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sovereign ground dana naone hall rethinking the way forward: ola nä iwi Protests erupted over the excavation of an ancient Hawaiian burial site at Honokahua , Maui in October 1988; by December of that year, Governor John Waihee halted the digging. Honokahua was the first time that massive desecration and destruction of a burial site had been stopped. The disturbed remains of 1,100 individuals, which archaeologists estimated represented about half the number of those buried there, were reinterred at the site, and out of that sacrifice, Hawai‘i’s burial protection law was born. Honokahua was not the first large-scale disturbance of a sand dune burial site, given the penchant for building hotels on Hawai‘i’s shorelines. Stories still abound about the earlier development of Kä‘anapali, several miles south of Kapalua, and one can only imagine the displacement of thousands of ancient graves in Waikïkï. However, the point of this reflection is not to mourn what is gone, but to move forward with the understanding that it is possible to renew our connection to the past and rethink the future. Hawai‘i’s post-Contact history is filled with episodes of Native Hawaiians ’ alienation from the land to the point where many of our people are homeless today—both those forced to live on beaches or under freeways and those unable to afford the price of a house and consigned to rent other people ’s houses for the rest of their lives. The alienation of land through its acquisition and development by others (in the case of hotel development by out-of-state and, frequently, international entities) compels a deeper understanding of the past. Since Honokahua, I have encountered hundreds of ancestral burials and the funerary objects that sometimes accompany them. Some of the burials are a thousand years old and more, while others date from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Our State burial law declares that all burial sites are significant, and this statute is weighted toward preservation in place of these 196 The Value of Hawai‘i sites. Each site, whether found alone or among a concentration of burials, is unique. No one owns a burial site except perhaps the individual whose remains are interred at that site. Importantly, not even a landowner owns the burials that may be present on property he or she owns. This fundamental fact gives the burial places of our Hawaiian ancestors an inherent sovereignty. Wherever our Hawaiian ancestors are buried, an island of sovereignty exists . Each time a decision is made to disinter Hawaiian iwi from their place of burial, their home for numberless years, our right to exist is affected. On the other hand, every decision to preserve in place a native Hawaiian burial site strengthens us as a people. In recent years, the State Historic Preservation Division (SHPD) has allowed politics and economic demands to trump laws and administrative rules designed to protect and preserve significant cultural and historic sites for future generations. One high-profile case involved the redevelopment of the Ward Villages property in Kaka‘ako. More than sixty burials were identified during the course of subsurface excavations, and many of these burials were disturbed or completely disinterred during initial phases of the project. A number of the burials were found in a sandy matrix that comprised the original sand dune system. I was amazed that beneath urban fill the iwi had slept undisturbed in the dunes until now. For me, this was history at its most intimate. But just as we were rediscovering these ancient vestiges, they were being destroyed. The poignancy of this situation was underscored by another bit of history . The land once belonged to Victoria Ward (born in 1846) and her family . Victoria Ward was a great supporter of the Hawaiian monarchy, and remained a loyal friend to Queen Lili‘uokalani after the overthrow. As an expression of her sentiments, she slept under a Hawaiian flag attached to the canopy of her bed. While I believe that serious mistakes were made in the Ward Villages case, and that SHPD was derelict in its duties, nevertheless, Honokahua, as its name indicates, has given us the opportunity to make our foundation stronger . As living descendants, we honor those who placed the iwi in their resting places with the intent that they remain undisturbed throughout time. Fulfilling this responsibility, we reaffirm who we are as a people—that we too have a place here, and it comes from the bones of our...

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