Honolulu Rail Project Highlights Burial Concerns
In Hawaii, bones are everywhere, and they’re nowhere.
In a centuries-old tradition that departs sharply from common mainland practices, Polynesians buried their dead in unmarked graves from the time they arrived in Hawaii, seeking to protect their loved ones’ spiritual power (mana) from theft.
The City and County of Honolulu’s $5.3 billion plan to construct a 20-mile elevated train line from West Oahu to downtown Honolulu, which would become the largest infrastructure project in Hawaii history, is almost certain to contact at one point or another.
How those burials are treated — especially in the culturally sensitive area of Kakaako — tells us a great deal about the relationship between Native Hawaiians and their government, not just in Honolulu but across the state. A public official who has direct control over what happens next seems resigned to the prospect of relocating bones.
That attitude concerns the Oahu Island Burial Council, which listed its many to the Federal Transit Administration. In April 2010, the council discouraged the state from allowing the city to conduct archaeological surveys in stages rather than all at once, and move forward with the rail plan in the interim. The council says this approach limits options for how to deal with burials.
“The OIBC cannot agree to a project plan that has placed our kupuna as a secondary after thought in the planning process,” the letter concluded.
State Historic Preservation Division Administrator Pua Aiu says the phased approach “makes more sense given that this is a project that is going to be built in phases, so it’s best to do the archaeology in phases.” She said similar approaches were employed in other linear projects like H-3, the Alii Highway on Hawaii Island and the multi-use coastal path on Kauai.
Native Hawaiian Legal Corporation Litigation Director Alan Murakami said the rail project’s failure to adequately consider burials is part of a worsening pattern that government agencies have followed in the decades since Hawaiian remains became a hot-button issue.
“These are major offenses against the legislative design that was put in place in 1990 and threatens the integrity of the program,” Murakami said, referring to the state’s Historic Preservation Program. “It would be a complete distortion of how the law is supposed to operate.”
A contentious fight over the construction of the Ritz Carlton at Honokahua in West Maui, where hundreds of burials were unearthed, led the state to amend of the Hawaii Revised Statutes. A program was established to preserve historic and cultural assets in the face of a changing society.
The law promotes burial preservation by requiring that the Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources have an opportunity to the effect of any proposed project on historic or prehistoric burial sites.
For previously identified burials, each island’s whether the iwi should be preserved in place or relocated. But when burials are during development, the preservation division has more latitude in making that decision on its own.
Archaeological surveys often don’t uncover all the burials on a site, Murakami said. But at least they make it possible to identify some, if not all, of the bones before any construction begins. If the surveys are phased, the council’s power is usurped as burials that should be identified prior to construction become inadvertent discoveries.
“The idea is that Hawaiians should have a decisive say whether burials should be protected or not. (But) in the last two decades SHPD has accelerated its interpretation of the law to in essence undercut that authority,” Murakami said. “If you’re sloppy about your archaeology, that’s where you start seeing this shift in power from the burial council to the SHPD staff.”
Murakami said conducting surveys in stages on the eve of construction puts extraordinary political pressure on SHPD to move the project forward.
Aiu agreed with Murakami that surveys don’t always find all the iwi, pointing to the proposed Ward Whole Foods Market that was slated to open near Kakaako before inadvertent discoveries stopped the project in its tracks.
Aiu said the burial council is focused specifically on iwi, while the division needs to look at the “bigger picture.” The Historic Hawaii Foundation has already published a list of that will be impacted by the rail project, and Aiu said moving the route mauka to Queen Street or King Street bring it to the edge or even into the heart of a historic district with buildings like the Hawaii Capitol and Iolani Palace. And because Kakaako is so packed with burials, there is no alignment that is guaranteed to avoid them, she said.
“Given the concentrations that we’ve found in Kakaako before, and given that on a project like this you have not only the post, you have trenching for utilities,” Aiu said. “I think that we’re going to be put into situations where we’re not going to be able to preserve in place.”
While the city has some flexibility in where it puts the footings for the elevated rail, it is constrained in many ways. Asked if she was concerned about her hands being tied by the project’s scale and the area’s limitations, Aiu said, “I think we know what’s coming down the road.”
“I’m hopeful that we don’t find huge numbers,” she said, “but we will have to deal with what we do find.”
