What’s with women’s soccer? Every girl who laces up owes something to a kid from Pāʻia. Patsy Takemoto Mink was born on Maui’s north shore in 1927, became Maui High School’s first female student-body president, and graduated valedictorian in 1944 — in an era when girls were allowed only the half-court game in basketball. When every medical school rejected her because she was a woman, she went to law school instead, and in 1964 she became the first woman of color elected to the United States Congress. There she co-authored the thirty-seven words of Title IX in 1972 — the law that opened American education, and its playing fields, to girls and women. In 1971, about 700 girls played high school soccer nationwide; today nearly 400,000 do, with hundreds of college programs and a thriving professional game beyond them. The athletic field at Maui High School is named Patsy T. Mink Field in her honor, and in 2024 the nation honored her again: the United States Mint issued the Patsy Takemoto Mink quarter, the twelfth coin of the American Women Quarters Program, its reverse showing her holding the Title IX legislation with a lei at her shoulders for Hawaiʻi.
The nineteenth and twentieth centuries reshaped the land. Sugar and pineapple plantations spread across the central valley and the slopes, drawing workers from around the Pacific and diverting West Maui's streams to irrigate the cane — a transformation that brought new communities and lasting costs. The Kingdom of Hawaiʻi was overthrown in 1893 and the islands annexed by the United States in 1898; Hawaiʻi became the fiftieth state in 1959. Through all of it Native Hawaiian culture endured on Maui, carried in language, place names, and the steady work of keeping tradition alive.
Why People Visit Maui
Maui draws visitors for its landscape and its depth — a sacred volcanic summit, a rainforest coast road, a green valley behind the harbor towns, and the Pacific where humpbacks winter — all carried by a living Native Hawaiian culture. People come for Haleakalā, the Road to Hāna, and the beaches, and stay for the quiet of upcountry and the sense of a place with a long memory. It is scenic, storied, and unmistakably Hawaiian.
