From the award-winning author of Hula, a dazzling saga that moves from Hawaii to California and back, about the generations of women tasked with protecting the history and place that made them.

A young woman lies in a hospital bed in a coma, watched over by her estranged grandmother. Some say she jumped off the cliff; others say she was swept away by a wave. But her tutu at her bedside suspects something else is wrong, that the reason for the hardship and heartbreak in their family history is tied to a story that she’s never told—one about a powerful stone, the pohaku, that her family was tasked with protecting generations ago. In fits and starts, the grandmother begins . . .

We travel back in time to the eighteenth century, when the explorer James Cook arrives in the Hawaiian Islands in pursuit of an ancient prophecy, a key that would unlock the mysteries of the world, but he is killed before he can learn about the mysterious stone—a stone born alongside future Hawaiian royalty, the key to something even more powerful than Cook could have imagined.

So begins a thrilling family saga of the women charged with protecting the pohaku, as it is taken from Hawai’i to California and possibly beyond, bringing fortune to the well-intentioned and misfortune to the bad. But with each successive generation, the fractures caused by its displacement widen until it becomes clear that the pohaku’s story must survive if there is to be any hope at all of the family's—and a nation’s—reconciliation with their home, with nature, and with each other.

Reminiscent of Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, Min Jin Lee’s Pachinko, and Tommy Orange’s There, There, The Pohaku is an immersive and bold novel about the history, perseverance, and resilience of the Hawaiian people.

A Conversation with Jasmin Ὶolani Hakes about THE POHAKU

1. The pōhaku plays a central role in the story. Can you share more about its symbolic significance and how it ties into the themes of the novel?

The pōhaku is meant to represent a point of connection, a balance between humanity and our planet based on a mutual respect and an understanding of how things work. I don’t want to idealize or romanticize the past, but there certainly was a time when our existence on this planet was more in harmony with the natural world, when our survival didn’t mean the destruction of everything else. Then this fork in the road happened, when greed started having real human and environmental impact and religion started outpacing spirituality, upending social order and previous power structures. What begins as a fissure of dissonance between a community and their environment – represented here by the removal of the pōhaku from its natural place in the world – grows ever wider as the women charged with its safekeeping lose their hold on it in the physical sense and then it their belief in it. The pōhaku transitions from something beautiful and pure into something dangerous to be exploited.

As time marches forward the question becomes does it exist at all, and is our disconnect with our environment (and in many ways ourselves) now so vast that we have reached a point of no return? Is there a way to reestablish some sort of connection and balance with the world around us?

2. As discussions around colonialism and cultural preservation become more prominent, what message do you hope The Pōhaku conveys about these issues?

More than anything, the message I hope to convey in The Pōhaku is one of hope. So much can seem out of our control, but then I start to think about the stories we inherit, the memories we collect. When I think about the bombing of Pearl Harbor, what comes to mind isn’t what I learned in history books. Instead, I remember my grandpa’s stories about how he was working on a roof with his grandfather when suddenly he felt the ground begin to shake. He assumed it was an earthquake until he looked up and in the distance saw the bombs falling. Similarly, when I think of the sketchy circumstances surrounding Hawai’i becoming the 50th state, I recall all he said about the public campaigns and conversations happening at the time and the messaging in the newspapers they were receiving, how public perception was being warped.

In this way, I see storytelling as an act of resistance. When we share our stories and put our culture into practice, we preserve cultural knowledge and our first-person accounts of what history books of the future might treat with merely a cursory glance.

We are currently in a time when “truth” is a relative term. As dueling narratives battle for headlines and clicks, the one thing we can rely on is our own lived experiences and perhaps those of our neighbors and loved ones. I believe the most poignant lessons we have learned from historical events are ones we have learned from the people who lived through them, and I think that will continue to be the case.

3. Family dynamics play a pivotal role in The Pōhaku. How did you approach writing the complex relationships between the generations of women in the story?

So much of what we do and who we are is informed by the times we live in. Keeping that always at the forefront of my mind, I tried to approach each generation with an empathetic nod to the ways the roles and responsibilities of women have changed over time, as well as the unique challenges and expectations each era faced.

The story begins with the pōhaku’s original keeper, when the bond was strong and undeniable. As it changes hands and becomes something that needs to be protected and hidden away, that bond changes, inherently changing what that woman needs from the next generation. The pōhaku transitions from a symbol of salvation to one of burden and responsibility in a very similar way to how the California Gold Rush turned the world upside down.

4. How does the theme of family legacy and the responsibility of protecting the pōhaku reflect broader ideas about cultural preservation and intergenerational connection?

Growing up in a culture that prioritized oral storytelling as means of preserving history, belief systems, and knowledge, I believe we have a responsibility not just to our present and our future. We also have a responsibility toward our past.

In this time of information overload, our every moment is filled with noise and movement. Your brain becomes so overstimulated it simply shuts down. We get busy trying to make ends meet, we relocate for a better job or a more affordable place to live, our kids are locked into packed schedules that zero free time, our elders are put in care homes isolated from the rest of society. We live in cities where even trees live within the confines of concrete and fences, it has become a privilege to have access to dirt to grow things. In many places, you need a permit to own a chicken. All these disconnects – from ourselves and from each other – seem to me a sort of death by a thousand paper cuts. The family legacy laid out in The Pōhaku speaks to the need to reprioritize what is important and learn how to listen in order to preserve the knowledge of where we have come from and how we got here, before that knowledge disappears forever.

5. Could you share more details about "Sutter's Hawaiians"? Specifically, how their history influenced the narrative of The Pōhaku and what role they play in connecting the themes of displacement, cultural preservation, and intergenerational legacy in the novel?

Oh, I will happily talk about them! They are absolutely the one and only reason this book exists. Soon after I moved from Hawai’i to California, I joined my daughter on a field trip to Sutter’s Fort. One of the first things you see on display are some blown-up pictures of Sutter’s journal entries. All of them expressed profuse gratitude toward what he referred to as “my Kanakas,” the group having apparently played a critical role in his achievements. It was the first I had ever heard about Hawaiians in California. When I asked our guide where I could find out more about them, he shrugged and said as far as Sutter’s Fort went, those journal entries were the only evidence the group even existed.

I spent the next decade and a half trying to dig up anything I could about them, scouring through family records in dusty corners of university libraries, studying archived state records in Hawaii, pouring over pretty much every book about John Sutter ever written, even driving through the foothills of California’s gold country, stopping at every tiny museum or park, talking to any park ranger, tour guide, museum docent, and historian who would spare me a minute of their time.

I am not a historian, so for a long time I was intimidated by the thought of trying to rewrite California Gold Rush history. Ultimately, I came to realize that there was so little public information about this group of people – who did in fact play an instrumental role in Sutter’s survival and ability to obtain the land grant that led to the establishment of the fort – that fiction might be the only way to bring some awareness and recognition to their story. I did not stop researching, I wanted to honor them by keeping the known history to be as true as possible, but I had a hunch that somewhere out there, of all the recorded history out there, the information I was looking for was probably sitting in someone’s living room within the pages of a crinkly photo album. I had no access to that, which got me thinking about how much history and experiences must get lost in time. I started thinking about my elders who are still here, drenched in institutional knowledge that isn’t recorded anywhere. That’s when the rest of the story bloomed.