A national park evicted living Hawaiians to present a historic Hawaiian culture

Evidence

In 1988, the Pai family’s agreement with the Greenwell family was put in jeopardy by the National Park Service (NPS) when it “bought” all of the Greenwell parcels for a sweet sum of $17 million. … What the NPS proposed to do was quite strange. The NPS intended to create a park, Kaloko-Honokohau National Historical Park, as “a center for the presentation, interpretation, and perpetuation of Hawaiian activities and culture.” But to make this cultural presentation, they would need to throw out all of the Native Hawaiians actually living on the land. A conflict between a living culture and an historic culture, as determined by a federal agency, ensued. … A living culture is manifested through a way of life. An historic culture, in this case, was a tool for the NPS. The NPS magnanimously granted a special use permit to the Pai family, but Mahealani rejected the permit, believing it to indicate an acquiescence to federal rights. — Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations, 831

Categorization

• XREF: Parallels Yellowstone seizing land from Native people (ch19) and Everglades displacing Seminoles — federal parks as instruments of Indigenous removal across the book. — connects to: US statehood for Hawaii violated UN decolonization law and made Hawaiians legal wards — Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for…, 851; Cultural and physical ties to Hawai’i drive Hawaiian racial identification in multiracial children. — Tatiana I. Zamora and Amado M. Padilla, Making sense of conflicting messages of…, 122
• SEED: ‘Living culture vs. historic culture’ is a strong analytic frame for an essay on how preservation regimes dispossess the very people whose culture they claim to protect.