The military bombed Kahoolawe for nearly half a century from 1941 to 1990. At the start of World War 2, the Army declared martial law throughout Hawaii and took control of Kahoolawe for use as a target and training area. Only 6 miles from the shore of Maui, it was the ideal practice site: close enough to bases on Oahu for planes to resupply and refuel, yet isolated enough to do some serious damage without injuring people.
It was to be a temporary annexation. A 1953 Executive Order placed Kahoolawe under the Secretary of the Navy with the assurance it would be restored to a “habitable condition” when no longer needed for naval purposes.
Then the Navy went to work: tons of munitions were exploded, shot at, or dropped on the island, so the men headed to war could get in some target practice first. “Without question, Kahoolawe was critical to the lives of many young Americans,” says a Navy CD-R about the value of the island. “Success depended on accurate gunfire. Thousands of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines prepared on Kahoolawe for assaults, the likes of which they would encounter at the Gilberts, Marianas, and Iwo Jima.”
During the Korean War, the focus shifted to air raids as carrier aircraft played a large role. “Mockups of airfields, vehicles, and other camps were constructed on Kahoolawe” for pilots to practice shooting at. In the Cold War and Vietnam War, the targets expanded to mock up aircraft, radar installation, gun mounts, and surface to air missile sites.
The Navy won’t estimate how many pounds of ordnance were exploded on the island but to give us some idea, according to Larry Zilinsky (RCN retired) in an e mail dated January 31, 2001: In 1965, 500 tons of TNT were detonated on the edge of the island to test the effects on Navy ships anchored a mile offshore. The Navy’s own documents guess at “millions of pounds” but admit nobody kept records of what was dropped there.
Before all this, the island was home to Native Hawaiians who “fished, farmed, and lived in coastal and interior settlements across the entire island” for over a thousand years, according to the Kahoolawe Island Reserve Commission.
The Protect Kahoolawe Ohana led a public protest to end the bombing and return the island to Hawaiians. PKO carried out a series of occupations of the island beginning in 1976 which brought national attention to the movement. It was successful. In 1980 the Navy issued a consent decree which provided PKO access to the island for religious, cultural, educational, and scientific activities. IN 1993, after years of sustained protests and strong public sentiment against the bombing, Congress passed a law that required the navy to return the island to the state and clean it up.
The bill authorized $400 million in federal funding for the cleanup through November 2003. The Navy says its taken 9 million pounds of scrap metal (from old munitions), 11,000 old tires, and 370 old vehicles (used as target practice) off the island. Of the 29,000 acres which make up Kahoolawe. The Navy says more than 20,000 are cleaned on the surface and 2,500 are cleaned to below 4 feet from the surface. The Navy says it’s fulfilled its goal to “make the land accessible”, but some Hawaiian groups disagree. How accessible is a land which requires a life or death warning?
Today one is greeted with the following caution upon entering the island: “WARNING! The Kahoolawe Island Reserve contains dangerous unexploded ordnance as well as cultural and natural resources which require protection. Unauthorized entrance into and activities within the Reserve are prohibited.”
The federal and state governments are trying to create a sovereign Native Hawaiian entity to eventually take over the island from KIRC. In the meantime, KIRC will continue to clean up the island and attempt to reforest it, in the hopes it’ll one day become a viable part of Hawaii’s future, “where Native Hawaiian cultural practices flourish… and the Native Hawaiian lifestyle spreads throughout the islands.”
Where does the future of Kahoolawe go from here? The answer is probably complex and years in the making. Humor me for a moment as I ruminate on the topic through the perspective of philosopher Nietzsche in his The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals book: “The ‘evolution’ of a thing, a custom, an organ is not its progressus towards a goal… Rather is it is a sequence of more or less profound, more or less independent processes of appropriation, included the resistances used in each instance, the attempted transformations for purposes of defense or reaction, as well as the results of successful counterattacks.”
As the state and Hawaiians work to shape a future for Kahoolawe, it’s easy to look back and see the land has been an evolution of different processes. As far as we can tell, Hawaiians used it first as their hometown. Then the military came along and appropriated it for target practice, transforming it from a cultural landscape to one marked by violence, all in the name of national defense. This stirred much resistance from modern Hawaiians, whose counterattack strategy was to occupy the land in protest. They, too, invoked the purpose of “defense” – although they wanted to defend the land from its then-current user, the Navy. This worked, and the land was reappropriated to the Hawaiians.
One of the most obvious ways the reappropriation would be complete is the name change of the island from Kahoolawe to Kanaloa. “The lordly right of bestowing names is such that one would almost be justified in seeing the origin of language itself as an expression of the rulers’ power. They say ‘this is that or that’; they seal off each thing and action with a sound and therefore take symbolic possession of it,” wrote Nietzsche.
In ancient times the island was called Kanaloa for the god of the ocean and the foundations of the earth. Davianna McGregor, president of the preservation group Protect Kahoolawe Ohana (with whom KIRC has a stewardship agreement), explains, “Traditionally, (the island) was honored as a body form of a major god and a place where people went for spiritual cleansing and healing.”
The name change occurred around the time of white colonization. Mc Gregor isn’t sure exactly when, but she says, “The kupuna have said this occurred some time during the period of missionary influence over (Queen) Kaahumanu, which would be in the 1820s.”
But the change is coming full circle. There is no official stance on returning to the original name, but in KIRC’s vision statement for the island there is one reference to Kanaloa: “The piko of Kanaloa is the crossroads of the past and future generations from which the Native Hawaiian lifestyle spreads throughout the islands.”
Some Hawaiians are excited. “It symbolizes the revival of the spiritual connection of aloha ‘aina with the island by the people of Hawaii. This spiritual essence of the island is that of Kanaloa forms. In establishing the island as a cultural reserve, this essence will be at the center of the cultural activity,” says McGregor.
The island is still in transition. Though its military chapter has been written, its future is still being formed. That’ll be another political process, in which we’ll likely see the Native Hawaiians continue to strive for their goal, because as Nietzsche says, “life simply is will to power.”
CELEBRITY SUITCASE
Pali Kaaihue, singer
Pali spends a lot of time on the road. He goes to Los Angeles and Las Vegas every two months for music bookings. “When I travel, I likes to take a book and laptop so I can play video games in the airport. Right now I’m into reading Tom Clancy thrillers and for video games, I like first-person shooting games. I also like to take an air purifier for the hotel room.”
