Interviews have been lightly edited for clarity.
Translation Note: ‘Ōlelo Hawaiʻi—the Native Hawaiian language—is a multivalent language in which meaning cannot be captured wholly by a single definition in English. The Yale Herald has decided not to italicize words in ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi and instead to italicize translations in English, following the translation policies of Kanaka Maoli scholar Noenoe Silva. Silva writes in the introduction of her seminal text Aloha Betrayed that she does not italicize Hawaiian words in text “to resist making the native tongue appear foreign in writing produced in and about a native land and people.”
The author has provided translations for the sake of clarity.
The hands of the kiawe and haole koa trees curled in anticipation as the interlopers stalked closer. On December 24, 1956, Kenneth Emory and his team of student archaeologists arrived in Hōnaunau, Hawai‘i. Pushing past the obstructive foliage, they arrived at their next excavation site. It is documented in the excavation’s field notebook as Cave #13. Located just within the southern boundary of Hōnaunau, the cave overlooked waves that crashed into the side of a cliff. To enter the cave, the archeologists climbed from the kiawe trunk to the ledge of the cave, using the grooves in the lava rock to scale the rest of the way up.
Robert Bowen, a member of Emory’s excavation team, took detailed records of the excavation. His field notebook documenting Hōnaunau is one of 40 notebooks that comprise Emory’s collection, which can be found in the archives of the Bernice Pauahi Bishop Museum in Honolulu, Hawai‘i. Bowen noted fragments of volcanic rocks littering the cave floor and piles of rubble where the cave seemed to have collapsed into itself. Near the entrance, he and his fellow archaeologists uncovered the bones of a child: “It appears as though a very small baby (or babies) were wrapped in white tapa and then placed inside a gourd container.”
Bowen’s field notebook described the team descending deeper into the cave, recording that the floor was strewn with bones. “Some of the bones seem big enough to be those of an adult—vertebrae, pelvis, ribs, scapula, etc.,” Bowen noted. “There were at least 5 children (5 frontals)…One frontal may be that of an adult.”
Bowen printed the question “Fluorine test?” in neat letters toward the bottom of the gridded page: the only hint to what could have happened to the Kānaka Maoli / Native Hawaiian children residing in the cave. Beginning in the 1890s, archaeologists used fluorine tests as a method of finding the relative age of bones by measuring their fluorine content in laboratories. Bowen’s diary notes insinuate that the children were removed from their burial and packed away to await this examination.
Hōnaunau was a puʻuhonua / sanctuary located on the west coast of Hawaiʻi Island. According to the stipulations of the kapu system, which dictated how Kānaka Maoli interacted with each other and the land they stewarded, people escaping oppression and war could shelter themselves from physical harm within the walls of Hōnaunau, and those who had committed transgressions could come to seek forgiveness and protection from persecution.
Hōnaunau’s sacredness is not innate, however. Places become puʻuhonua, meaning that this protection can be unraveled and disturbed. Hōnaunau’s mana / spiritual power was said to be tied to the bones of aliʻi / nobility that rested upon the land. Because of this, the act of moving the bones is tantamount to stripping Hōnaunau of its ability to provide sanctity—destroying what made it consecrated in the first place.
At the time of the excavation, the Washington D.C. Evening Star had published an article titled “Fugitive Tests Sanctity of Hawaiʻi City of Refuge,” which traced fugitive George Leroy Page’s escape from the South Carolina penitentiary and his attempt to seek protection and immunity within Hōnaunau. Although this pilgrimage was contentious, the public outcry over Page’s invocation of Hōnaunau as a puʻuhonua served as evidence in the ongoing battle between the place’s dual identities as both an active living sanctuary and a National Historical Park. While Hōnaunau’s national status as such since 1955 relegated the site to a memory of a puʻuhonua, Page’s flight destabilized this claim. Emory’s excavation was not an autopsy of an ancient society’s ruins but an incision into the pulsing artery of a people’s refuge.
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On August 6, 1945, the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, leaving two cities leveled and at least 200,000 civilians killed on impact. Radiocarbon dating arose as a parallel invention in 1946, fuelling Emory’s conquest of Native Hawaiian burial sites five years later. Transforming an uncountable amount of iwi kūpuna / ancestral remains into specimens, Kānaka Maoli bones were seized in the name of scientific discovery. Nearly 80 years later, the citizens of Nishiyama, a Japanese city located 3,000 meters from the original detonation point of the atomic bomb in Nagasaki, still experience heightened levels of radioactive material in their soil. Hōnaunau offers yet another incarnation of nuclear fallout.
Nearly 80 years later, the citizens of Nishiyama, a Japanese city located 3,000 meters from the original detonation point of the atomic bomb in Nagasaki, still experience heightened levels of radioactive material in their soil. Hōnaunau offers yet another incarnation of nuclear fallout.
The leading archaeologist of the Hōnaunau excavation, Emory, began working at the Bishop Museum in the 1920s and studied under Herbert Ernest Gregory, the former head of Yale’s geology department and Director of the Bishop Museum. He then received his PhD in archaeology from Yale University in 1946. Upon his return, Emory continued his career in documenting Polynesian cultures, which primarily revolved around ethnographic research and anthropological interaction, and solving the “mystery” of Polynesian origin.
Emory had been in the field for twenty years, establishing a career primarily through the exploitation of Indigenous communities, when archaeology in the Pacific stagnated during World War II. “[Emory’s] brand of anthropology had gone out of date,” wrote Bob Krauss, in the 1975 biography Keneti: South Seas Adventures of Kenneth Emory. “There were no more sages from whom he could learn about the ancient religion. Suburbs were being built over the old temples.” With the subjects of his research quickly dying out and the cultural landscape of Hawaiʻi rapidly developing, Emory was not sure how to progress.
But across the Pacific Ocean, nuclear scientists developed instruments of mass destruction and made an irretrievable discovery. Willard Libby—Chemistry Professor at the University of Chicago, Manhattan Project contributor, and 1960 Nobel Prize recipient—had discovered that the decay of carbon-14 isotopes could be used to estimate the age of organic material.
This discovery catalyzed the “radiocarbon revolution,” a boom in archaeological expeditions that inspired Emory to pursue the “mystery” of Polynesian origin once more. Revitalizing the fields of anthropology and archaeology, the advent of radiocarbon dating brought new and greater attention to Pacific anthropology. According to Krauss’ biography, in 1951, Emory collected a sample of charcoal from the Kuliʻouʻou cave on the island of Oʻahu, marking the first carbon dating of a Polynesian artifact. The mass death of Native Hawaiians—both corporeal and cultural—no longer posed an impediment to Emory’s work. To Emory, the disappearance of Native Hawaiians and their intimacy with their ancestral knowledge became a convenient circumstance to exploit.
By 1953, Emory and his volunteers had, in Krauss’ words, become “an army.” They had excavated fifty-six burial caves by the end of the year. This desecration of Hōnaunau was only a part of the larger war waged against sacred spaces across the island chain. The publicity and media coverage of these excavations had expanding repercussions, with residents feeling inspired to take on their own expeditions. As Krauss wrote, “Teachers stumbled over lava flows to see petroglyphs, squirmed through scratchy lantana and thorny kiawe to view Hawaiian ruins, and generally had a marvelous time.”
The Bishop Museum was the primary sponsor of Emory’s expeditions. As the largest museum in the state of Hawaiʻi, the Bishop Museum was originally established to care for the royal family’s collection of Hawaiian heirlooms. By the 1950s, it had expanded to researching and educating the public on natural and cultural Pacific history. However, as Emory was beginning his conquest of Indigenous sacred places, the Bishop Museum found itself in an extremely vulnerable position. After the director of the Bishop Museum, Te Rangi Hiroa, passed away in 1951, the institution was left without a leader or sufficient funds to maintain its current programs. In this dire time, the Bishop Museum called on Yale University for assistance, invoking the long-standing relationship that the Museum has had with the University.
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Yale first associated itself with the museum in the 1920s when the dean of the Graduate School, Wilbur Cross, recommended a cooperative research agreement between the institutions to university President Arthur Twining Hadley. According to Cross, the Bishop Museum served as an invaluable “outpost in the Pacific” for Yale.
As the museum was considered an “affiliated part of Yale University,” the institutional ties between the Bishop Museum and Yale were both financial and structural. Correspondences between Te Rangi Hiroa and Yale representatives in the years before his death indicated that the university provided the museum with an “annual appropriation of $8,000,” according to a letter in the Yale University Manuscripts & Archives. Additionally, in the inter-institutional agreement, it was stipulated that “the director of the museum should be a member of the faculty of the Graduate School of Yale University—appointed by the trustees of the museum but paid by the university.” To ensure the longevity of the relationship between the two institutions, the Yale-Bishop Museum Committee was established.
John Murdock, a representative of the Yale-Bishop Museum Committee, traveled to Hawaiʻi in 1953 and made the institutional changes necessary to prevent a proposed merger with the University of Hawaiʻi. This ensured the continuation of the museum’s current programs, including Emory’s excavations. Part of this endeavor included setting up the Bishop Museum Association, the institutional body responsible for fundraising that was led by the famed musician Ernest Kaʻai at its inception. Through these changes, the Yale-Bishop Museum Committee, and consequently, Yale University became inextricably intertwined with the excavations of Hōnaunau.
In this way, nuclear fallout does not disappear but instead disperses. It remains in the soil and embeds itself in the fabric of a place. It spreads to people, forever changing the chemical composition of their cells that are passed down from generation to generation. Foreign memories coil permanently in the most fundamental and intimate elements of our existence. In this respect, Hōnaunau resides in my body. As a Native Hawaiian, understanding this event becomes understanding my origins.
Foreign memories coil permanently in the most fundamental and intimate elements of our existence. In this respect, Hōnaunau resides in my body. As a Native Hawaiian, understanding this event becomes understanding my origins.
Daniel HoSang, professor of American Studies and faculty advisor to the Anti-Eugenics Collective at Yale, believes that the desecration of Hōnaunau burials was “not an outlier.” Eugenics and scientific racism are embedded in the genealogies of the academy. The methodologies existing before World War II that were used to substantiate the superiority of the white race remained largely unchanged and unquestioned after the war. Therefore, the afterlives of eugenics still exist within these disciplines and institutions today. HoSang explained that the atrocities committed during the Holocaust and World War II illuminated the consequences of scientific racism. “Even though there might be some assumption that there was a kind of liberal consensus against the [concept of race]…[these methodologies] are part of the regular practice. And those practices extended from work in botany and ecology to anthropology,” said HoSang.
“That was how you practiced science—you gathered human specimens.”
Systems such as these reduce casualties of fallout, namely Indigenous bodies and spaces, to necessary byproducts of scientific study. “In the name of scientific discovery, you can take whatever you want, you can categorize it—it’s all for the greater good,” HoSang said. “That is the norm.” Through this lens, Emory’s exploitation of Hōnaunau must be viewed in conjunction with the institutions that perpetuated these norms and shaped his methodologies. His actions represent the teachings of Yale’s archaeology department and the wider interweaving narratives of eugenics and scientific racism that persist within American academia.
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As both a student and a Native Hawaiian who experiences the lasting effects of Yale’s presence in Hawaiʻi, the path towards achieving reconciliation and restitution can often feel unclear. HoSang believes that simply existing within the institution is not enough. “I think that’s a kind of convenient story because it doesn’t require you to do anything else. And it also doesn’t acknowledge the interest the institution has in incorporating lots of different people as a way to legitimize its innocence,” he said. The increased representation of underserved communities in Yale’s student body is not evidence of systemic change. Yale cannot absolve itself of its complicity in Indigenous violence by merely allowing Indigenous students inside its walls.
Since the 1990 passage of the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), the Yale Peabody Museum still holds the ancestral remains of at least 700 Indigenous people, with 53% of these remains available for repatriation. Over the past 34 years, according to Peabody Museum Repatriation Registrar Jessie Cohen, the museum has repatriated the remains of 460 ancestors to over 38 federally recognized tribes. In a response to the Yale Herald, Cohen wrote that recently, the Peabody Museum added two new staff members whose responsibilities are solely dedicated to repatriation.
The Yale Peabody Museum must comply with new federal regulations instituted by the Biden administration in January 2024, mandating tribal consultation and a five-year deadline to update inventories on human remains and Native American objects. Using a regional consultation approach, the Peabody Museum has completed consultations for ancestors and funerary objects from Florida, Maine, and parts of California. Full inventories of collections containing ancestral remains have been completed in six states, with an additional six states inventoried between 50-90%. In response to recent federal regulations, the Peabody Museum claims it has initiated consultations with 45 federally recognized tribes. “We remain dedicated to working with tribal communities to reunite ancestors with their loved ones,” Cohen wrote to the Herald.
Although HoSang acknowledges the importance of speeding up this process of returning ancestral remains, he argues that an equally important inquiry is interrogating “what all these things are doing here and what were the assumptions behind it.” In this way, repatriation is not the end of repair: the violence of archaeology still exists within museums and academic institutions in the form of unquestioned histories. Without critically interrogating these institutional pasts, affected communities are unable to articulate the damage they have sustained, effectively hindering the path to recovery.
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This path is long and winding. When Emory was asked to comment on Page’s attempt to reinvoke Hōnaunau’s status as a puʻuhonua, he claimed that Page was “150 years too late,” and “[Hōnaunau’s] protection ended when the Hawaiian [kapu] system was abolished in 1810.” Emory conceived of Hōnaunau the same way he conceived of the children resting within Cave #13—dead. He thought Hōnaunau and the bones resting within its caves existed merely as a relic of a long-destroyed belief system, culture, and people.
The atomic age began with the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and continued with the excavations of Hōnaunau. It is still unclear how it will end. In unveiling this end, Emory’s claims about Native Hawaiian existence may be denied. In Nuclear Winter: Global Consequences of Multiple Nuclear Explosions, R. P. Turco, O. B. Toon, T. P. Ackerman, J. B. Pollack, and Carl Sagan imagine this future as a global nuclear war. They theorize that upon the impact of multiple nuclear bombs, melting cities, bodies, and forests will collapse into smoke and soot. Rising into the air and enveloping the earth, the remnants of society block out the sky, and the world is thrust into a sunless winter.
When developing this hypothesis, the authors of Nuclear Winter utilized models originally developed to study volcanic eruptions. This methodological equivalence between the atom bomb and the volcano allows for the Kānaka Maoli children residing in the caves of Hōnaunau to be reanimated. In a Kānaka Maoli worldview, the volcano is believed to be a site that wields sacredness and volatility simultaneously. In this way, agency can be both self-defending and destroying.
I reimagine the end of the nuclear age with the Hawaiian deity of the volcano, Peleʻaihonua / Pele the world eater, as the agent. Peleʻaihonua will take the form of a nuclear warhead. Her hunger, fueled by rage and vengeance, will rain down on the civilizations of the world as nuclear waste. Her mouth will engulf the world, and we will fall into the dark expanse of her stomach.
