The Trump administration has announced plans to close three regional National Archives and Records Administration facilities across the country.
One of these is the NARA San Francisco Archives, which contains thousands of historical documents about Hawaiʻi, American Samoa and the Native American communities of North America’s west coast.
These records are depended upon by scholars for genealogical, military and immigration-related research.
NARA San Francisco is one of the most comprehensive collections of Pacific archives, which makes it one of the few resources where academics can learn what Hawaiʻi was like during the territorial period.
Professors Maile Arvin of UH Mānoa and David Aiona Chang of the University of Minnesota are two Native Hawaiian scholars who co-organized a letter opposing the closure of NARA San Francisco.
HPR spoke with the two of them to discuss why the archive matters to Hawaiʻi and how its closure will impact Native Hawaiian research.
“They're not available online. They've not been printed. There's millions and millions of pages, and you can't get to them unless you go there,” Chang told HPR.
“It should be close. It should be free. It should be publicly available. These are our records. They belong to the citizens of the United States. They must be available to them.”
Access to these vital documents is especially important for Native Hawaiians, said Arvin, because they contain historical information that is directly tied to Native Hawaiian communities today.
“Those have become really important ways for people today to trace and document and understand something about their own family,” she explained.
“There are records related to individual people from Hawaiʻi maybe trying to go from the Hawaiian Kingdom into the United States and being denied, or there's immigration records that were, again, not originally created to document genealogy, but have become an important source of genealogical research for people today.”
Access to that information is a necessity for preserving and perpetuating the knowledge of Hawaiʻi’s history.
“It helps us to understand through the classes that we take, the classes that our teachers take that go on and teach our children, the history of Hawaii, the history of people's ancestors, the history of their lives,” Chang said.
“So all of this, it might seem far away from everyday life, but it's a way to everyday life, and that's our job. That's my job.”
To learn more about the archive’s closure and the letter co-authored by Arvin and Chang, click here.
This story aired on The Conversation on Aug. 28, 2026. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. Jinwook Lee adapted this story for the web.
