Abstract

A Little Justice in Hawai'i

Kaho'olawe is for native Hawaiians a sacred place, the only one of the eight major Hawaiian Islands named for a god-Kanaloa, god of the ocean and foundations of the earth. Inhabited for more than a thousand years, it was, as the poet W.S. Merwin has said, their university. There the art of navigation was taught, and young Hawaiians learned how to sail to Tahiti, where their ancestors came from a millennium ago. The island is covered with so many archeological sites that in 1981 it was added to the National Register of Historic Places. But for forty years no native Hawaiian and almost no one else, in fact-had been allowed on the island. This sacred ground, this ancient center of learning, had been made a bombing range by the U.S. Navy.