The University of Hawaii at Hilo’s History Club members will return to Molokai on Friday to honor the patients of Hansen’s disease, or leprosy, by placing lei on their graves.
“This will be our tenth year of placing lei,” said Kerri Inglis, a history professor who launched Hui Malama Makanalua, the group responsible for placing the lei at Kalaupapa. “We picked June 30 because in 1969, that’s the day that the isolation law was officially lifted.
“Prior to that, if you had Hansen’s disease, you had to not only go into quarantine, but even as late as the early 1960s, you had to be sent to Kalaupapa, which leads to the separation of families, stigma, and all kinds of things.”
This year, just six members of the group will be going due to visitor restrictions in place, but the community is invited to help with the memorial tribute.
Today from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m., a lei-making workshop will be held on the lanai at the Kipuka Native Hawaiian Student Center at UH-Hilo.
The group will have ti leaves available for participants.
With a goal of distributing 1,500 lei, the group is short roughly 400 but hopes to provide them for all the Kalaupapa graves.
“Given that approximately 8,000 people were sent to Kalaupapa because of leprosy and were laid to rest there, we obviously can’t honor every grave, as not every grave is marked,” Inglis said. “So, we also make a very large lei at one of the locations, where there are a number of unmarked graves, and we put flowers on each side of the ocean to kind of place a lei around the entire peninsula on this day of remembrance.”
The concept developed during a 2013 service trip led by Inglis, where students visited Kalaupapa to help clean graves, remove invasive species, and help out with the national park.
“I was with a small group of students walking back from the cemetery, back to where we were staying in the settlement, and we were just looking around and felt overwhelmed, that everyone deserved to have a lei, to be remembered,” she said. “They had this idea: What if we could bring a lei for everybody, and what if we could do this all in one day?”
During the trips, Inglis shared that students were able to reconnect with their families and history.
“Inevitably, the students would have family connections to Kalaupapa,” she said. “Probably every Hawaiian family has a connection to Kalaupapa and the history of leprosy there.”
One of those students was Kepa Revelle, a recent graduate who participated for the first time during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“To me, it was almost redemptive, because while the whole world was scrambling because of COVID, we were in the safest place we could possibly be,” he said of the experience. “It was somewhere you were sent to be outcast. But now, instead of being trapped there, it was more like we were protected.”
Revelle was able to reconnect with his ohana and culture during the visits and will return again this year to place the lei.
“People in my own ohana were sent to Kalaupapa, and a lot of other people against their will,” he said. “Placing these lei in memory of all the kupuna who were there bridges a gap to reconnect and reclaim identity, genealogy and familial connection. It’s healing, and you need to know where you come from in order to know where you’re going.”
Inglis added many students have shared similar experiences during their trips.
“I’ve seen an incredible transformation in the students who have the opportunity to go to Kalaupapa. There’s a deep connection they make with the kupuna,” she said. “In that connection comes a new sense of their kuleana, or responsibility, to their history, their heritage, to one another, and to the community at large because you start to realize the sacrifice that close to 8,000 people made to keep the rest of the lahui safe.”
Since the project began in 2014, the group has left an estimated 15,000 lei, nearly two for each of the roughly 8,000 patients sent between 1866 and 1969.
“It’s a very powerful place to go, to be where so much of this history occurred, and by history, I mean people lived their lives there, they had joy but they had pain, they had challenges but they had triumphs, they were indeed a strong, largely Hawaiian community,” Inglis said. “I really think it’s helping to heal some of the trauma of that past when we’re able to make these reconnections.”
Email Grant Phillips at gphillips@hawaiitribune-herald.com.
