The Folklore of the Freeway: Race and Revolt in the Modernist City

Conclusion: Identity Politics in Post-Interstate America

181 Haole Highway Dwarfing the high-rise office and apartment towers of Honolulu, Hawaii, the Ko‘olau mountain range presides over the island of Oahu. The range was formed tens of thousands of years ago by volcanic eruptions; it has peaks jutting twice the height of the Empire State Building. These verdant mountains , laced with streams and waterfalls, cradled the civilization of the first Hawaiians. Driving the sixteen miles of Interstate H-3 from Honolulu to Kaneohe Bay takes one through the Tetsuo Harano Tunnel, bored through the Ko‘olaus in the 1980s. To undertake this monumental feat of engineering, construction crews extracted half a million cubic yards of mountain rock and laid 200,000 cubic yards of concrete, 18 million pounds of steel reinforcements, and 30 miles of fiber optic cable. The tunnel’s towering concrete portals, over 1,000 feet high, slope slightly backward into the lush mountainside, like sentries guarding passage through the heart of an extinct volcano. Like many interstate highways, H-3 owes its existence to the Cold War. As the United States deepened its involvement against Communist aggression in Southeast Asia in the early 1960s, state and federal highway engineers planned a direct highway link from Naval Station Pearl Harbor to Marine Corps Base Hawaii at Kaneohe Bay. Despite the absence of state borders in Hawaii, this military rationale qualified H-3 for federal funding under the Interstate Highway Act, completing the final segment of a tripartite system of CONCLUSION Identity Politics in Post-Interstate America 182 Conclusion highways designed to solve traffic demands and connect the island’s major military centers. H-3 would also link Honolulu to the windward side of Oahu, a less developed area that supported scattered rural—and dwindling— settlements of indigenous Hawaiians.1 This project had the backing of Hawaii’s establishment: military and transportation officials, business leaders , contractors, labor, and congressional representatives, most notably the late Senator Daniel Inouye, who pushed H-3 through Congress as chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. Drafted in the early 1960s, H-3 finally opened to vehicular traffic in 1997, but the prolonged opposition to its construction illustrates a striking twist in the folklore of the freeway. Throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s, local environmentalists posed determined opposition to the highway’s completion . Although the legal challenges they mounted added costly delays to the project, the discourse of opposition to H-3 took a new inflection during the 1980s amid an upsurge of indigenous activism among local Hawaiians claiming ancestral ties to the land. This movement included demands for the creation of ethnic studies programs in Hawaii’s state university system to rewrite Hawaii’s history from an indigenous perspective, as well as a revival of traditional cultural practices—all founded on a renewed respect for the land that cradled the first Hawaiian civilization.2 H-3 galvanized this movement further when construction crews began unearthing ruins in the northern Halawa Valley, a site believed to have been sacred to indigenous Hawaiians. In 1987, to address local opposition, the Hawaii Department of Transportation contracted archaeologists from the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum, the oldest museum in Hawaii and repository of the world’s largest collection of Polynesian artifacts, for on-site archeological research.3 These experts corroborated the state’s claim that no harm was done—the sites in question were not sacred ruins but, rather, the remnants of a dryland agricultural system. The Bishop Museum archaeologists reached a similar conclusion some five years later, when bulldozers dug up more ruins, even though one of its own archaeologists went on record to state that these ruins were in fact a Hale O Papa (House of Papa), a heiau (temple) that honored Papahanaumoku, the Mother Earth and female ancestor of all indigenous Hawaiians. According to University of Hawaii historian Conclusion 183 Davianna Pomaika‘i McGregor, this heiau served a unique role as a special refuge for women, a site of birthing and healing.4 Bishop officials immediately dismissed this outspoken archaeologist from his post, raising a storm of controversy and casting public doubt on the museum ’s impartiality. Meanwhile, a group of women claiming ancestral ties to the Halawa Valley registered their protest by organizing themselves as Women of Hale O Papa. They occupied the site to worship the goddess to whom they believed the site belonged, blocking further construction in the area. One woman, feeling the spiritual pull of...