james and i went up to bumpy's village today to pick up a computer that steve tayama no longer wanted. recycle! we hadn't been up there for a while. steve took us up the road a bit and to the left of the houses along the road to check out the area. a bulldozer was grading the land to level it out for a road and for planting. a friend of bumpy's, an older tongan man, had been planting crops in the cleared area, as you can see from the photos. it's pretty extensive. looks like they'll be growing taro and sweet potato, and other kinds of food. steve seemed pretty excited by this project and by the idea that the aina was going to be used to grow food to feed the people. it sounded pretty good to me, too. steve also mentioned that there might be opportunity to grow the village itself by inviting more people to come and live there. sounds exciting!
in other news, i have been reading up on kaneohe (where i now live) and the various sacred places on this aina. kaneohe's history is interesting, like it is everywhere else in hawaii. i went up to mahealani cypher's website, malamapono. she describes the building of the H-3 freeway. inouye first proposed it in the 1960s as a small pork barrel project to connect two military bases on oahu. over the next 30 years it ballooned from a few hundred thousand dollars to $2 billion. although the military in the 1980s decided they didn't really need an H-3, and opportunities were there for building a mass transit system in honolulu, instead, inouye pushed forward, persuading congress to provide a special waiver of environmental laws to allow the project to succeed. that set precedence for other sttes to also circumvent environmental protections.
however, even though NEPA (national environmental protection act) was waived for this project, certain provisions of the Historic Preservation Act were not. of course, the feds and state knew this, but nonetheless hundreds (maybe thousands) of ancient hawaiian sites, burial grounds, and heiau were destroyed in the building of the H-3. kukuiokane heiau, the largest temple in the windward side, was one of the victims. in addition, luluku archaeological district, which is near to where i live now (i'm probably living on it, as a matter of fact), was destroyed except for one small part. this whole area was a large complex of irrigation systems (all lands for growing food for an obviously large population--lots of food, lots of people to feed).
bishop museum contracted, mahealani states, "as the main facilitator of the destruction and benefited to the tune of $40 million in federal aid over the years." so much for the museum's commitment to preserve hawaii's history and culture. or maybe that was the museum's "development plan". OHA also failed to protect these sites and now so few of them exist that people will forget, in time, the role of these major organizations in hastening our cultural demise by allowing these areas to be destroyed.
kukuiokane heiau was the larget heiau on the windward side, as i mentioned earlier. it was dedicated to the hawaiian god, kane--god of procreation, fresh water, sunlight, and taro. it's located just below the ridge next to the roman catholic monastery near likelike highway in kaneohe. the temple itself was probably built around the 12th century.
luluku, where i live, was considered the breadbasket of oahu. this is probably what kamehameha saw as the prize and the reason for the battle of nu`uanu. he could certainly see it from the pali area where the last battle for oahu took place. i imagine that the longer i live here, the more i'll find out about this interesting and rainy place.
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