Denby Fawcett: The TV Show ‘Yellowstone’ Is Pertinent To Hawaii In Unexpected Ways

While sick in bed last week, recovering from laryngitis, I unexpectedly became addicted to the TV show “Yellowstone.”

At first I was surprised to be binge-watching a show about modern-day Montana rancher John Dutton (Kevin Costner) as he battles increasingly violent speculators  —  all of them villains, hell bent on driving him out of business to chop up his vast pastures into luxury vacation homes for coastal elites.

You wouldn’t think a Montana rancher’s story would resonate with people in faraway Hawaii, but it does.

At heart, “Yellowstone” is a universal story about the struggle to retain a way of life that is fast disappearing.

Dutton faces many of the same issues that tear at Hawaii today: the fight over land and water rights, newcomers wanting to take over property and remake it in their own image, clueless tourists endangering themselves and commandeering the localsʻ favorite places, and an Indigenous population trying to regain lost land and power.

A central theme in “Yellowstone” is the dismay of Native Americans living in dilapidated houses on the Broken Rock Reservation next to the rich pasturelands of Duttonʻs sprawling ranch —  tribal land they once owned and are angling to reclaim.

Kualoa Ranch president John Morgan told me at a party Saturday he sees his some of the same challenges in “Yellowstone” that he faces as he works to preserve the land and a ranching way of life on the 4,000 acres his family has owned for six generations.

Issues include the diminishing financial sustainability of cow production as well as having to deal with droughts, pests and invasive species.

“We don’t brand our workers,” Morgan said with a smile, referring to the painful scenes of Dutton’s cowboys getting branded with a “Y” on their chests in secret rituals to ensure their lifelong loyalty and committment to the Yellowstone ranch.

“But the struggle to preserve open land is the same as in ‘Yellowstone,’” Morgan said. “You will find Hawaii’s kamaaina ranchers like Jimmy Greenwell and Pono von Holt saying the same thing.”

Instead of chasing tourists off his ranch land as Dutton did with his rifle, Morgan has kept Kualoa Ranch alive by embracing visitors as paying customers for horseback rides, movie and jungle tours, a gift shop, farmerʻs market and hot lunches. It is a balance that keeps Kualoa Ranch in business.

It is interesting watching Dutton in “Yellowstone” challenged by enemies from increasingly distant places.

Fighting For A Way Of Life

First, he faces his opponent at home, the Native American tribe next door questing for his land but planning to preserve it in the open prairies beloved by their ancestors. Then he has to fight ever more dangerous interlopers including a luxury home developer from California and later a murderous multinational company operating out of New York intent on demolishing the ranch to build an airport and a mega ski resort.

In Hawaii, when I was young, people knew their friends and foes. If you ask people from my generation what they miss, many will say doing business face to face, knowing who you are dealing with, not being forced to work out an issue with a call center in the Philippines or a company with headquarters in Minnesota.

“Yellowstone” makes it clear it is not progress when the people coming at you are from afar with no understanding or concern about what you are trying to protect.

Watching “Yellowstone” got me thinking about my own land dispute as an 11-year-old horse owner in Kahala with a large local landowner known then as the Bishop Estate  — an alii land trust deeply rooted in Hawaii.

That was in the early 1950s when the Bishop Estate decided to turn the open fields behind our Kahala homes into a housing subdivision.

‘You Cannot Stop Progress’

For the neighborhood kids, the issue was the estate taking away the land we were using for grazing our horses — the same land truck farmers of Japanese and Okinawan descent had been leasing for decades from the estate in small plots to grow lettuce, roses and pikake flowers and raise chickens and pigs.

After Bishop Estate evicted most of the farmers, the neighbor children met in a friend’s backyard on Auki Avenue to make a pact to do everything possible to stop construction of what would become Waialae subdivision, later known by the more fancy name of Waialae-Kahala.

We gathered every day after school and all day on weekends — steaming ahead under our own rules. Unlike Montana landowner John Dutton, we had no legal claim to the land. We were squatters, moving our horses to a different patch of Bishop Estateʻs grass each evening.

The little kids led by older kids incuding me and my friends worked in groups, moving the surveyors’ markers only slightly, filling up holes the workers dug for the plumbing and wiring, hauling off heavy wooden boards as far as we could carry them.

Bishop Estate sent an agent to catch us but when we spotted his car moving suspiciously slowly down the backroads, we threw ourselves face down onto the ground, hidden in the kiawe thickets.

We knew we had been defeated when the frames of the subdivision houses started springing up, one by one.

One of the most discouraged little kids marked our surrender, saying as she must have imagined most profoundly: “You cannot stop progress.”

We grandiosely thought the Bishop Estate had ruined our way of life, but in reality it was only our playground.

We lost the freedom of being able to come home from school and gallop our horses down the usually vacant Kahala beach, unfettered, free, imagining we were like cowboys of the past  —  but the Waialae farmers lost so much more — their entire way of life.

The tenant farmers first settled in Waialae in 1926 after they were evicted from Moiliili  to clear the way for a housing development and the expansion of the University of Hawaii.

After they got kicked out of Waialae, some of them resettled in Kalama Valley In Hawaii Kai where they were evicted once again in 1971 to make way for yet another Bishop Estate housing subdivision. After that, a few of the farmers — still clinging to the agrarian way of life  — moved much farther out of town to rural Waianae where the land was hot and dry and they had to drive for miles to get anywhere.

You can laugh at some of scenes in Yellowstone like the busload of tourists from China trespassing in Duttonʻs pasture to try to take selfies in front of a menacing grizzly bear or when Beth Dutton (Kelly Reilly) launches a bar fight to trash a California tourist woman who dares to taunt her. Nobody messes with the rancher’s daughter Beth Dutton, one of the most complex female characters on TV today.

But mostly the series is sad because of the large issues it broaches.

“Yellowstone” resonates with us in Hawaii because it raises the questions — whose vision of progress should win and at what cost?