Across nine generations, Archie Kalepa’s family has seen the waterfront in Lahaina, a town on the island of Maui, undergo repeated transformation.

Once the home of the Hawaiian Kingdom’s royalty, Lahaina’s shores over the centuries became a stop for whalers plundering the seas, for missionaries spreading the Christian gospel, for plantation owners who opened canneries to prepare their bounty of pineapples for export. More recently, tourists packed high-end galleries and shoreline restaurants.

Relics of each of those layers of history were turned to ash a year ago, when an Aug. 8 inferno roared through Lahaina, killing at least 102 people. Now, as the task of rebuilding begins, Kalepa, a community leader who has organized fire-recovery efforts, is siding with many of those who see a chance to prioritize the town’s deeper history over the economic interests that have dominated for decades.

That would mean doing what for many has seemed unthinkable until now: transforming the famous waterfront by peeling back history, removing some of the gift shops, restaurants and beachwear boutiques.

Now, they are turning to the thornier question of what rebuilding should look like. On the table are proposals to revamp neighborhoods, move thousands of people to new areas, pull properties along the shoreline back from rising sea levels and restore former wetlands. At the heart of the debate is a fundamental question: In a community shaped by so many different eras of history, which history should guide the future?

Perhaps nowhere is the discussion more fraught than along the city’s famed Front Street.

In rebuilding, some are calling for a greater emphasis on the Indigenous past and turning the heart of Front Street into a walking boulevard.

But in other corners, there is deep wariness to a rollback from the waterfront.