The ongoing fight to protect iwi kūpuna: An interview with Clare Apana
by Rosalie Luo, Volunteer Organizer | Reading time: 7.75 minutes
“According to Mary Kawena Pukui, for Kānaka Maoli, the highest kuleana that we can have is to mālama iwi kūpuna. It is essential to our connection to the land and to who we are.” – Clare Apana
I had the immense honor of sitting down with Clare Apana, president of Mālama Kakanilua and long-time Sierra Club Maui Group leader, to talk about the tremendously difficult process she and other protectors have undergone to protect iwi kūpuna (ancestor burials) on the island of Maui. The Grand Wailea Resort in Maui intends to expand its operations on the burial sites despite the ongoing backlash they have received from Kānaka Maoli community groups who have been granted intervention in legal proceedings.
According to Apana, one of the most important aspects of the struggle has been the lack of transparency despite the importance of this contested case proceeding. Apana and other protectors are gearing up for an upcoming Maui Planning Commission meeting on March 12 and we encourage Sierra Club members to support them by attending the meeting and learning more about their struggle against Blackstone Real Estate's Grand Wailea Resort. The meeting will have two relevant items on the agenda, including the intervention with the Grand Wailea expansion and an objection to the developers receiving a permit to change water meters.
300 ancient Hawaiian remains were moved from ocean sand dunes and are said to be in this constructed burial preserve, set in a convenient location near a massive wing of the Grand Wailea Resort and a parking structure. Photo: Lucienne de Naie
RL: What are some of the most important lessons you’ve experienced in this process?
CA: In general, one of the most important realizations for us has been that sometimes kuleana comes in surprising ways to have purposes that we do not foresee. Sometimes kuleana isn’t only about protecting our kupuna, but it's also about protecting the integrity of fair and just public processes. In this case, the very first example of an unforeseen protection of the public rights was when the hearing officer thought to use the emergency rules to close our case to not only the public and the press, but to the interveners themselves. What happened was the press objected and in a Supreme Court decision it was upheld that this contested case shall be open to the public.
RL: What do you think is often not well-understood about how difficult this process has been for protectors?
CA: When we started the intervention application, none of us had ever been really intervenors before, and we wrote our own application. Our primary intentions were the needs for protecting the ancestral burials that have already been tremendously desecrated to build this hotel, and through the years of existence, more and more of our ancestral burials have been taken from their resting places, even hidden and lied about their existence by this resort. We thought we will bring the truth and they can document where our kupuna are buried on this property and protect them from further harm and they can also tell the truth about how many and where are ancestral burials have been taken off of this property. We thought that would bring some justice and protection to those and their families who had given up so much already on this property, as well as an acknowledgement of how inhumane it is to desecrate and remove another cultures' ancestral remains to build a hotel resort.
Maui is the only place you can be an intervenor on an SMA (Shoreline Management Access) permit. It’s run by coastal zone management laws, which are federal laws, but are given to county entities to run (like the Maui Planning Department) and potentially change the laws to make it easier for developers. It’s also very difficult to do a contested case. To become an intervenor (to intervene in the proposed project, for instance), you have to show that you have jurisdiction, which in our case is because of the hundreds of burials that have been found, disturbed, displaced, or unreported on the property. We’ve been in this case since January 21, 2020, so we just passed the fourth-year anniversary and never expected it to be this long. We initially finished the hearings in 2020 but then in June 2021, we were forced to reopen and do another hearing at the request of the hotel (Grand Wailea) so they could put in a Ka Paʻakai study, which is intended to show if there’s any harm done to a traditional practitioner by the proposed project. The Grand Wailea hired an archaeology firm to do this study, and then we decided to do our own study with the help of grants from the People’s Fund and many professionals who helped us do ethnographic studies and historical research on the area. But shockingly, during the 2021 hearing, the hotel did not even send their experts to present their findings of their study. In fact, their representative openly admitted that he had not read the study.
RL: What have you uncovered about the resort in terms of environmental violations?
Throughout this entire process, our tremendous attorney Dr. Bianca Isaki, amongst many others, have worked tirelessly to uncover the many environmental violations on the property. We have 300 pages outlining the many violations that they have. Some of them directly affect our cultural practices. The SMA laws call for restoration, for instance, but we haven’t seen any restoration planned for our iwi kūpuna, for our fisheries, or for the land in which they keep building upon our burials. Instead the hotel has desecrated them. The month before our hearing date, the hotel came up with a need for another permit to put in grease trap interceptors. They tried to hide the fact that they were in violation since 2002 and the county assessed them a fine of $125,000 for all those years of polluting. When they finally decided to change their grease trap interceptors, they found ancestral burials underneath the kitchen floor.
RL: What would you like readers to know about the hearing, and how could you use support?
CA: We could use support on the first agenda (the expansion) when people come to the hybrid meeting because the commissioners are aware that people are watching. When there are fewer people watching online or in-person, they're more apt to treat us badly, like that happened our first time, just two months ago. We were even accused of grandstanding, trying to delay for time, and all these things. Two months ago, they heard our water case for the first time, and the hotel said, “Well, they're just trying to stall…” but the hotel caused this case to go an extra year and a half. The second agenda item is related because they’re not getting the permits for the expansion case without this water meter.
For this case, I feel it's been so important to keep these interventions and contested cases open to the public, because sometimes that's all we have. We cannot go into a full fledged lawsuit because of the prohibitive costs. And if they keep us out of there, like doing things like making it so that we couldn't even attend our own case, the public couldn't come, the media couldn't come. But they allow the people with more money to be able to come in and break the procedural rules. Then, where will the public be?
Generally, I want people to know that developers should not be allowed to build on known burial grounds and the rights of the public should always be held in bringing information and to question decisions made by departments, department heads, and government agencies. More importantly, we want people to just stop digging. Please stop giving permission to dig up our ancestors.
RL: On that note, can you describe the importance of iwi kūpuna to Kānaka Maoli?
CA: According to Mary Kawena Pukui, it is the highest kuleana that we can have this to mālama. And so in my estimation, it is essential to our connection to the land, and to our who we are. It is really essential. It'll always be in our DNA. Because nobody ever taught me. As I've done it more, it's like I remember more and more, but not because anybody taught me. As an organization and as protectors, our primary goal is seeking protection and respect for our ancestral burials. We have never lost sight of that, and as a matter fact it is probably what is allowed us to keep going in this long process with this resort.
(Excerpts from this interview have been edited for clarity and conciseness.)
To learn more about the case and Mālama Kakanilua, visit malamakakanilua.com. For details about the March 12 hearing, you can view the agenda here.
About Clare Apana:
Clare Apana, a native of Wailuku, Maui, is a cultural practitioner, teacher, and retired physical therapist who is deeply involved with cultural preservation issues throughout Maui. She received the Sierra Club’s Onipa‘a Award in 2013 for her long dedication to advocacy in protecting Maui’s traditional cultural landscapes and burial areas. As a descendant of the sand dune burials on Maui, she has been standing up against developers in court to stop the desecration of illegal sand mining on Hawaiian burial grounds. She is also the founder of the Hawaiian burial conference held across the Hawaiian islands, which incorporates speeches of Hawaiian burial descendants, Hawaiian lawyers and other Kānaka Maoli advocates.