Our lineages carry the memory of plantation systems, forced labor, displacement, and survival. One founder comes from plantation lineage in Hawaiʻi and the slave diaspora of Mississippi and North Carolina, raised on stories of land dispossession, incarceration camps, and resilience. The other is a fourth-generation Kona coffee farmer from lau’au lapa’au lineage working to preserve her family’s ancestral lands in a time when farming alone is no longer economically viable.

Together, we recognized that reclaiming agriculture means reclaiming value, ownership, and narrative.

We do not believe in extracting from land — we believe in restoring relationship with it.
We do not believe in exploitation economies — we believe in regenerative ones.
We do not believe in selling culture — we believe in living it.

 We operate through full-system Indigenous entrepreneurship. We grow our crops, process our plants, create our products, educate our communities, and control our narrative. We create value-added goods from farm to table so that farming remains economically viable for Indigenous families. We train women in agriculture, apothecary sciences, crafting arts, business development, and land-based enterprise. We build spaces — physical and relational — where people gather, learn, heal, and connect. Using models of sliding scale, trade, and accessible rates, our intention is to be accessible.

Miko’s background as a high school agriculture and horticulture arts teacher for 7 years shaped this model. She taught that land could be their future instead of a burden. She taught them to plant, grow, forage, process, and transform herbs into teas, medicines, perfumes, lotions, and beauty products. When they asked her, “Aunty, can we work for you? Can we keep making things together after we graduate?” Rachael and Miko knew this work had to live beyond the classroom. She left teaching, Rachael left social work and organized permits, built storefronts, trained under Indigenous leaders around the world, and gained the experience needed to build this for my own community. Thus our apprentice program was born.

The Herban Hapa is not a wellness brand — it is an education platform, a community infrastructure, a cultural economy, and a healing system. “Hapa,” once used derogatorily to mean half, is reframed by us to mean partial but still whole — incomplete but holistic. In a world that needs Indigenous solidarity more than ever, our mission is to bring people together through the food we grow, the products we make, and the women we educate.

By supporting The Herban Hapa, people are not just buying tea or coffee — they are supporting the rise of Indigenous women leaders, farmers, healers, and entrepreneurs. We are not performing healing culture — we are living it. We are not selling aesthetics — we are building systems. We are not a café — we are creating a future where Indigenous women own the land, the medicine, the knowledge, the economy, and the narrative.