About 20 Molokaʻi community members gathered at the Kalaupapa trailhead to oppose the first National Park Service hiking tour on July 9. They held signs stating, “No ask, no come,” “Protect Kalaupapa,” and other messages.
Maui County Councilmember Keani Rawlins-Fernandez of Molokaʻi was one of them.
“The residents in Kalaupapa as well as topside Molokaʻi community (were) not consulted and given the opportunity to consent prior to the tour starting,” she told HPR.
The group of community members called themselves Kūnou iā Kalaupapa and came to voice their concerns against the tours.
“The National Parks Services has rushed in to begin tourism at this sacred place, with no consultation with the Molokai community,” said Walter Ritte, one of the Kūnou iā Kalaupapa organizers, via email. “The impacts on our island and its community will be huge and we demand our voices be heard.”
Rawlins-Fernandez said NPS gave the community no basic information about the tours, or about safety protocols if hikers had a medical emergency on the strenuous pali trail.
The hiking tour was in the planning process for about two years, the Kalaupapa superintendent had told HPR. The tour allowed 10 people twice a week to participate in guided visits.
NPS leases a portion of the land it manages in Kalaupapa from the state Department of Hawaiian Homelands, and Rawlins-Fernandez believes proper protocol was not followed.
“How are you justifying commencing this activity without first conducting beneficiary consultation? Because the land that this tour is operating on is homestead land, and so beneficiaries should be consulted,” she said.
This is the first time NPS had operated tours to the remote settlement. Tours had previously been led for decades by Kalaupapa patient residents, which Rawlins-Fernandez said she supported.
“The patients telling their own stories about somewhere they live, and then you know, being able to make some kind of an income to provide for their needs — that was appropriate. That was OK,” she said.
This comes after the death of Meli Watanuki, the patient resident who owned the Kalaupapa Saints Tour, which closed last month.
Patient residents have first right of refusal to operate tours, and none of the four remaining residents on the Kalaupapa registry wanted to run a tour.
Last month, leading up to the first NPS tour, Rawlins-Fernandez said she had received a generic email notification when the tour was announced.
“It didn't have any information about how many tours, how big the tours would be, what the safety plan was, how much it would cost, if they had permission to cross the... private property from the beginning of the trail to, I believe, the second switchback,” she said. “So there's just a lot of questions.”
She said had there been an opportunity to discuss the tours in advance, residents might have felt differently.
“Where was the community meeting about it, so that we could have the information?" Rawlins-Fernandez said. "Because maybe community members would have been supportive if they knew it was like only 10 people per tour twice a week.”
The incident also reflects a long-standing community distrust of the National Park Service's presence in Kalaupapa, and a desire for greater involvement in the settlement's future planning.
Rawlins-Fernandez said the lack of communication about the tours shows “blatant disrespect for the community” and sets a “bad precedent.”
“If you're going to conduct this kind of activity without thinking that the appropriate first step is to talk to the community, then how do we know that you're not gonna scale up without consulting us, too?” she said.
NPS said the tour is fully guided and hikers don't have free access in the Kalaupapa settlement, in respect to the privacy of patient residents still living there.
But Rawlins-Fernandez also took issue with the tour being led by a non-local employee.
“Why is a seasonal NPS worker, without ties to Molokaʻi, leading this tour and telling our story?” she said.
About 30 Molokaʻi residents gathered again on Saturday to meet the second tour, but NPS had already placed the operation on hold.
The National Park Service said in a statement, “The NPS is temporarily pausing future public tours while it reassesses the feasibility of visitor access.”
It's not yet clear if a community meeting will be held or when tours might resume.
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