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Chapter 42. To See This Place Stay Sacred: The Education and Inspiration of Present and Future Generations
- University of Hawai'i Press
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503 42 To SeeThis Place Stay Sacred The Education and Inspiration of Present and Future Generations every time great progress was made in Hawaii’s treatment of leprosy, there was talk of closing Kalaupapa down. This happened in the 1920s when there was great hope in chaulmoogra oil. It happened again in the late 1940s, after the introduction of the sulfones as a cure for leprosy and the removal of many barriers by Lawrence Judd. The official abolition of the isolation policies in 1969 once again set the stage for concerns that Kalaupapa would be closed. Richard Marks: “My uncle Frank was a brilliant man, and we sat over there and talked about the future of Kalaupapa, about how do we keep Kalaupapa from closing down. Uncle Frank knew about the Park Service. He said maybe we should bring them in.”1 Bob Barrel related the following story: I was the Pacific Area director of the National Park Service from 1970 to 1980, and it’s during that time that the whole idea of Kalaupapa as a unit of the National Park System began. I should say, clearly, that the single person who’s most responsible is Richard Marks. . . . It all began, so far as I’m concerned , with Richard Marks. . . . The reason I say that is that there was a Study 504 chapter forty-two AdvisoryCommission for Kaloko-Honokohau National Historical Park, and we were holding meetings all around the state. We had a meeting topside Molokai one day and Richard Marks climbed out of Kalaupapa, came to the meeting, and spoke. What he said was that, although he was in favor of Kaloko-Honokohau Park, what he was most interested in was getting the National Park Service involved with Kalaupapa. . . . “Because,” said Richard, “We don’t believe that the State is going to honor their commitment to us to keep all of us here for the rest of our lives, as long as we wish to live here. . . . I’m afraid, we’re afraid, a lot of us are afraid that we won’t be able to stay here and this is our home, emotionally, our home.” Well, that led the Kaloko-Honokohau Advisory Commission to decidethat the next day we would all fly down there, which we did, in one of those old soup-plate airplanes that used to scare me to death. We fluttereddown to Kalaupapa—spent the whole day down there.2 Geraldine Bell: “My first impression of Kalaupapa was that it was an area like I had never seen before in Hawaii, very beautiful—the area and the people. The nice thing about it was that I had met, while there, Richard Marks, who had grown up with my older brothers and sisters.”3 Richard Marks gave the Kaloko-Honokohau Advisory Commission a tour of Kalaupapa. Almost all of the commission members were Native Hawaiians, including Iolani Luahine, a renowned kumu hula (hula master). Bob Barrel: “We looked not only at what the situation was in terms of the patients’lives there but also the Hawaiian history. I well remember Iolani Luahine, a member of the commission, standing on the rim looking down to the little lake in the crater and chanting and leaning way out over the rim into a strong wind, her red dress blowing in the wind . . . chanting, chanting in Hawaiian, hearing things, feeling things in that area where Hawaiians are buried. . . . She saw and heard things that we didn’t hear.” Richard Marks: “She said the mana was there and she could feel it. She was something special.” Bob Barrel: “We had a lot of Hawaiians on the Advisory Commission, so we had a lot of input there. That led, then, to a commitment by the National Park Serviceto make a study of alternatives . . . viewing the alternatives for management and looking carefully at what sort of things had to be preserved in the social sense, [54.163.62.42] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 18:54 GMT) To SeeThis Place Stay Sacred 505 what the rights of the patients would have to continue to be. . . . On the basis of that, I think, Patsy Mink introduced a bill to authorize a formal study with an advisory commission. Patsy Mink: “Governor Burns . . . said that he had had an overture from a foreign investor to buy the peninsula and, of course, he didn’t say anything further than that but that started me thinking, my goodness, if we don...