“Why is this sacred but that is not sacred?” “Is Kaho`olawe deserving of focus if Mauna Kea and Haleakala and Kilauea are excluded?” “Is sacred land separate from knowledge, chants, stories, heiaus?” “The bombing of Kaho`olawe has been stopped, but they are still bombing Makua Valley on Oahu, so why not film there?” These are the questions Native Hawaiians ask me as I make the rounds in search of understanding of their struggle to strengthen their long, deep, but battered connections to their islands and their traditional culture.
On my second research trip in February, a Hawaiian lawyer asked me, “What do you mean by sacred?” These are hard questions for a journalist to answer. I’m supposed to be asking the questions! But this is what happens to the outsider who probes for information about closely held secret knowledge. Past history has shown native people that it is a huge risk to be open about these subjects. The best of intentions often have unintended consequences.
Pualani Kanahele, a highly respected elder and hula master, asked me, “How can you assure me that your work will not result in harm to our sacred places?” My reply that I take this question seriously and will do everything I can to make sure that our work helps and does not harm was not a good enough answer for her. “It is your responsibility to answer that question to my satisfaction,” she replied.
My old friend, Palikapu Dedman, talked easily about his role in Kaho`olawe’s history and his uneasy feelings about the state of the movement, which arise mostly because he’s concerned about the issues that confront the Big Island of Hawaii right now — and there are many. He took me to the `Ahu `Ena Heiau near the King Kamehemeha Kona Beach Hotel in Kailua-Kona, where the Sheraton chain recently bought a 60s era hotel in the middle of the tourism madness of Kona. The site of Hawaii’s capital from 1812-19, there are burials all around, but the hotel stages a hula luau show every night with the sacred heiau as the background, part of the stage set, and the gates to the property are locked at 10 PM. Palikapu coordinated a demonstration last fall at the site and beached a red fiberglass double-hulled canoe right in the middle of the scene, which rankles the hotel and makes Pali smile.
“I tell students: aloha — you have it at home — nurture and protect something, a forest, your water, a place, that feeling,” says Pali as we walk the beach. “Young people should take on an issue, fight it all the way, learn it every step, eat and sleep it, until it becomes part of you — not just a demonstration and you go home. Do that and you then have experience and lessons for your entire life.”
“I want policy, law, legislation — so we don’t have to write letters asking permission to worship in our church. To be forced to ask permission of someone who now owns the land and is not of our race and religion is a racist act.”
These are the hard lessons learned from a lifetime of struggle for native rights, and one island was a particularly powerful teacher.
The people who are focusing on Kaho`olawe have their eyes on a prize of international significance. There are problems to be sure — not the least of which is all of the unexploded ordnance that litters the island, even after a $350 million multi-year clean-up. However, the reconciliation of human and nature, of present with past, is the daunting challenge we all face. Tackling it is messy.
Davianna McGregor, a member of PKO and a Professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of Hawaii, sees the Kaho`olawe story as “the rebirth of the sacred” and asserts that the long struggle was not anti-military but pro-Hawaiian, and that the value and practice of aloha aina has been central all along — love the land, care for the land. “We are planning for the future of Kaho`olawe as a sacred place, asking how to bring the island back into the proper realm,” she says, “how to be when we go there, the protocols, rededication of sites, calling back our gods of nature, to provide a place for people to be immersed in the elements and honor the land as sacred.”
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