposed to go?” she said. “We have finite resources here. And the most finite resource is water, especially now that the military has poisoned it. And number two is housing. So if people wanna stay, they just can’t find rentals or they can’t afford the rentals.”

The rising cost of living and stagnant wages don’t make it any easier.

“So, there’s me and my family and we’re blue-collar workers — we just do what we love, what we’re passionate about, but it doesn’t make a huge income. So not only are we trying to thrive, but we’re basically just surviving in a sense. It’s an endless battle, I guess, to say that we’re constantly having to fight for what is right. So, it’s really just a struggle. As a people, it’s hard because we have our culture, which is aloha, and to welcome people and to be kind to people, but it’s getting harder to do that when people just keep coming.”

Parker said one of the biggest challenges to her culture is to remain kind to people who mean the natives harm. 

“People are coming to Hawai’i and they want this aloha spirit and they want this kindness and friendliness, but then they come here with their ideologies and then they try to force it on us,” she said.

She said the most recent new residents have been wealthy and entitled.

“They’re entitled and they bring that entitlement with them and the expectations of this Hawai’i that they’ve seen on TV and in movies,” she said. “They don’t come to give back, and I can’t say that of everybody, but you know, like, to me, if you’re gonna come to Hawaiʻi, you have to come with a responsibility because everybody here has an understanding of that responsibility. You have to understand that we are an island and there are only so many resources.”

From refusing to participate in the necessary conservation of resources like land and water to making native Hawaiians feel ashamed of speaking ‘Ōlelo Hawai’i, Parker said there has been a historic disregard for the native people. She is unable to completely speak in her cultural tongue because her grandparents felt ashamed to use the language.

Upon its statehood, English and ‘Ōlelo Hawaiʻi were designated as official languages. But the shame and stigmatization that past generations were made to feel mean that many people in Parker’s xennial age group are unable to speak the native Hawaiian language.

“I’ve been trying to learn it for over 25 years,” she said. “I can converse, but I would say I feel uncomfortable speaking around other Hawaiian speakers. We’ve been put in a position where we have been shamed for being Hawaiian. They have made us feel that we are lesser. Like any colonizer, they’re gonna break your system down. They’re gonna break you down so that you conform. So, it’s a battle we face every day.”

More than shame, Parker said, her grandparents were also physically disciplined for speaking ‘Ōlelo Hawai’i.

“They actually didn’t speak the language to the next generation,” she said. “They feel a little bit shame for speaking the language, their language, their first language. And it saddens me that that shame is there because what’s happening is they’re not talking. They don’t speak, so if the language isn’t spoken, then it disappears.”

Parker is grateful to Gen Z, who she said is making sure the ‘Ōlelo Hawai’i doesn’t disappear.

“I feel like my generation really had to learn and persist, but the next generation — the 20-something-year-olds — they’re on it,” she said. “They’re not taking crap from nobody. And they’re using the language, they’re fighting the fight. And I’m very proud of that. I’m very proud because I’m like, ‘thank you for doing something that our generation kind of had to get prepared to have you do.’ They’re gonna change the world. Thank God. And social media is literally their tool — they’re so lucky because they can be heard instantly. I’m proud of them — they excite me and they give hope.”