Historic preservation and burial laws would work fine if they were followed

We share the frustrations over historic preservation review of Kawaiahao Church’s construction project and the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transportation expressed on your editorial pages.

However, we disagree with your editorial position that the historic preservation laws need to be reviewed and clarified ("Laws protecting iwi need review," Star-Advertiser, Our View, Oct. 5).

We believe that conscientious application of existing laws might have led to very different outcomes in these two high-profile cases.

The case of HART is fairly straightforward. The Oahu Island Burial Council pointed out years ago that the archaeological inventory survey is designed to be part of the planning process, not part of the construction process as HART was proposing. The Hawaii Supreme Court’s unanimous decision in Paulette Kaleikini’s case confirms this.

The situation at Kawaiahao is less straightforward. The unknowns stem from multiple factors including these:

» It is possible that Hawaiians lived and were buried there before the church or its cemetery were constructed. Many traditional Hawaiian sites and burials have been found in Kakaako, and there is no reason why there shouldn’t have been some in the vicinity of what is today Kawaiahao Cemetery.

» The boundaries of the church property and cemetery have changed over time. However, what was known when Kawaiahao Church drew up construction plans was that family cemetery plots at Kawaiahao were mapped by land surveyors in the early 1900s. Many of the cemetery plots they mapped fall within the current construction footprint.

State Historic Preservation Division (SHPD) staff reviewed Kawaiahao Church’s proposal and internally recommended an archaeological inventory survey. For reasons that we don’t know, the staff recommendation was ignored and the project moved forward without the survey.

This led, initially, to the incongruous situation where archaeologists working under the jurisdiction of SHPD "inadvertently discovered" several dozen coffins and their remains from "unmarked burials" located within the family cemetery plots shown on the survey map!

Subsequently, jurisdiction was transferred to the Department of Health, which regulates cemeteries. Under its jurisdiction, several hundred more coffin burials have been removed by the archaeologists, along with many human remains not associated with coffins.

In our view, Dana Naone Hall is correct to question whether these human remains found outside of coffins are part of the cemetery.

Had an archaeological inventory survey been done — and it could have been done regardless of whether it was required by SHPD — it might have been designed along the lines of one done several years ago in a corner of the cemetery.

Using a technique that has been applied successfully elsewhere in Kakaako, the archaeologists stripped off the sod and cleaned the surface of the dirt. The tops of several grave shafts appeared as dark rectangles in the brown soil. Archaeologists completed that inventory survey by counting the graves. They didn’t disturb a single coffin.

We believe that an inventory survey like this could have yielded a reliable estimate of how many graves in each family plot were going to be disturbed by the construction. It could also have guided the archaeologists in their search for pre-cemetery Hawaiian remains outside the cemetery grave shafts. Project planners and state regulators would have known what construction would unearth, and the church could have consulted more effectively with the families.

All of this could have happened within the framework of existing laws and regulations.

Hawaii’s historic preservation and burial laws are not broken. The troubles faced by HART and Kawaiahao Church came about because the existing historic preservation laws were not followed or honored. The courts’ focus on SHPD and its failure to follow its own rules correctly emphasizes that agency’s crucial role.