When Sonny Kaniho looked across the broad expanses of pastoral lands on his native Big Island, he saw not just beauty, history and opportunity, but injustice.

Kaniho — a retired airman, Pearl Harbor ship-fitter and rancher whose father died while waiting for his Hawaiian homestead land — spent decades trying to bring public and administrative attention to the plight of thousands of Native Hawaiian homestead applicants left stranded on the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands waiting list.

Kaniho died Friday at the age of 87.

"His main motivation was that there were a lot of people who had waited a long time to receive their land, and he wanted to help them," said Kaniho's son, Kalani.

Kaniho was born in Kawaihae Uka on the Big Island and spent most of his life in Waimea.

He served in the Air Force for 20 years before taking a job as a shipfitter at Pearl Harbor.

Kaniho's father, Willie, died in 1978 after spending some 26 years on the homelands list. As Kaniho told The Advertiser in 1996, he promised his father that he would see to it that he would help those still waiting.

Kaniho's high-profile battles with the state actually began in 1974, when he and several others were arrested for trespassing during a protest in Waimea. One of the arresting officers remarked that Kaniho was "the nicest protester I've ever dealt with."

It was a reputation that would follow the affable Kaniho, even as he continued his activism with a series of protests in which he and other members of the "Aged Hawaiians" (a group representing Native Hawaiians who had been waiting since 1952 for pastoral land allotments) turned loose cattle on homestead lands leased to non-Hawaiian users.

In one such protest, Kaniho mailed an airline ticket to then-Gov. Ben Cayetano so he could attend. (Cayetano, who was in the Philippines at the time, returned the ticket.)

"My father was a very kind person and he was very respectful of other people," Kalani Kaniho said. "It took a lot to get him upset."

Kaniho would eventually get his homestead pastures in 1991, but that didn't quell his desire to fight for those who still waited.

"They might have thought that if they gave him his land, he might back off, get satisfied and discontinue his protests," Kalani Kaniho said.

"But, no, he wasn't satisfied. He knew there was still more to be done."

Kaniho is survived by his wife, Tomie; daughter, Kathy Gayle; sons, Kalani and Kazu; brothers, Thomas, Kenneth and Martinson; sisters, Jane Gouveia and Mary Tegman; and four grandchildren.

Funeral arrangements are pending.