A Paradise Lost - KOPS - Universität Konstanz

identity-forging quality of place is undermined by the mushrooming of American
‘culture.’
how we spose
feel Hawaiian anymoa
barefoot buying smokes
in da seven
eleven stoa…? 544
Still, some places in the Islands are irrevocably layered with indigenous history and
significance. Sites of ancient burials or heiau contain strong mana. Craig Howes’s short
story “The Resurrection Man” relates how such places might communicate with the
people who are of this land. 545 The part-Hawaiian protagonist is introduced in a curious
in-between position: Working construction, he is forced to witness the removal of a
native family that protests the desecration of a roadwork site. “Standing to one side, not
with the crew, not with the ohana, Isaiah watched everyone climb into the vans” (50).
When bones and graves are discovered, an archeologist employs the frightened man to
help unearth an ancient burial site: “And with each day, Isaiah felt more strongly that it
was his past, and not the archeologists’, that was being uncovered” (55-6). He also begins
to understand that native places have been bulldozed over and reconfigured by foreign
inscriptions. Crying at the reburial of the bones, he registers that “the minister said the
bodies were ‘asleep in Christ,’ and he spoke about shepherds and pastures, although the
church stood on a rocky slope looking out on the bay so far below” (56). While this part
of the story takes place in Kona, on the West coast of the Big Island, the following
episodes are headed “East Maui,” “Leeward Oahu,” “Hawaii Nei,” and “Kona, toward
Kohala:” The papers are full of the feats of “The Undertaker,” who in this “summer of
dead bodies” (58) obstructs development everywhere by burying skulls and bones in the
ground. While the police and the archeologist are looking for Isaiah, he has retreated to
the old ‘city of refuge,’ Pu’uhonua (today a national park and one of the Big Island’s
premier attractions), where he wants to spend the remainder of his life, together with a
hundred buried bodies: “All would now silently resist, turning their faces to the light
when the pursuers broke through, climbing in pieces onto the dozer blade, making each
544 Wayne Kaumuali’i Westlake, “Native-Hawaiian,” in Hall 1985: 109.
545 Craig Howes, “The Resurrection Man,” in Stewart 1987: 50-61.
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