The Kalaupapa Names Project will honor previously unidentified residents with a permanent monument

By Patrick Downes | Hawaii Catholic Herald

The names, beautifully written in large swirling black script by the nib of a nineteenth century pen, offer no hint of the stern statute that put them in that big black book and on the rough passage to a life of anguish in a place of desolation.

Rather, the calligraphy — recording the thousands of people, nearly all of them Hawaiian, who were given a one-way ticket to Kalaupapa for contracting the bacillus Mycobacterium leprae — is quite exquisite.

How ironic still that this ledger of banishment has become the sole remaining proof that these people existed. But they are all there. The names, the names, the many, many names.

And how lucky, because this record provides the opportunity to remember these people in a public and permanent way.

The Kalaupapa Names Project seeks to erect a monument on Molokai’s Kalaupapa peninsula displaying the names of the more than 8,000 Hansen’s disease patients who were quarantined there from 1866 to 1969.

The only public markers in Kalaupapa today identifying the people who lived and died there are the weathered gravestones that cover the landscape. But they only number around 1,300. Most of the gravesites have long been lost to the ravages of time and nature.

Most of the patients’ names can only be found in a 21-by-16 inch Hawaii Department of Health black leather bound ledger labeled “Record of Inmates at Kalaupapa.” Amazingly, with all that has been written about the world’s most infamous leprosy settlement, the names of its patients have never been copied, cataloged, compiled, published or displayed in total.

That is, until now. In preparation for the monument, Anwei Skinsnes Law and her husband Henry Law, armed with several laptop computers and a digital camera, have been spending their days at the Hawaii State Archives where the book is stored, entering the names into a computerized database.

A longtime friend and advocate of people with Hansen’s disease, Skinsnes Law is the international coordinator of IDEA, The International Association for Integration, Dignity and Economic Advancement, an organization dedicated to eliminating the stigma and social isolation associated with leprosy worldwide.

Her husband was the first superintendent of Kalaupapa National Historical Park.

“Bringing your family back”

Meeting Anwei and Henry at the archives building on July 25 to discuss the project were Piolani Motta and Pauline Hess. Both are descendents of Kalaupapa patients and members of the Ka Ohana O Kalaupapa monument committee.

Motta’s grandmother, Becky Perry of Kohala, was sent to Kalaupapa in 1898 at age 14 and buried there in 1917. Perry’s fate had been a tightly held family secret, so great was the shame associated with leprosy at the time. Motta only learned of her grandmother by accident when she discovered on birth records that her mother had been born at Kalaupapa.

Hess’ grandfather had been forced to surrender six of his children, including Hess’s mother, to Kalaupapa. Because no children were allowed to be raised in Kalaupapa, Hess was taken from her parents, Catherine and Jubilee Puahala, shortly after she was born.

The two women’s stories are pretty typical. In Hawaii, Hansen’s disease tore families apart, and shame and embarrassment kept the separations secret. The disease did not respect age and neither did the law. You were sent away whether you were five or 75.

Children who were taken away, later, as adults, saw their own children taken from them in a kind of exile in reverse.

Multiply that family fragmentation by the thousands, and you will only begin to comprehend the vast abyss of heartbreak and pain that is the legacy of Kalaupapa.

And that, say its advocates, is why the Kalaupapa monument must be built, not as a history project or social statement, but for the families.

Motta summarized it this way. For the living, “it’s bringing your family back home, discovering who you are, where you belong.” For the dead, “it’s to perpetuate their life, their life story.”

For many family members, it will provide “closure,” she said. The monument will be the place to find lost mothers, fathers and grandparents, discover previously unknown relatives and connect severed family roots.

Word of the project has already spread. Motta has gotten letters from the mainland — “one from Minnesota, one from Oregon” — asking her to locate some “very Hawaiian names” of Kalaupapa residents of a century ago.

As Motta and Hess paged through the ledger at the archives they noted that the names were nearly all Hawaiian. In most cases, only the surname was written. The records included the sex — “K” for “kane,” “W” for “wahine” — the age, date of arrival at Kalaupapa, date of death, and occasionally other details.

The first arrivals show a group of 12 who disembarked on Jan. 6, 1866.

Listed without special notation between #2885 “Kapahu” and #2887 “Manaia” is #2886 “Father Damien,” Belgian, age 45. The date indicates that he was put in the book not when he first went to Molokai, but after he was diagnosed with the disease.

Because the handwriting styles are very uniform, Skinsnes Law, who has returned to the ledger many times over the years, suspects that it may have been compiled by the Department of Health in Honolulu, not Kalaupapa, from a number of different records.

She said some names are entered more than once as a few patients left and returned. Also recorded are the names of “kokua,” usually family members who did not have the disease themselves, but who moved into the settlement to help someone who did.

The Laws began their work on July 25 and will continue through August, doing additional research at Kalaupapa. For this first phase, they will stop at #5000 “Nawahineelua,” a woman who landed in Kalaupapa on Oct. 10, 1896.

Ka Ohana O Kalaupapa

The monument is a project of Ka Ohana O Kalaupapa, an extended family of support organized for the residents of Kalaupapa. The group first surfaced as a dream of resident Bernard Punikaia more than a decade ago and as a reality in 2003.

The group of about 70 patients, family members, friends, religious leaders and government officials meets regularly to give the patients an independent voice. Its purpose is to ensure that members of the Kalaupapa community can live out their lives with the necessary services, to respect and preserve their history, and to pass down their stories for the education and inspiration of future generations.

A federal bill to establish the monument was introduced in Congress in 2005 on behalf of the Ohana. Motta spoke at a hearing held in Washington last September, and introduced the testimonies of many Kalaupapa residents. The bill received bipartisan support, but did not pass by the end of the session.

Members of the Ohana plan to meet with Hawaii’s congressional delegation on Aug. 24 and expect the bill to be reintroduced.

The idea of a monument for those who were segregated by Hansen’s disease and their families is not unique to Hawaii. According to Ohana member Valerie Monson, Japan, Korea, Carville, La., and Norway already have such monuments, and in Australia, two names projects are on the drawing board.

Skinsnes Law said Hawaii’s effort is “part of the global effort to bring people with leprosy back into the history of leprosy worldwide.”

“People have been left out of history,” she said.

While the Kalaupapa monument is supported virtually unanimously by Kalaupapa’s 30-or-so patients, the Ohana, Gov. Linda Lingle, Bishop Larry Silva, Hawaii’s members of Congress and leading native Hawaiian organizations, it is not yet a done deal.

Henry Law, who worked for the National Park Service for 26 years, said obstacles would include those old bugaboos of inertia and bureaucracy and the attitude that you shouldn’t add new elements to a historic national park.

The problem with that last argument, Law countered, is that, because once-segregated patients still live in Kalaupapa, “history is still in process.”

“We are still in the historic period,” he said.

But that period is coming to an end. The residents are elderly, and family members are passing on.

“That’s why we felt this urgency, that this had to start now,” Skinsnes Law said. “They (the patients) had to see it’s happening now.”

The thousands who have died must be honored, Skinsnes Law said.

“Just because people are dead, they don’t have any rights? They don’t have any voice?” she asked.

“In Kalaupapa, you’ve got people buried everywhere, yet who’s making decisions about this land and what happens there? The park service, the department of health …,” she said.

The memorial has yet to be designed. But all agreed it has to be, as Hess explained, “Something that is conducive to the environment, to the culture that is there.”

“I think it’s going to be a challenge to somebody to design something that is not a replica of the Vietnam War Memorial (in Washington D.C.),” Skinsnes Law said, “but something that is very much in tune with the environment.”

“It has to be done,” Hess said.