Project seeks to catalogue ceded lands
By Vicki Viotti
Advertiser Staff Writer
While the question of how much of the state-controlled "ceded lands" should go to Native Hawaiians probably will be debated in courtrooms and over negotiating tables for years, a team of students and professors at the University of Hawai'i is trying to clear up at least where all that land is.
As a starting point, they're going by the book: "Buke Mahele," the record of the 1848 land division known to Hawaiian historians as the Great Mahele.
When they're done, the project staff at the University of Hawai'i Center for Hawaiian Studies hopes to produce an inventory of ceded lands and make the records available on the Web.
And the staff also hopes that the final product will be used in negotiations for any settlement between the state and a sovereign Hawaiian entity that would inherit a portion of ceded lands, which are generally described as Hawaiian crown and government lands ceded to the territorial and state governments of Hawai'i.
The team is operating under a $300,000 federal grant from the Administration for Native Americans and $75,000 from the Office of Hawaiian Affairs for the first year's work, which may not be done even after the two-year grant period expires, said Lilikala Kame'eleihiwa, the center's director.
"But we'll find more money," Kame'eleihiwa said.
The grant was secured by Pono Kaulike, the nonprofit educational arm of the sovereignty organization Ka Lahui Hawai'i. Twelve research assistants were hired to do the painstaking work of tracking the ownership, as well as the history and cultural and economic resources, of the ceded lands in each of the roughly 1,000 ahupua'a (land divisions) in Hawai'i.
The work began in earnest only in December, when the students were hired and began their academic training with the inventory research; the conservative estimate is that the assessment of only about 100 of the land divisions has been largely finished.
But the initial impression forming for Kame'eleihiwa and April Drexel, the project coordinator, is that there are many land parcels that should show up in state records of the ceded lands that don't. A chronicle of apparent discrepancies between the historic land-distribution records and what the state lists as ceded lands is being compiled.
"The scope of the project is that we want to know where the ceded lands are," Kame'eleihiwa said. "I don't think the state of Hawai'i knows all the land it controls."
Dede Mamiya, the land division administrator for the state Department of Land and Natural Resources, acknowledges that a great deal of land has been conveyed to other owners without the transactions being recorded at the Bureau of Conveyances. Records are instead in relatively obscure indices that are all but unknown to most researchers more accustomed to tracking private title, Mamiya said.
"We would be more than willing to research what they feel are discrepancies, and see what we find," she said.
Kame'eleihiwa, who has done extensive research on the Mahele, is fascinated with the notion that the research assistants are recovering knowledge once held only by the konohiki, the headman appointed to manage each ahupua'a.
"I was amazed at what they (the konohiki) knew, and what they could argue," she said. "How do we create modern konohiki? That's what this program is about."
The practical application, Drexel said, is that Hawaiians will have a much clearer sense of what the land is worth before striking any deals.
"If you have no inventory, you can't make any kind of settlement," she said, "because you don't know what you have."
Reach Vicki Viotti at vviotti@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8053.
