bring roots to the islands. Hawaiians did.
Long before any Westerner came to these shores, the local diet revolved around
taro and yams.

So what gives? Who would be so devoted to the memory
and legacy of Vancouver? I set out to find out more and stumbled across a
resolution from the Maui County Council dating back to January 1970. It’s
basically a letter of congratulations to a Canadian for building the monument
on December 22, 1969—the same date in the inscription.

The resolution congratulates J. Gordon Gibson, a
Canadian logger, businessman, and politician. Gibson made his money in the
Canadian Northwest in the logging industry. He was a politician too, but was a
bit eccentric. Like Vancouver, he sailed to Maui. The rig was later re-named
the Maui Lu in honor of his wife, Louise. And yes, in 1956he bought a 28-acre
property in North Kihei and opened a resort bearing the same name in 1960. The
mystery was solved.

Six years later, he apparently built a home-made
memorial to Vancouver. The resolution noted that Gibson led “the way for other
Canadians to develop the Kihei area.”

The County Council and Gibson might have been
prescient. Would the pioneering Canadian have never dreamed that his countrymen
and women would be the biggest group of foreign land buyers on Maui fifty years
later?

Last year, Canadians spent $84 million in buying
properties on Maui. Their presence is obvious in Kihei. The red maple leaf
flies proudly at strip malls and eateries along South Kihei Road. Canadians are
all over Kihei. Many of them are from British Columbia and they all certainly
know about Vancouver.

And so the memorial still stands—long after Gibson
and