Following up on some posts on recent scholarship on property monographs (Bourgeois Nightmares and Broken Trust) and a couple on cultural property (on native culture and the Elgin Marbles), I thought that I’d talk about a wonderful book, Jan Becket and Joseph Singer’s Pana O’ahu: Sacred Stones, Sacred Land (University of Hawaii Press, 1999). It has black and white pictures of sacred sites around O’ahu.
The book grew out of controversy over the construction of the H-3 Interstate in the early 1990s that obliterated many ancient sites, including–it is believed–the Kikuiokane Heiau (shrine). The authors describe in their preface how the H-3 controversy led to their efforts to photograph sacred sites:
The demolition of that heiau gave rise to this project: an effort to locate and document remaining heiau and smaller shrines on O’ahu before they too suffer the same fate. Kukuiokana Heiau itself had been partly dismantled many decades before by Libby, McNeill & Libby Pineapple Company in a failed effort to grow pineapple in Kane’ohe. We know, however, that it was an important structure in the region: An old photo taken from the Pali lookout miles away shows a massive platform of some stone where the freeway now passes. But this is merely the latest in a long series of dismantlings. If the roadbed of H-3 is made from the remnants of a heiau, so is much of the roadbed of highway circling the island. The stones of Kanahau Heiau, connected in myth with the goddess Hi’iaka, helped pave the old road from Kailua to Waimanalo…. (xi)