The Forgotten Story of the Forbidden Island: Niihau

In 1864 a Scottish widow paid ten thousand dollars in gold for an entire Hawaiian island, and turned down the ground that would become Waikiki to do it. Six generations later her descendants still own every acre of Niihau, still decide who may set foot on it, and still keep the last place on earth where Hawaiian is the daily language. Eliza Sinclair bought Niihau from a dying Hawaiian kingdom, and her grandson Aubrey Robinson sealed it against the outside world in 1915, the act that earned it the name the Forbidden Island. Behind that wall the family built a private sheep-and-cattle empire worked by Hawaiian-speaking paniolo, and a version of old Hawaii went on breathing while every other island was remade around it. Then, hours after Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, a crippled Japanese Zero crash-landed on the one island that did not yet know a war had begun. This film follows the Niihau incident that came next, the downed pilot, the island's three residents of Japanese descent, and Ben and Ella Kanahele, who ended a six-day standoff, and the Navy intelligence report that was later folded into the case for interning a hundred thousand Japanese Americans. It carries the story into the present: an island whose recorded population fell from 170 to 84 in a single decade, a private kingdom now kept solvent by a U.S. Navy lease, a property-tax bill that quadrupled overnight, and two aging Robinson brothers holding a seventy-square-mile Hawaiian island with no clear hand to pass it to. #Niihau #ForbiddenIsland #Hawaii #NiihauIncident #PearlHarbor #HawaiianHistory #AmericanHistory Copyright & Fair Use Notice This video is a non-commercial, educational history documentary produced for research and for purposes of commentary, critique, and analysis. Certain archival photographs and video clips appear here under the Fair Use doctrine (Section 107 of the U.S. Copyright Act), including use for commentary and criticism, news reporting, instruction, scholarship, and research.