🪦Imagine... Legacy That Speak, Not Disappear🪦
💡 Imagined Endstate:
A future in which every burial ground is protected by law and culture, where descendants, government, and developers engage in respectful dialogue, not unilateral action, and where the land remains living with its memory intact.
📚 Source:
Dye, T. S. (2025, September 10). Why We Must Preserve Customary Hawaiian Protections for Human Burials. Honolulu Civil Beat. link.
💥 What’s the Big Deal:
In Kailua, on the island of Oahu, Hawaii, thousands of unmarked burials lie beneath sandy soils. When development proceeds without honoring Hawaiian customs, ancestors are disturbed, community memory fractured, and relationships broken. The City’s Department of Planning & Permitting (DPP) has misapplied statutes to exempt land projects from historical review, conflating house and lot, to sideline burial protections🏗️. In doing so, it overrides centuries‑old cultural duty and silences descendant voices.
True leadership means communication and debate before irreversible actions. When dialogue is cut off, decisions are made, and discussion is lost🗣. At that point, wounds deepen, trust erodes, and the only remedy left is damage control. Protecting burial grounds isn’t just heritage, it is respect, listening, and collaboration. Hawaiians entrusted mālama ʻāina to generations; destroying graves is not development, it is erasure. Before options slip away, we need forums, transparency, and sincere dialogue, so that no burial is destroyed in silence.
#MālamaʻĀina, #ProtectAncestralBurials, #CulturalRespect, #CommunityStewardship,#CommunityEmpowerment, #IMSPARK,
