Skye Razon-Olds’ circle of relatives has been struggling to bury her ancestors since before he was born. Now, at 32, she also has a warrior, part of the long struggle to obtain thousands of iwi kupuna, or local Hawaiian ancestral remains, from the hands of the colonizers and the tombs to which they belong.
Countless Indigenous burial sites have been desecrated since the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii in 1893. Some were disturbed as a result of land-use planning, but many were deliberately exhumed by white anthropologists and sent to the Bishop Museum, where scientists who consider Hawaii a “racial group” laboratory studied them to delve into sectarian pseudosciences, adding eugenics, the so-called “science” of creating “perfect” human beings.
For decades, the Bishop Museum, which remains Hawaii’s premier cultural history museum, a collector of iwi kupuna, many of which came from the Mokapu Peninsula, now better known as the home of the Hawaii Marine Corps base. The museum’s director even presented rewards for the remains of local Hawaiians, turning the tomb flight into a treasure hunt. The sand dunes on the beaches of Mokapu proved to be temporarily an abundant playground for scavengers.
In total, the iwi, or skeletal remains, of no less than 3000 babies, adolescents and adults were kidnapped in Mokapu and donated to the Bishop Museum between 1915 and 1993. For much of this period, the museum lent the collection to anthropologists. study, adding eugenicists and other racial “scientists”.
“Our black and brown bones were not treated as human remains,” Razon-Olds told SFGATE. “For archaeologists, it’s just a fun way to see and learn, and you know, it’s like a compliment for them to dig up our family. “
The maritime coastline of the Mokapu Peninsula, on the windward side of Oahu, is the location of Hawaii’s largest desecrated burial site. More than a century later, the iwi kupuna (ancestral skeletal remains of Hawaii) that have been re-entered.
Mokapu is the largest burial ever desecrated by Americans in Hawaii; however, such grave robberies are not isolated cases. This history of systematic dehumanization is an ongoing source of anger, frustration and pain for indigenous communities. In 1990, driven by the tireless efforts of indigenous activists, the federal government passed a landmark law that forces universities, museums, government agencies, and other establishments to return their collections of indigenous remains and cultural artifacts, “repatriating” people’s skeletons to their descendants for burial.
The paintings have progressed slowly. Between 1990 and 2020, U. S. establishments reported possessing the remains of only about 200,000 Indians; 116,857 of them have still been returned.
Razon-Olds is part of a new generation that is pushing for the burial of the Mokapu iwi; her great-aunt became the first advocate in the case in the 1980s. Officially, the bodies discovered on the Mokapu Peninsula are among the 82,000 returned to their descendants: in 1998, much of the Bishop Museum’s iwi collection was legally transferred to an organization of 21 local Hawaiian organizations that come with cultural organizations and descendants, such as Razon – The Family of Elders.
But efforts to re-enter the iwi were hampered by disagreements between the 21 teams and with the military. By law, all rights holders will have to achieve an absolute consensus on what to do with leftovers; no one or organization can make a resolution for everyone. Now, two decades after the negotiations, the remains of thousands of other people are still sitting in boxes around the Marine Corps base.
“All iwi kupuna, we are connected, we have a connection with Mokapu,” Razon-Olds told SFGATE. “It’s an incredibly heavy responsibility. “
The Bishop Museum was founded in 1889 by Charles Bishop, an American businessman and citizen of the Kingdom of Hawaii, in memory of his late wife, Hawaiian Princess Bernice Pauahi Bishop.
The museum introduced payment for the indigenous remains in 1912, but it was the museum’s director and Yale anthropologist, Herbert Gregory, who, after beginning his tenure in 1919, began providing the museum’s resources to visiting anthropologists. At the time, many scientists—numbering a significant number of eugenicists—found Hawaii desirable because of its unlimited multiracial population, calling it a “racial laboratory. “
On the windward side of Oahu, more than 1,500 iwi kupuna (hawaiian ancestral skeletal remains) have been unearthed from the coastal sand dunes of the Mokapu Peninsula between Kuau (also known as Pyramid Rock) and Ulupau Crater. The remains of infants, teenagers, adults and the elderly were removed from their last resting places in a series of excavations and remote discoveries from 1915 to 1993.
Visiting researchers wanted to use the museum’s collection of remains, as well as the physical measurements of the island’s natives, to try to solve the “Pacific problem,” a buzzword for understanding the origin of the Polynesian race and defining a “pure” Hawaiian. Such “research” was popular among classical anthropologists for decades; The Bishop Museum has gained investments and established partnerships with leading cultural institutions, adding the Rockefeller Foundation, Yale, the University of Hawaii, and the Carnegie Institution, to paintings on the “problem. “
In 1920, Gregory opened the doors of the museum to eugenicist Louis Sullivan, who worked at the American Museum of Natural History with Henry Osborn, one of the founders of the American Eugenics Society. With Osborn’s guidance, Sullivan measured and cataloged more than 10,000 Native Hawaiians, living and dead, as well as taking blood samples and measuring skulls from children at a museum-related school. The museum also provided Sullivan with an ability to “manage the natives” and convince them to be part of his studies.
The Bishop Museum continued to collect human remains for decades, lending them to anthropologists who sought to racially characterize local Hawaiians. In fact, most of the Bishop Museum’s Mokapu iwi collection was discovered between 1938 and 1957, when the Bishop Museum and the University of Hawaii conducted large-scale excavations. (More graves would be disturbed when the army began to use the dunes as advertising for sand mining. )
The Bishop Museum confronted its role in selling racism in a “(Re)generations” exhibition last year. He presented the equipment used in the pseudosciences of phrenology and anthropometry, as well as some images and busts from Sullivan’s collection.
In the 1940s, anthropologist Charles Snow took over much of the studies on the Bishop Museum’s collection of Mokapu remains. He and his team separated the iwi into piles of teeth, skulls, spines and pelvis, to measure and categorize them. later galvanize a debate over the number of Americans included in the collection; Mavens bones come from the remains of about 1,500 to 3,000 other people or more.
“The recovery of the skeleton from the Mokapu sand dunes provided an opportunity to conduct clinical research into the physical characteristics of Hawaiians who lived and died before coming into contact with Europeans, thus adding a bankruptcy to our wisdom about their racial heritage,” Snow wrote in his 1974 eBook, titled “Early Hawaiians: An Initial Examination of the Skeletal Remains of Mokapu, Oahu. “adding and black Americans.
“The photographs in this eBook are misleading to me, seeing piles of bones thrown and combined on other tables with other measuring tools,” Razon-Olds said. “It is nothing but hewa [sin, offense] and desecration. “
For Native Hawaiians, the trauma of this type of clinical cruelty goes beyond the dehumanization of human bodies. Those ancient remains involve mana, a spiritual force that can be found in both other people and objects; this force, theyArray is stolen when the iwi are taken.
“Damaging bones to take measurements or DNA samples, those are things that happen when other people need to examine our kupuna,” or our ancestors, Razon-Olds said. “Our iwi, our ancestral remains, never touch the light. “
Native Hawaiians lived on the Mokapu Peninsula for 500 to 800 years before Captain Cook arrived in 1778. The native Hawaiians who lived in Mokapu thrived thanks to the generosity that surrounded them, adding taro and sweet potato crops, and their own sustainable fish ponds. Now known as Marine Corps Base Hawaii, Mokapu is inaccessible to the general public.
The Federal Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA, was enacted in 1990, with the purpose of returning human remains and artifacts to their descendants throughout the United States. The law gives priority to direct descendants who can justify an uninterrupted tree circle of relatives. This is almost unlikely for Hawaiians, who prefer nameless and, infrequently, secret burials. They that mana remains in human bones after the death of the person; Historically, many have been buried in unmarked, unmarked tombs, without identifying objects, to prevent rival chiefs or families from stealing the manna of an express person.
“It was written for Native American tribes and Alaska Natives,” says June Cleghorn, senior manager of cultural resources at the Marine Corps base in Mokapu, who repatriated the museum’s collection under NAGPRA. Cleghorn is of Hawaiian descent. She and two of her workers manage archaeological sites and historic buildings around the base.
NAGPRA allowed Edward Ayau (second from left) and various other Hawaiian organizations, such as the Hawaii Bureau of Affairs, to bring home iwi kupuna from museums and universities around the world. Mana Caceres also appears next to him. In this previous year, they brought 58 iwi kupuna from Europe.
Instead of linear descendants, the Marine Corps accepted claims from individuals, families, and organizations that can only show that they were affiliated with Mokapu in some way. Twenty-one teams came to the table; in 1998 legal ownership of the remains was transferred to each of them, each with their own opinions and interests.
It was about the last time most agreed on something. Until 2018, the Bishop’s Museum preserved the remains. Then, after a two-decade stalemate, the iwi were handed over to the Marine Corps, which stored them.
One of the biggest problems is where to re-enter the iwi, according to Mana Cáceres, who has been a member of the Oahu Island Burial Council, a public company tasked with cultural preservation, since 2016. The Marine Corps, for example, proposed a plan for a mass burial site near the base, where descendants can make a stopover outside of a limited area. However, some applicants said they liked the bones to be buried separately, in the country from which they were removed.
There is also a war of words over what deserves to happen when new debris is discovered at the Marine Corps base. The Marine Corps has not made a public announcement related to new discoveries since 1994, the discovery of new iwi “has taken place and continues to take place periodically,” Cleghorn admitted to SFGATE, while saying the military was following the law.
On the windward side of Oahu, more than 1,500 iwi kupuna (Hawaiian ancestral skeletal remains) have been unearthed from the 1915 sand dunes off the coast of Mokapu, a peninsula that juts into the Pacific for a few miles long and divides Kaneohe Bay from Kailua Bay.
While Razon-Olds claims the military has the strength to buy the newly discovered remains with the other bones, Cáceres argues that the Marine Corps is breaking the law by not making the new findings public.
It’s hard to know exactly what else the plaintiffs and the military disagree on. For 20 years, negotiations have been conducted behind closed doors. Most families and organizations have accepted a kapu, or ban, from talking to the public about negotiations.
“The number one explanation for why thousands of kupuna are waiting for Mokapu to be buried again [is] because the living agree,” Cáceres told SFGATE.
Hoping to bring more transparency to the process, Razon-Olds began providing updates on closed-door negotiations at public meetings of the Island of Oahu Funeral Council. The letter said public updates can simply result in “prosecution and prosecution,” and said it violated an “agreement with the Marine Corps. “(Cleghorn told SFGATE that the Marine Corps does not enforce any kind of gag order. )
“In fact, the pride and ego of some determined candidates prevented us from replanting our kupuna in the aina [earth],” Cáceres told SFGATE. “The only thing I can think of is that the original plaintiffs are embarrassed. to let other local Hawaiians know that it took so long to bury iwi kupuna. “
In fact, the repatriation of iwi kupuna is imaginable under NAGPRA, according to Edward Halealoha Ayau, former CEO of Hui Malama I Na Kupuna O Hawaii Nei. (Hui Malama was one of Mokapu’s first iwi claimants, but retired 23 years ago, when families have become territorial. )Since the federal law was passed, Ayau said, Hui Malama and other organizations have been able to recover 6,000 iwi kupuna.
“It’s hard for us to bring home to our ancestors globally and the largest collection of Hawaiian remains on a single site is still waiting to be re-entered,” Ayau told SFGATE.
It is known how many more iwi kupuna have been desecrated in all the islands of Hawaii, but advertising and real estate advances continue to dig them up. Ayau also says he and other activists still find remains in museums and establishments abroad.
“Every time we celebrate his return home, we notice that there are more and more of them. So we keep looking,” Ayau told SFGATE.
Ayau feels the wonderful duty to regain the iwi kupuna and give them the dignity of a position to rest. Because local Hawaiians do not have classic prayers for burial after a tomb robbery, the Ayau kumu, or master, created new prayers, asking forgiveness from the ancestors. his descendants for allowing the desecration of his remains and providing humility to appease his wrath.
Earlier this year, Mana Cáceres participated in a handover ceremony, in which eight iwi kupuna from the Ubersee-Museum Bremen in Germany were returned to representatives of the Hawaii Affairs Bureau. The OHA has been involved in 120 repatriation cases over the past 30 years.
Meanwhile, Razon-Olds feels a wonderful urgency to involve younger generations in the repatriation process. Many of the deceased who led the rate are now elderly, he told SFGATE. But even after the burial of the Mokapu iwi, there is no end in sight to the enduring trauma of Hawaii’s colonization and development.
“There is iwi kupuna everywhere. Wherever you grow up, you have the possibility to disturb, to desecrate,” Razon-Olds said. “As long as there is structure anywhere in Hawaii, our work will continue. “
Although he knows that there will still be paintings to make for his children, he hopes that the Mokapu iwi will be buried in his life, so as not to pass on their duty.
“Since I know my young people will also be advocates of iwi kupuna, I hope they don’t have to face something as heavy as Mokapu,” he says. “It’s hard. It’s hard for my Aunt Nalani. I know it’s hard for all the other proponents of iwi kupuna.