Burial officials look into Big Island development
By Jan TenBruggencate
Advertiser Staff Writer
State burial officials are launching an investigation and lawyers are preparing for contested hearings in court over the mishandling of human remains at a Big Island luxury development.
The discovery last week of a box of human bones in a storage container at the beleaguered Hokuli'a project stunned even the developer.
John DeFries, president of Hokuli'a developer 1250 Oceanside Partners, said he will establish an independent organization to oversee his firm's archaeological program.
He said the box of bones was found Thursday by an employee of archaeology consultant Scientific Consultant Services, Inc. (SCS).
Hokuli'a is a 1,500-acre luxury residential project midway between Keauhou and Kealakekua Bay. It is to include a golf course, 700 homes and a 15-acre, 100-unit lodge.
The project has been bedeviled with problems, including a massive sediment spill in 2000 that dumped tons of mud into near shore waters, the destruction by contractors of more than 100 yards of the historic coastal trail known as Ala Loa, and the unearthing and damaging of numerous burials.
While burials are commonly found during excavation in many parts of the Islands, there are strict rules about how to handle them. Both state officials and island burial councils oversee the process of respectfully handling them and seeing to their reburial.
Attorney Alan Murakami of the Native Hawaiian Legal Corporation, said leaving human remains in paper bags in a shipping container for months is just one of the culturally insensitive acts that have taken place at Hokuli'a. He said bulldozers "obliterated" one site that contained burials and bones were "smashed to smithereens."
Murakami said his office, which represents area residents and Hawaiians, will ask for immediate sanctions against Hokuli'a over the latest finding, which he said violates an August 2001 order by Circuit Judge Ronald Ibarra ordering the developer to rebury by Octover 2001 all human remains it had unearthed.
"We always felt that not all the bones had been reinterred," said Jack Kelly, vice president of Protect Keopuka 'Ohana, Murakami's client. "There's just a real lack of care."
The state Burial Sites Program will not allow any reburial of the remains until it has conducted a full investigation, said Kai Markell, program director. That investigation is under way, he said.
1250 Oceanside Partners says the finding of the bones was a simple error that it is working hard to rectify. In documents prepared for filing in Ibarra's court, DeFries said he had believed all bones had been reburied.
"Oceanside had no reason to believe that any human remains remained in the temporary curation facility," the legal brief says.
The additional human bones were found Thursday while the staff of Scientific Consultant Services was making an inventory of items in its locked artifact container. Items in the curation facility included Hawaiian artifacts, four boxes of cow bones, and the box of human remains.
The human bones were nearly all fragments, according to an exhibit prepared for the court. The box contained a large paper bag with several small pieces of broken bone. Inside the large bag were three paper bags that also contained bones. They included numerous pieces of limb bones 10 inches or less in length, along with a collar bone, vertebrae and assorted other fragments.
Oceanside is asking the court's permission to be relieved from Ibarra's August order that all the bones be reburied by last October. Murakami said that he will ask that Ibarra instead find Oceanside in contempt and issue fines.
DeFries was scheduled to meet last night with representatives of families known to have lived in the area, and which may have family members buried there. In a press release, Oceanside said DeFries would seek their assistance in "finalizing their wishes for the reinterment of the remains in a culturally appropriate manner."
Reach Jan TenBruggencate at jant@honoluluadvertiser.com or (808) 245-3074.
