Posted on: Friday, November 12, 2004
Burials law is focus of workshop
| • | Two more groups seek Moloka'i objects |
By Vicki Viotti
Advertiser Staff Writer
Hawaiians and others concerned with the balance between science and native rights are eyeing possible changes they could propose to a federal law protecting burials and native cultural treasures when a U.S. Senate committee holds a hearing here next month.
Among the topics sparking interest at a workshop yesterday were who could qualify as a "Native Hawaiian organization" that, under the law, could claim an object or human remains from a museum or federal agency.
The current definition is loose, not even requiring Native Hawaiian ancestry for organization members. And although less formal groupings such as families have been recognized as claimants before, some Hawaiians say the legal definition should clearly include them.
A group of about 75 participants began batting around the issues yesterday when staffers who work with the law — the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, or NAGPRA — gave a workshop on the 14-year-old statute at Kamehameha Schools.
The session was held in part as preparation for a hearing of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee tentatively set for Dec. 8 in Honolulu, said Patricia Zell, minority staff director and chief counsel to the committee.
Zell, who works for U.S. Sen. Daniel Inouye, said Hawai'i's senior senator will give up his post as committee vice chairman when the new Congress convenes in January. She added that the new committee assignments are due next week and that U.S. Sen. Daniel Akaka is among those who could take over the No. 2 spot.
Many of those attending yesterday's workshop were veterans of filing claims, with comments linked to ongoing disputes over the various categories of objects that can be claimed.
"There have been sacred objects reclassified as funerary objects," said Cy Harris, a representative of the Kekumano family, one of the claimants in the Forbes controversy, a four-year-old dispute that is still simmering.
Harris was referring to the disagreement over certain objects in the case, including two ki'i, or images. Harris said his research shows these were sacred objects that had been hidden for safekeeping in Kawaihae Cave, a burial cave looted in the Forbes expedition a century ago. They were reburied at Kawaihae four years ago, but they were never burial objects to begin with, he said.
The difficulty, he said, is that Hawaiians have been alienated from their traditional religion for so long that it's difficult to make authoritative religious findings in the case of sacred objects.
The Kawaihae dispute, fraught with such discord, is expected to erupt anew in March, when a NAGPRA committee reopens the case in a hearing held in Hawai'i.
The NAGPRA law is constructed relatively simply, said Tim McKeown, the federal officer presenting the workshop, although he acknowledged that it's more neatly tailored to the institutions of Native American tribes and Native Alaskans.
For example, said homesteader and Hawaiian historian Rubellite Johnson, the law classifies Hawaiian Homes property as "tribal land" that is governed by the law. Johnson said this complicates matters for Hawaiian families who could face claims when remains or objects are found on their individual homesteads.
Reach Vicki Viotti at vviotti@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8053.
