Symbiotic Commemoration: The Stories of Kalaupapa

Hawaii is not the first place that comes to mind when considering the phenomenon of dark tourism, a term meant to define the preservation, marketing and organized visitation of sites associated with suffering and death. ¹ Since the eighteenth century, the Hawaiian islands have been represented in exploration chronicles, novels, television series, films and tourism promotional material as an earthly paradise (even though most visitors currently spend the bulk of their time in the concrete jungle of Waikiki). ² One of the least visited and least developed Hawaiian islands is Molokai, tucked between Oahu and Maui. Molokai's tourism literature promotes the usual assortment of tropical amenities: a fancy Sheraton Resort, golf courses, quaint tropical bed-and-breakfast places, and one unique feature—a former colony for people with leprosy, called Kalaupapa. ³Since 1980 the inaccessible peninsula, previously a legally mandated place of banishment, has been on the National Park Service's (NPS) roster of historic sites. ⁴ By buying park permits visitors (other than invited guests) now purchase passage to the settlement, both a home for the remaining residents and a graveyard for thousands of people who died in medicopenal exile over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. ⁵

While the history of Hawaii's exclusionary leprosy policies has been analyzed and retold in many accounts, both scholarly and popular, the ways in which that dark past has come to be represented and marketed at this National Historic Park and beyond its borders has received comparatively little attention. Particularly intriguing are the agents and processes that produce on-site and off-site narratives of a disease, its management and its people—those touched by leprosy and stigmatization, as well as those who fought and continue to fight to improve the lives of people with the disease. Drawing from a range of sources (archival and park service records of Kalaupapa's emergence and maintenance as a park, site observations, interviews with persons involved in its interpretation and management, and transcripts of pre-recorded interviews with site residents), ⁶ I analyze how this site of involuntary segregation, neglect and death operates simultaneously as a unique tourist destination, a sacred place of Christian pilgrimage, a focus for ongoing human rights struggles, and a symbol of community integrity and human dignity. ⁷

Officially designated and interpreted sites of memory such as Kalaupapa National Historic Park are shaped by the state's framing of the past. ⁸ But as a growing body of heritage scholars argues, state-directed historic preservation, no matter how carefully orchestrated, is vulnerable to unofficial and oppositional forces, as well as subject to historically contingent political agendas. Favored by analysts, who question the state's supposed lock-hold on historic representation, the metaphoric language of "contested memory" and "layers of meaning" provides convenient shorthand terms for memorialization's instability and its evolving nature. Yet these images are more rigid than the phenomena they aim to analyze: "contest" entails competition, and consequently the implication of winners and losers (the winner controlling historical interpretation, at least for a time); and "layers" suggests scenarios in which one interpretation overlays another, obscuring if not canceling out previous representations. While the preservation and presentation of Kalaupapa's history could be described as multilayered and contested, the concept of symbiosis offers a more flexible and less deterministic way to conceive of how the past is represented, not only at this site, but also in other forms and locations of public remembrance.

The biological model of symbiosis suits the dynamic character of public history, and it moves away from the top-down model of state memory management. If, as Samuel argues, memory is protean ("historically conditioned, changing colour and shape according to the emergencies of its time"), ⁹ its responsive and adaptive capacities are best captured by likening commemorative agents to symbiotic organisms. The relationship between two distinct entities (in this case the current residents of the settlement and those agencies, official and otherwise, which interpret and represent Kalaupapa's...