Honokahua

Honokahua

For Hawaiians, as for people in many cultures, the remains of ancestors are to be treated with utmost care. Before and after Western contact, Hawaiians conducted burial rituals and protected burial sites with great reverence and secrecy. Desecration of the remains of ancestors was unthinkable. The bones (iwi kupuna) and sacred funerary objects of chiefs were often sealed in caves that were deliberately inaccessible. Other burials were in beach sands and dunes, unmarked but not forgotten by the succeeding generations charged with protecting them.

When outsiders began to carve up and develop the land, the iwi kupuna of Hawaiian families were frequently unearthed and scattered: taken by archaeologists, given to museums, sold as curiosities, or simply discarded. The anguish this caused the Native people was largely ignored.

In the late 1980s, however, a large burial site was disturbed during the building of the Ritz Carlton Hotel on Maui, and this time, Hawaiians came together to challenge the laws that allowed such sacrilege and to reaffirm their obligation, right, and responsibility to protect ancestral remains. Among the first individuals to draw attention to the Honokahua burial site were Charles Kauluwehi Maxwell Sr., now the Maui Burial Council chairman and president of the board of Hui Mālama i Nā Kūpuna o Hawai'i Nei, and Dana Naone Hall, a leader and activist with the group Hui Alanui o Makena. Hall has written of these events:

Everyone must realize that Honokahua, as dramatic as it was, wasn't the first time that a concentrated burial site belonging to native Hawaiians had been disturbed; it had happened hundreds if not thousands of times before, everywhere in our island chain practically. But this was the first time anybody latched on to what was happening and stayed with it and slowed the process down enough so that we could really see and understand what was going on and other people could understand it, and the uproar could occur. Honokahua allowed for the final necessary element to be put in place, which is that the people whose culture it is were able to begin to make the decisions about what happened to these important sacred places.

The dispute among the Native Hawaiians, the hotel developers, the Maui County Planning Commission, and the State lasted for three years. In 1989, an agreement was reached. One of the ramifications of this agreement was legislative revision of Hawai'i's historic preservation laws: Burial Councils on each island would review all findings of human remains. The following year, the Federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act went into effect.

One group that was formed to take the responsibility for repatriation and burial of iwi kupuna was Hui Mālama i Nā Kūpuna o Hawai'i Nei. In the words of the founders, Edward and Pualani Kanahele:

Hui Mālama i Nā Kūpuna o Hawai'i Nei (Group Caring for the Ancestors of Hawai'i) was born December 1988 from the kaumaha (heaviness) and aokanaka (enlightenment) caused by the archaeological disinterment of over 1,100 ancestral Native Hawaiians from Honokahua, Maui. The ancestral remains were removed over the protests of the Native Hawaiian community in order to build the Ritz Carlton Hotel.

The desecration was stopped following a 24-hour vigil at the Hawai'i State Capitol. Governor John Waihe'e, a Native Hawaiian, approved of a settlement that returned the ancestral remains to their one hānau (birth sands), set aside the reburial site in perpetuity, and moved the hotel inland and away from the ancestral resting place. Today, stone memorials and plaques mark the location of the re-interment site, a chilly reminder of the pain, anguish, and shame that could have been avoided if State and County officials and the private landowner/developer had only listened to those who demanded the hotel not be...