09/21/2026
Three government houses sat empty at Makapuʻu for 13 years. He moved his family in.
The Coast Guard had automated the lighthouse in 1974 and walked away from the keepers' houses below it. On June 13, 1987, Dennis "Bumpy" Kanahele filed a deed at the Bureau of Conveyances claiming the land from Hawaii Kai to Waimānalo, and led his ʻohana up the point.
He was 32. He had grown up in Waikīkī and Waimānalo, the son of a man everyone called Bumper after a car hit him on Maunakea Street and lost its bumper. He had a record already, burglary convictions from before the movement found him.
The occupation lasted two months. In July 1987 police arrested him on fi****ms, trespass and resisting arrest charges. He was convicted of terroristic threatening and sent to Oahu Community Correctional Center.
He filed a deed. The state filed charges.
Then 1993. One hundred years after the overthrow, Kanahele took the ʻOhana Council down to Kaupō Beach Park, under the same lighthouse, and pitched tents. The people who followed him were Waimānalo's homeless. "Everybody was homeless, brah," he said later.
The camp grew to as many as 300 people. They stayed 15 months. While they were on that beach, on November 23, 1993, Congress signed a formal apology for the overthrow. Police arrested 23 of the campers that year. None were charged.
Governor John Waiheʻe made an offer. Leave the beach, and the state would lease the group 45 acres of forest above Waimānalo for 55 years at $3,000 a year. The last structures came down on June 14, 1994. "It was a forest," said Gina Maikai, who would run the village council. "There was nothing but trees."
The state got its beach park back. Three hundred Hawaiians got a forest and a piece of paper.
Then came the part nobody planned. On March 16, 1994, three months before the deal, two deputy U.S. marshals came to his Waimānalo homestead at 12:30 in the morning. They wanted Nathan Brown, a Hawaiian tax protester who had skipped a 78-month federal sentence. Kanahele stood in the gate of his fenced yard.
Deputy Marshal Lawrence Tice could not get past him. Brown got away.
"I didn't see him as protecting his property," Tice testified. "I saw him as stopping me."
On August 2, 1995, federal agents walked him off a Hawaiian Airlines plane at Honolulu Airport, less than three hours after a grand jury indicted him. He was 41. A magistrate held him without bail. Judge Helen Gillmor kept him there. He sat in a federal cell for more than three months and lost 35 pounds.
The first trial ended in a mistrial on October 31, 1995. When Judge David Ezra let him out to a halfway house that November, the conditions barred him from Waimānalo and from the village.
He built the place. The court would not let him set foot in it.
On September 12, 1997, at 43, he pleaded guilty to one count of blocking a deputy marshal. In February 1998 Gillmor gave him the minimum: four months, all but seven days already served, a $500 fine, and four more months with a monitor on his ankle.
"I do believe Mr. Kanahele has come to understand where the power lies," she said. At least 50 supporters filled her courtroom and chanted outside.
In 2002 Governor Ben Cayetano pardoned every state conviction and called him "a leader in the Hawaiian community."
Then 2006. He put his name on the ballot for an Office of Hawaiian Affairs seat. More than 53,000 people voted for a man the federal government had held without bail.
Waiheʻe, the governor who signed the lease, said it in 2014: "There's nobody else who actually created an entity that could actually be called self-governing and kept it intact all these years later."
Twinkle Borge came to him for help with her camp of 200 at the Waiʻanae boat harbor, and named it Puʻuhonua o Waiʻanae after his. In 2025 her people began moving onto their own 20 acres in Waiʻanae Valley.
On January 22, 2025, Office of Hawaiian Affairs trustees voted to study taking the 45.6-acre Waimānalo parcel into the trust, after testimony about 30 years of stewardship and monthly free food distributions. The lease runs to March 31, 2056.
Bumpy Kanahele is 72. He still lives in Waimānalo. "I was told I was a sellout," he said. "I've also been called an outlaw. That'll never leave me."
In 1987 he filed a deed nobody honored. The paper the state signed instead still has 30 years to run.
The state calls it a lease. Waimānalo calls it Bumpy's Village.
