Native Hawaiians’ Remains Coming Home

As a Colorado law student in the 1980s, Edward Ayau hoped to use what he learned about American Indian tribal governments to improve the lives of fellow Native Hawaiians in his home islands.

He didn’t know his legal career would focus more on the dead than the living.

For the last decade, Ayau has been a key figure in a campaign that has returned 5,000 sets of ancestral Hawaiian remains from some of the nation’s most prestigious museums and schools, including the Smithsonian Institution, New York’s American Museum of Natural History, Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History and several Ivy League schools.

“It is our kuleana, our responsibility as living descendants,” he said. “We don’t have to know these people. What we have to know is that they are Hawaiians and they have been disturbed, and it’s our duty to take care of them.

“That’s the nature of aloha.”

Now, other indigenous Pacific Islanders, including the Chamorros of Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands, are following that example and launching similar repatriation efforts.

The vehicle is the 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. The law allows American Indians, Alaska Natives and Native Hawaiians to repossess human remains and cultural property from U.S. museums and the federal government.

On the mainland, five Pacific Northwest Indian tribes are using the law to claim the bones and skeletal fragments of the 9,000-year-old Kennewick Man, whose remains were found in the shallows of the Columbia River in 1996.

In Hawaii, the law has fueled the Native Hawaiian sovereignty movement, said Ayau, 36.

Removing bones from burial sites “robs the living of the mana of their ancestors--the spiritual essence of their people which goes to the very heart of their identity,” he said. “How can you expect people to stand tall when their foundation has been eroded?”

Repatriation efforts began after the 1988 unearthing of more than 1,000 Native Hawaiian remains by developers of a luxury resort in Kapalua, Maui, about 80 miles east of Honolulu.

Archeologists said the remains appeared to have been buried over the course of 1,000 years, ending about the time of Capt. James Cook’s 1778 arrival in the islands.

To Ayau, there was no more powerful symbol for the displacement Hawaiians felt from their native land.

“Imagine if 1,000 remains got dug out of Punchbowl [the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu],” he said. “Whoever did it would go to prison.”

After protests, the state paid Kapalua Land Co. $6 million to restore the burial ground and move the resort inland.

That situation drew attention to the thousands of Native Hawaiian remains in museum collections worldwide.

Ayau believes that racism fueled the scholarly pursuits that amassed such huge collections of remains. Scientists used the data to support flawed assumptions that whites were intellectually superior, he said.

But University of Tennessee anthropology professor Richard Jantz, one of the scientists suing for the right to study the Kennewick Man, said today’s researchers have nobler motives.

Ancient remains can shed light on evolutionary divergences, health status and activity patterns, and can provide evidence of violence and warfare, he said.

Jantz supports repatriation but said, “It seems that for any remains that are old--say, 1,000 years or more--there’s an extremely tenuous connection between these old remains and the living people.”

The law, co-sponsored by Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), recognized Hui Malama I Na Kupuna O Hawaii Nei--which means “Group Caring for the Ancestors of Hawaii”--as an organization representing Native Hawaiian repatriation interests.

Hui Malama since has obtained remains and artifacts from more than two dozen institutions, including UC Berkeley, Harvard University, Yale University and University of Pennsylvania.

Ayau is a member of Hui Malama and project director of Ola Na Iwi--”The Bones Live”--that is reburying 1,100 ancient remains from Oahu that were repatriated from Honolulu’s Bishop Museum.

Separate efforts by Hawaiian claimants are under way for the eventual reburial of more than 1,500 remains uncovered at the Marine Corps Base Hawaii in Kaneohe over the last 80 years and given to the Bishop Museum.

Ola Na Iwi’s reburial ceremonies are conducted by trained volunteers at secret locations. The remains are wrapped in Hawaiian tapa cloth and laid in hand-woven lauhala baskets, and are reburied as near to their original graves as possible.

Though it says it is not legally obligated to do so, the Bishop Museum has been working with Pacific Island governments and organizations to repatriate its collection of human remains.

In December, about 75 sets of ancient Chamorro remains collected in the early 20th century were repatriated to the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. possession about 3,700 miles southwest of Hawaii.

Commonwealth officials and the Bring Our Ancestors Home Foundation, a Chamorro group, also are inquiring about Chamorro remains at Chicago’s Field Museum.

When advising others about the law, Ayau warns them that repatriation takes an emotional toll.

“Hawaiians believe that when you relive this experience of what happened to these people, you take on a part of it,” he said. “In a lot of instances they removed the skulls from the rest of their bodies.

“It’s something we wouldn’t wish upon anybody, not even our worst enemy.”