U.S. Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell will be in Hawaii next week to help dedicate the newly designated Honouliuli National Monument in Kunia.
Jewell will be joined at Tuesday’s ceremony by Peggy O’Dell, deputy director of the National Park Service; U.S. Sens. Brian Schatz and Mazie Hirono; Carole Hayashino, president of the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawaii; University of Hawaii President David Lassner; representatives from Monsanto Co.; and other community leaders, the U.S. Department of the Interior said.
Announced by President Barack Obama last month, the new monument will encompass 155 acres at its former location in Kunia, but a general management plan for its development could take several years and needs funding, the National Park Service recently said.
The park service "tries to complete general management plans for new parks within a few years of their creation, but that is dependent on funding being made available," Craig Dalby, a spokesman for the park service’s Pacific West Region, said last month. "In the short term, the NPS will work with partners to provide limited opportunities for the public to visit the site, and to organize special events to recognize the site’s significant history."
Opened in 1943, Honouliuli Internment Camp was the last, largest and longest-used World War II confinement site in Hawaii. It held 320 internees, mostly second-generation Japanese-Americans, but also Japanese, German and Italian nationals, according to the park service.
The Kunia site was the largest prisoner-of-war camp in Hawaii, with nearly 4,000 POWs from Korea, Okinawa, Taiwan, Japan and Italy.
The former facility has come to symbolize Hawaii’s role in the discrimination that was directed against Americans of Japanese descent after the Dec. 7, 1941, attack and America’s entry into World War II.
"Going forward, it’s going to be a monument to a painful part of our history so that we don’t repeat the mistakes of the past," Obama said when he designated Honouliuli. What the site eventually will include still needs to be determined.
Monsanto donated 116 acres in the gulch and 7 acres at the top of the gulch. The park service said an additional 31 acres of Monsanto land would be protected through conservation easements or land acquisition.
Although a 2014 Honouliuli Gulch and Associated Sites draft study prepared by the park service said the then-proposed national monument or historic site would be about 440 acres, the park service — which will manage the monument — refined that number to 155 acres.
The national monument will not include 285 acres of adjacent University of Hawaii land considered in the draft study to facilitate access, the park service’s Dalby said.
"However, the University of Hawaii and the National Park Service have signed an agreement to assure public access to the national monument," Dalby said.
