Ivory sales ban eyed in legislature

The ivory earrings have darkened with age, but they remain lovely emblems of a certain classic, understated island style. Carved by hand into the shape of mock orange blossoms, their value is enhanced in the eyes of collectors by the mark of Ming’s Jewelry, the Hawaii-founded business that closed in 1999.

“They have sentimental value because my father, who died last year, and his wife gave them to me 25 years ago,” said the earrings’ owner, Cathy Lee Chong. It’s been nearly that long since she put them on. “I don’t wear them anymore,” she said. “As my son, who is 13, says, the earrings represent elephants who were killed for their tusks.”

Elephants are still being killed for their tusks — more than ever, despite international bans on the ivory trade — in a recent resurgence of poaching fueled by Asian demand. An estimated 30,000 African elephants are slaughtered every year by poachers; the ivory is smuggled over borders and sold on the black market.

Ivory is a hot political issue locally this year. Two bills before the state Legislature, House Bill 2502 and Senate Bill 2647, propose to ban all sales of elephant ivory in Hawaii, which is the third-largest ivory market in the U.S. after New York and California, both of which have recently passed ivory bans. Also banned would be products made with body parts of other wildlife species, such as rhinoceroses, walruses and whales.

An investigation of Hawaii’s online ivory trade, in a report to be released today, World Wildlife Day, examined online advertising and sales figures from 47 Hawaii-­based sellers of ivory between Dec. 9 and 14. It found 4,661 products in stock or for sale, with a total value exceeding $1.22 million.

“Hawaii remains a major center of trade and must follow suit in enacting a prohibition on ivory sales,” concludes the report, published by the International Fund for Animal Welfare, the Wildlife Conservation Society, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Humane Society of the United States.

“At least 90 percent of the ivory being sold in Hawaii is black market,” said Tony Hunstiger, 64, a Honolulu vocational counselor who serves on the board of directors of the nonprofit Nsefu Wildlife Conservation Foundation. “The only way to stop the poaching is to kill the market with a blanket ban.”

The proposed Hawaii laws would eliminate a longstanding exception for African elephant ivory that entered the U.S. before 1989, when a law banning its importation was passed. This legal loophole has been allowing poached ivory to fraudulently enter the marketplace, Hunstiger said. “(Merchants) say it’s ‘genuine vintage ivory’ imported before the 1989 ban. If that were true, the sale would be legal, but there’s no way of confirming it.”

This situation “puts consumers at risk because they could be buying blood (poached) ivory when they don’t want to,” said Marjorie Ziegler, executive director of the Conservation Council for Hawai‘i, which has been lobbying for a state ban in a coalition with the Hawaiian Humane Society and other local and national organizations.

Confirming the age of an object requires tracing its provenance, or ownership, as far back as possible, said Stephen Salel, assistant curator of Japanese art at the Honolulu Museum of Art. “There’s documentation and then there are scientific methods, which would be invasive,” Salel said, adding that, out of concern for wildlife, the museum no longer collects ivory works. It owns mostly decorative ivory pieces, such as netsuke sculptures from the late Edo period in 19th-century Japan.

Most Hawaii ivory sellers fail to provide documentation of their pre-1989 import claims, and the documents that are provided fail to establish provenance, Hunstiger said.

Linda Lee, a Honolulu collector, argues that Ming’s ivory should be exempted from any ban.

“Nothing in ivory was produced by Ming’s after the first ban (of Indian elephant ivory) in 1975,” Lee told the Star-Advertiser.

As the bills currently stand, the only age-based exemption is for ivory antiques that can be documented as at least 100 years old: Jewelry by Ming’s, founded in 1941, wouldn’t make the cut.

AT THE Hawaii Collectors’ Expo at the Blaisdell Center Exhibition Hall in February, at least 10 booths offered a wide spectrum of nominally vintage ivory for sale.

On the high end were simple, elegant, slightly yellowed — or mellowed — pieces of Hawaii-made jewelry signed by Ming’s and John Roberts. Roberts was the top Honolulu carver in the 1930s-1950s, said Darlene Mandel of Cinderella’s, a Waimanalo consignment shop, holding up an ivory pikake-bud necklace bearing Roberts’ name.

William Warmboe, owner of an eponymous Burlingame, Calif., antiques shop, wore a stately Roberts necklace of large ivory maunaloa flowers. Other Ming’s jewelry in his booth included a silver-and-ivory leaf pin designed by Hawaii-born artist Isami Doi and plumeria and bird of paradise pieces that were dyed with tattoo ink, Warmboe said.

Other booths displayed teeth and tusks, some carved in scrimshaw style, as well as figurines of people, mermaids, sharks, lions, rhinoceroses, hippos and elephants.

Shiny white ivory jewelry filled the glass cases of Jewelry Kingdom, which has a store in the Waikiki Business Plaza. “My parents imported the ivory in the 1980s, right before the trade ban,” said Jerry Chan, 39. He invited shoppers to examine documents from the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service permitting the company’s importation of ivory before 1989.

But the documents permitted no way of telling whether this was the same ivory that was imported back in the day, stating only the number of “ivory jewelry” pieces in the lot and the countries of origin, such as Botswana or Congo.

A few aisles away, Herman “Uncle Helemano” Lee, who is of Native Hawaiian descent, voiced his concern that a Hawaii ban would interfere with his people’s traditional use of objects made from whale and walrus parts, the latter from Alaska.

Around his neck, Lee was wearing a large off-white pendant shaped like a blunt hook that curved out from his chest. “It is lei niho palaoa, fossilized walrus tusk carved into the tongue of defiance,” he said. “Why would they want to take this away from us?”

Actually, that is not an expressed purpose of either bill. While some opponents claim that a ban would result in the seizure of personal property, the bills prohibit the sale, purchase, trade or barter of covered objects, not their possession.

In addition, both bills contain exemptions for wildlife-derived objects used in traditional Native Hawaiian cultural practices.

Other vendors, Sylvia Kop and Don Nigro, were circulating through the exhibition hall distributing pamphlets and expressing opposition to the Hawaii ivory bills.

“I liquidate estates, and I have one-third of the ivory from Ming’s Hilo,” Kop said. She and Nigro, who deals in antiques, said that in their experience there isn’t much of a market for ivory in Hawaii, unless it’s Ming’s.

One reason they oppose the ban is that, while they support protecting wildlife, they think it will backfire. “It’s like Prohibition,” Nigro said. “Now it’s going to be forbidden, people will want to buy ivory.”

Hunstiger counters that a ban is the only thing that can save elephants now. He has witnessed the effects of poaching firsthand: In 2013, on his first visit to Zambia, he saw the corpse of a poached elephant with its tusks removed.

He was visiting the Zikomo Safari Camp, in which he had invested at the invitation of Victoria Wallace, a friend going back to 1978 when they worked in a restaurant in Nawiliwili, Kauai. The camp lies beside the river in the Luangwa Valley, adjacent to a national wildlife park, and is administered by the Nsefu Wildlife Conservation Foundation with a mission to preserve and protect wildlife species and habitat.

Elephants wander through the camp to eat the fruit of the thorn trees, Hunstiger said. In 2012, the Zambian president had banned the hunting of elephants, but he died in November and the interim president has lifted the ban.

“Someone immediately shot two old elephants right by our camp,” Hunstiger said.

Because ivory comes from dead elephants, regardless of when they died, it doesn’t matter to Chong that her earrings were made in the 1950s, long before the passage of any ivory bans. “I don’t feel right about them now,” she said. “So those earrings just sit in my jewelry box as a memento of the past.”

Her daughter, Jackie Mosteller, 24, has a slightly different take.

“I think if I inherited the earrings my mother was given, I would wear them to honor her and the legacy of my grandfather,” she said. But although she wears vintage furs from the 1930s-50s to keep warm in New York City, where she works as a children’s librarian, Mosteller said she would not buy new furs or vintage ivory.

Chong, 54, supports banning the sale of ivory in Hawaii.

“Financial profit at the expense of an animal species seems wrong to me,” she said. “The world is different now than it was 50 to 100 years ago, and we are more aware of our planet’s limited resources — including wildlife.”

Her thoughts carry a particular resonance in Hawaii, which, as Ziegler noted, has the most endangered species of any state. In September, the International Union for Conservation of Nature will hold its conference here, so this could be an opportune time for the islands to extend true aloha to elephants.