The Windward View
Repatriating the Hawaiian Kingdom
Hiʻilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart
“See? How can you not believe that the ancestors are guiding you? You remember what I told you last time, right?” I was sitting in my dimly lit faculty office on Yale University’s campus, boxes half-unpacked from my recent move from Austin, Texas, and speaking on the phone with Edward Halealoha Ayau, a Kanaka ʻŌiwi cultural practitioner and repatriation specialist.
Ayau runs Project Iwi Kuamoʻo, an organization that builds community capacity for the protection and care of Native Hawaiian ancestral remains and funerary objects. Part of this work includes identifying items illicitly held by institutions outside of Hawaiʻi and facilitating their rightful return. When he describes this work, Ayau—a lawyer by training—speaks in hard, clipped sentences that reflect the effort it takes to convince universities and museums to give back what they have stolen. These processes often take years of stubborn negotiation and meticulously researched paperwork to “prove” provenance; sometimes simply waiting for staff turnover at these institutions helps, too, when new administrators are inclined towards return. For over thirty years now, Ayau has brought thousands of ancestors home.
I hadn’t expected to be calling him again so soon. When I explained to him that Yale’s Peabody Museum had a collection of Native Hawaiian teeth and mandibles in its possession, he asked me to repeat myself. “Yale gave everything back years ago,” he said.
“There’s more,” I responded.
How do you make peace with ghosts?
If the news I delivered was a surprise, it perhaps shouldn’t have been. Western institutions like Yale are lousy with the dead, due to aggressive nineteenth-century collection policies used to scaffold the scientific study of “racial difference.” I had not fully comprehended how those histories of collection and objectification set the tone for my presence in the academy, as both specter of and substructure for my eventual equitable inclusion, until I stumbled upon my own ancestors. Since then, I have become increasingly attuned to the relationship between ghosts and homeland. What does it mean to live a life far from one’s own ancestors? How do you make sense of it when you unexpectedly find them in the diaspora, too, also longing to return? How do you make peace with ghosts?
For most of my life, I had assumed that haunting was a personal matter. However, as Unangax̂ scholar Eve Tuck and artist C. Ree suggest in their essay “A Glossary of Haunting,” ghosts are also contextual beings. “Individuals are haunted,” they write, “but so are societies.” If the violence of settler colonization sets the context for an Indigenous spectral present, then historical efforts to exterminate Native peoples have, paradoxically, produced a kind of indelibility to settler society. Even though we are meant to die out, we are also foundational to the myth of manifest destiny, and so the idea of us remains as a lamentable—but necessary—historical fact, even when we are so clearly still here. Tuck and Ree go on to argue that “haunting doesn’t hope to change people’s perceptions, not does it hope for reconciliation...for ghosts, the haunting is the resolving, it is not what needs to be resolved.” Put another way, trying to settle the matter may be counterintuitive when our refusal to disappear sets the conditions for haunting.
The tenor of such forms of Indigenous haunting, however, shifts when it skips across continents and oceans to become the strange neither-here-nor-there of the Indigenous diaspora. A five-thousand-mile distance produces its own strange forms of grief: not only for persons lost, but also a life lived without the thick surround of one’s own ghosts.
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The remains of these elite female warriors would remain there, unnoticed, until around 2010, when Ayau began working the case.
Ayau and I had met only a couple of months earlier, when I interviewed him about the twelve iwi poʻo (human skulls) that he had reinterred in October 2020 at the Nuʻuanu Pali State Wayside Park, a scenic lookout point that straddles the Koʻolau mountain range on the island of Oʻahu. Once a precarious mountain pass, the park now sits above a pair of twinned tunnels completed in 1961, which superseded the old highway connecting the towns of Kaneʻohe, Kailua, and Waimanalo to the city of Honolulu. Long before that, however, it was the location of Kaleleaka‘anae, a significant and bloody battle that secured Kamehameha the Great’s rule over the Hawaiian archipelago in 1795. Despite the indignity of its transformation into a tourist backdrop and traffic jam, the thoroughfare still stuns: the sprawling Windward view that bleeds into turquoise ocean, the sheer, wind-battered cliffs that plunge into emerald valleys, and the gap in the range where the setting sun streams through in crisp, celestial beams. A distinctive peak shaped like an incisor mark where Oʻahu’s warriors, pushed up the valley and onto the ridge, chose the precipice over surrender to an invading army.
When I was a child riding in my mother’s station wagon on morning school commutes, we would memorialize this violent birth of the Hawaiian Kingdom by singing refrains from a popular 1930s hapa haole tune:
King Kamehameha, the conqueror of the Islands
Became a famous hero one day.
He fought a native army and pushed it o’er the pali
And said, ‘Auwe nō ho‘i ē’ [My, oh my]!
In hindsight, it was a history lesson for us kids, training us to see our landscape in Hawaiian terms, even if it was from a vantage constructed by federal funds at the cusp of American statehood. I wonder now if these ancestors would see it the same way.
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I wasn’t sure what I was looking for exactly when I contacted Ayau to ask him about bones. Adrift after completing my first book and pressured to find new research sites for a second, I gravitated toward the Pali. If I was going to be fumbling, I figured I ought to do so in a place that felt meaningful to me, and so I turned to that highway and its small scenic lookout in hopes of recovering memories of my mother and, if I was lucky, my mother’s memories, too. For the first twenty years of my life, I built my relationship with the mountain from the backseat of her car. Twenty years later, I realize that it was where I built my relationship with her, too: driving up the snaking road’s hairpins helps me recall her best. Thinking of the stories she told about driving on the old highway, now defunct and crumbling alongside the new, I began interviewing kūpuna (elders) who recalled doing the same. In their eighties and nineties now, they helped me glimpse her childhood through theirs, illustrated by buggies and Model T Fords, ranches, and agricultural fields instead of suburban sprawl, and Hawaiian names for the winds that whip up the cliffs so forcefully they send waterfalls in the wrong direction - now largely forgotten. When I reached the outer edges of their memories, I kept going.
The iwi poʻo who returned after their 120-year residency at Cambridge University, England, to be buried at Pali State Wayside, are unusual in several respects, one of which is that they belong entirely to women. It is unclear whether R. L. Perkins, the British entomologist who stole them from the base of the Pali sometime in the late 1800s, was aware of their sex. He may have, instead, simply been intrigued by their distinctive shape. Head shaping, a cultural practice of the late 1700s, in which the skulls of newborns were flattened at the front and back through a process of kapa cloth binding, was reserved for high-ranking individuals. Perkins, who was in Hawaiʻi to study insects, had no business collecting skulls. Nevertheless, he would transport his plunder back to England and deposit it into the Duckworth Laboratory’s collection in 1902. The remains of these elite female warriors would remain there, unnoticed, until around 2010, when Ayau began working the case.
It would turn into the most complex repatriation project of Ayau’s career, taking about a decade to complete. In its first few years especially, it inched forward unproductively, hitting bureaucratic roadblocks at Duckworth and taking a backseat to the demands of Ayau’s employment at the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands. The tenor of the case changed, however, when the ancestors found him.
It started with stomach cramps. As he told it, they came on debilitatingly fast. Soon he was so doubled over in pain that he nearly asked his wife to take him to the hospital, but, on that particular evening, her cousin happened to be in town, and this unplanned family obligation kept Ayau home, in agony, entertaining instead. They sat in conversation for a while until, abruptly, the cousin’s demeanor shifted. He turned and locked eyes with Ayau and asked in a strange voice: “Why have you foresaken us? Why are you not helping to get us home?” He lifted his arm and pointed to the door that led into Ayau’s home office. “What I’m talking about is in that room.” This cousin is known to be gifted with ʻike pāpālua, a kind of second sight, and, whether he knew it at the time or not, he pointed to where Ayau kept his international repatriation files. Sitting there at the top of the pile was the Duckworth folder, and as Ayau started to figure out what was going on, the pain lifted as quickly as it came on. “What that alerted me to,” he told me, “was that there were some very powerful personalities amongst those kūpuna.”
This story—though it hadn’t been far from my mind since he told it to me a couple of months earlier—came to the surface as we discussed the matter of the teeth and mandibles still sitting in a storage room at Yale Peabody’s West Campus facilities. They were, as it turned out, supposed to have gone back to Hawaiʻi in 2014 with the rest of the collection that they matched. Put politely, the remains had been mishandled and nobody thought to tell their Native Hawaiian contacts as much. This, I realize, is strange language for describing the violence of the situation, but I can’t figure out how to write about the disassembly of my ancestors in another way.
It would have probably, for many more years, gone unsaid had I not, on the third day of my first semester at my new job, thought to ask the institution’s Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) compliance officer whether they had any iwi in their possession. It was an impromptu question I asked while taking a collections tour of their facility. The officer replied, “yes,” brought me to the room where they keep repatriation objects, lifted the lid off the pale-yellow archival box that held them, and I sobbed.
And so, a few weeks later, after a follow-up meeting with the compliance officer to confirm that there was no good reason, bureaucratic or otherwise, why these bones should not be immediately retuned, I’m on the phone with Ayau, who is telling me that when it comes to ancestors who want our help getting home, there are no coincidences.
They sat in conversation for a while until, abruptly, the cousin’s demeanor shifted. He turned and locked eyes with Ayau and asked in a strange voice: “Why have you foresaken us? Why are you not helping to get us home?
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The first time I moved to a college on the East Coast, it was to attend Colby, a small liberal arts institution in rural Maine. I chose it because I wanted a radical shift in environment and, with few exceptions, I couldn’t have gone to school farther from Hawaiʻi without leaving the country. The distance felt exhilarating until my mother’s pancreatic cancer diagnosis. Our conversations across time zones quickly began to feel like too much and not enough, until one day in October, at a payphone in the campus arts building, she told me to get on the first flight I could find because she wouldn’t make it to fall break. Some of my friends drove me overnight to an airport in New Hampshire, occasionally pulling over to let me vomit. When I arrived in Honolulu, I went directly to the hospital, where she slipped in and out of consciousness for a few days, until the doctor consented to letting her die with us at home. We rode together over the Pali in the ambulette—our last drive together—holding hands.
Over the next decade, I felt my relationship with home stretch out to a thin tether. Worried that the line might snap, I held on by reading books. Eventually, Hawaiʻi became the object of my study—a paltry substitute for cultural grounding—and I channeled my grief into academic articles. I spent another decade reeling myself back in until I started to learn how to be in and of both places—Hawaiʻi plus wherever my adult life would take me: New York, Portland, Chicago, Austin, and now New Haven, Connecticut.
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Ayau told me that the timing of our reconnection was fortuitous, even if the circumstances weren’t. He was scheduled to be in Poughkeepsie at Vassar College in a matter of weeks. If I could bring the iwi there, he would transport them the rest of the way to Hawaiʻi. It’s only a short drive from New Haven, and so, with the time fast approaching, he emailed me a document containing the six oli (chants) I would need to memorize in ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi. Feeling underqualified for the task ahead, I nervously contacted some of the Native Hawaiian undergraduates on campus whom I barely knew, looking them up in the campus directory. They came over to my apartment the next night, and together we agreed to memorize the words and protocol required to shepherd our ancestors home with dignity.
Across the following week, we attended Zoom meetings with Mana and Kalehua Caceres, a husband-and-wife team who taught us the cadence of the chants, but also trained us on proper handling and comportment. They are students of Ayau’s whom I also met while researching the iwi poʻo from the Pali. I had been, at the time, especially interested in talking to Kalehua, a serious woman with a patient voice, who had officiated the reinternment ceremony—a job that customarily belongs to a man, but, Ayau told me, the ancestors had insisted on a wahine instead. Kalehua suggested, during our lessons, that the iwi at the Peabody had been waiting for me. At that point, I believed her.
With the days counting down, my memorization efforts took over every spare moment. I made voice recordings on my phone and listened to nothing but the lines on a loop, repeating them aloud to passive lobbies and sidewalks and dining halls as I walked between classes. At home, my four-year-old daughter heard me repeat the oli so much that she started chanting, too. A few days before our appointment with the Peabody, for which we would don funerary kīhei (sashes) in black, check the bones against inventory sheets, and wrap them in linen for transport to Vassar, Mana and Kalehua gave us one more instruction. They told us that we must introduce ourselves to the bones with our genealogies in ‘ōlelo Hawaiʻi and that it must be memorized, too. Having crammed the rest of it, I worried that I wouldn’t be able to do it. In fact, I dreaded it, but it was too late to do anything other than expand my memorizations. When it came time for us to greet the iwi and assure them, in our mother tongue, that we would carry them home, that we recognized their grief and felt it, too, I summoned my kin eight generations back and spoke their names into the room, an ocean and a continent away. I ended with my mother’s.