Of course, there's another side to that story as well. On the way to Hana, we passed a church constructed of tin, and, following it, a sign outside the Haiku Community Center: nation reinstatement meeting. A song came on the radio, its lyrics talking of "unfurling the rainbow flag" across the land and "fulfilling the promises of our elders"—a song of native Hawaiian sovereignty set to a honky-tonk twang. My father, who came of age in the 1960s, during the first organized Hawaiian sovereignty movement, and whose best friend from high school was one of its early proponents, would have approved of the song's sentiments if not its harmony.

A few miles later, we passed a Hawaiian flag with its Union Jack flapping from a pole; not unusual in itself, except this flag was hung upside-down—the thrilling, discomfiting symbol of a nation in distress. And all of this was less than two hours east of Paia, where I never saw another non-white face, much less anyone flying the now-weary flag of Hawaiian sovereignty. To those who are willing to see it, this is the other Hawaii, one just as singular and important as the Hawaii of beaches and surfing and luxury hotels: Everywhere are small, vivid reminders of what the islands were before they began the crash course in statehood that culminated in their producing the nation's forty-fourth president. Just a little more than a century ago, this was a kingdom with its own monarch, palace, and religion, and there are people for whom it is a kingdom still, even as they smilingly welcome you to Maui. If the islands are special for their plurality, they are equally special for their endemic culture. No other state in the union can claim its own language, its own dance, its own gods, its own cuisine, its own music.

The nostalgia of the sovereignty movement's advocates is of a different kind, one more heartbreaking and furious than the less complicated nostalgia that my parents and I have for a favorite, long-gone diner or a particular house: Theirs is a yearning for a land, a way of life, and a set of beliefs that have been almost eradicated in only a few generations. Not everyone is celebrating Hawaii's statehood this year, its shotgun marriage to a country that, arguably, needed Hawaii—its resources and agreeable soil and strategic location—more than Hawaii needed it.

Five hours later (the trip takes most people two and a half, but every forty yards or so my mother felt it necessary to pull off onto the shoulder), we reached Hana. The most remote and most heavily native Hawaiian place on Maui, it can feel, with its simple A-frame wooden structures and copses of shedding ironwood pines, a little like an equatorial Catskills. That night we stumbled down the main road outside the Hotel Hana-Maui and uphill, cutting through soft, long grasses, to the Hana Ranch, whose dining room, lit from within with a warm yellow light, beckoned like a rice paper lantern. Inside, we ate twisty saimin noodles topped with sliced fish cake, its surface a whorl of candy pink and white, and listened to the moths thwack themselves against the screen door. The lone waiter, a middle-aged Midwesterner with a horsey face, moved slowly through the room as if in a dream, and the bartender, a fat Hawaiian woman wearing inch-wide gold bangles and a polo shirt, fiddled with the karaoke machine and hummed. It was a tableau you'd find only in Hawaii: the gentle, melancholy slack key music filling the air, the smell of soy sauce and jasmine, and the certainty that the next day and many days after, these two unlikely co-workers would be standing in the restaurant, waiting for customers who would or would not arrive.