Dr. Keanu Sai Genealogy: The Promise to His Tutu That Changed His Life

BrotherLee Time Episode 90 | Guest: Dr. Keanu Sai | Format: Narrative Feature

Sometimes the thing that changes your life does not feel important when it happens. Sometimes it is just a conversation with your tutu.

For Dr. Keanu Sai, one of the defining moments of his life happened before the scholarship, the political science, the research, the court cases and the public conversations that would eventually make his name known across Hawaiʻi.

His tutu was dying. Sai was still at New Mexico Military Institute when he got the call from his mother. His tutu was in hospice. According to Sai, she had told the family that she was not going to pass until he came home. So he came home.

When he arrived, she did not give him some big speech about what his life was supposed to become. She wanted him to sit down. Close the door. And listen.

Dr. Sai remembers her telling stories about growing up. Stories about family. Stories about people he knew only as old aunties and uncles, but who had lived close enough to an earlier Hawaiʻi that names like Prince Kūhiō were not distant historical figures.

At one point, his tutu told him about a relative who had gotten “dirty lickings” because he had not properly bowed to the prince. Dr. Sai stopped her.

What prince? Prince Kūhiō.

To Dr. Sai, this was almost unbelievable. The Hawaiʻi he knew from school and the Hawaiʻi his tutu remembered did not feel like the same place. Her parents, he explained in the episode, had been born in the 1880s, during the period of the Hawaiian Kingdom. His tutu had been born in 1910. She stood close to a historical transition that, generations later, felt far away from him.

Before she passed, she asked him for something. She wanted him to learn his genealogy. Sai remembers her telling him that once he knew his genealogy, he would know who he was and what he had to do.

He said yes. Then life kept moving.

The Promise He Put Aside

Sai did not immediately become the scholar people recognize today. He stayed focused on his military career. He had obligations to fulfill and training ahead of him. By the early 1990s, he was already a captain. But the promise to his tutu had never completely disappeared.

Eventually, it came back. Sai realized he still had not done what she asked him to do.

So he started looking. He went to the archives at ʻIolani Palace grounds and asked a simple question: where do I begin?

From there, genealogy turned into research. Sai says he found published genealogical records connected to both sides of his family. He began following names backward through old Hawaiian records and newspapers. The search brought him into stories about chiefs, family members, political figures and events he had never seriously examined before.

This was not how Sai had approached history before. He approached it like an Army officer. Find the information. Follow the records. Figure out what happened. The deeper he went into his genealogy, the more questions appeared. Who were these people? What did they do?

How did they understand Hawaiʻi in their own time? How was his great-grandfather connected to Prince Kūhiō? Why did the history he was reading in primary records feel different from the history he remembered learning?

Genealogy had started as a promise to his tutu. It became an investigation.

When Military Training Met Hawaiian History

One of the most interesting parts of Sai’s story is that he does not describe his turning point as something that came first from political science. He describes it through his military training.

As he researched the events surrounding 1893, Sai says he began reading government records and historical reports connected to the overthrow of Queen Liliʻuokalani and the actions of the United States.

What caught his attention was not simply the politics of what he was reading. It was the structure.

As an Army officer, Sai had been trained to think about governments, military occupation, command structures and what happens when the government of another country is displaced. He began applying that framework to what he was discovering about Hawaiʻi. That connection changed the direction of his life.

Later in the episode, Sai describes his experience almost as if the work found him. “I didn’t pick this,” he tells Taisei Lee. “It picked me.” He says his military background caused him to see the information differently, not because he went looking for a particular conclusion, but because that was the training he already carried with him.

And suddenly, the words his tutu had given him years earlier looked different. Know your genealogy. Know who you are. Then you will know what you have to do.

The Story Before the Scholar

It can be easy to encounter Dr. Keanu Sai through the arguments first.

The Hawaiian Kingdom.

International law.

Occupation.

Education.

Denationalization.

Those conversations are a major part of his public work, and they take up a significant portion of this BrotherLee Time episode. But before all of that, there is a grandson sitting beside his tutu. There is a young man who grew up in Kuliʻouʻou surrounded by family, fishing, food, cousins and practices that he says nobody stopped to label as “culture.”

It was simply life.

There is a football player who once carried a 2.4 GPA and says his old classmates still cannot believe he eventually earned a PhD. There is an Army officer who followed one family question into another. And underneath everything is a promise. That may be one of the simplest ways to understand the man before trying to understand the mission.

Not everybody will agree with every conclusion Sai has reached. That is not really the starting point of this story. The starting point is curiosity. Who came before me? What did they know? What was their world? And what changes when I finally go looking?

Near the end of his conversation with Taisei, Sai explained why he agreed to sit down with BrotherLee Time in the first place.

To share moʻolelo.

Nothing to join.

Nothing you are required to stand behind.

Maybe you simply hear something and think:

“I never know that.”

For Sai, that question changed everything.

Watch the Full Conversation

This story only touches one part of a much larger conversation.

Watch BrotherLee Time Episode #90 with Dr. Keanu Sai for the full discussion about his upbringing in Kuliʻouʻou, military career, genealogy, Hawaiian history, education, identity, law and the mission that now defines much of his work.

Watch the full episode on the BrotherLee Time YouTube channel and listen wherever you get your podcasts, including Spotify and Apple Podcasts. You can also support BrotherLee Time on Patreon.

Leeward born. Globally felt.

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Accuracy Note

This article is based on Dr. Keanu Sai’s statements during his BrotherLee Time interview. Personal memories are presented as he recalled them. Historical and legal interpretations attributed to Dr. Sai reflect the positions and explanations he gave during the episode and are not presented here as independent legal findings or separate verification by BrotherLee Time.