‘It felt like a calling’: Native Hawaiian students, professor step up to return iwi kupuna from Yale University
By A’ali’i Dukelow
Click here for updates on this story
Hawaii (KITV) — A Native Hawaiian from O’ahu, Hi’ilei Hobart recently started teaching at Yale University and made a visit to the school’s Peabody museum.
After finding out the facility still had iwi kupuna or human remains that were supposed to be returned to Hawai’i, she felt the need to act.
“I was like, are we going to get those home ASAP?,” Hobart recalled asking a museum representative, adding it was the right question at the right time that started the effort to take back the iwi.
The remains included jaw and teeth bones that had been a part of the Peabody collection in New Haven, Connecticut for more than 150 years.
The museum sent back more than 100 iwi back to Hawai’i in 1994 and and several more in 2014, which is when Hobart said the third round of iwi were meant to be sent back — but they were separated from the rest.
KITV-4 reached out to the museum for an explanation and are awaiting a response.
When Hobart asked how that happened, she said she was told, “sometimes this just happens, right, somebody who was processing it isn’t careful, isn’t mindful, things get separated and later discovered.”
“But for me the most important thing was to just make sure that we work quickly to correct it.”
Hobart enlisted a few kanaka maoli or native Hawaiian students at Yale to help her transfer the iwi, including Kala’i Anderson, Connor Arakaki, and Joshua Ching.
“It was kind of hard to manage my time, but I knew that this kind of repatriation project was really important to me, so I made it a priority” Anderson said.
In the midst of midterms, the group had about a week to prepare, meeting with cultural practitioners Mana and Kalehua Caceres daily via zoom to learn new pule or prayer and oli, chants, for a ceremony to remove and transport the iwi.
Earlier this month, the four took the iwi to repatriation expert Halealoha Ayau, who happened to have scheduled a trip to Vassar College about an hour drive away to retrieve iwi from there himself.
“I didn’t feel like I was worthy of doing it, but because there weren’t many other native Hawaiians at Yale, it kind of felt like sort of a calling,” Ching said.
“Doing the repatriation project felt like a calling for me to build a space for native students at Yale and to respond to the call of duty,” Arakaki said.
The kuleana of helping to return the iwi was both grueling and gratifying for Hobart and the three students, as they’re relieved to know the remains have been returned to their proper resting place.
Please note: This content carries a strict local market embargo. If you share the same market as the contributor of this article, you may not use it on any platform.
