North shore lot known to have 30 graves; plans call for building a home

Within Joseph Brescia’s 15,667-square-foot beachfront house lot on Kaua’i’s north shore are 30 known burials of pre-Western-contact Native Hawaiians.

To Kaua’i residents Jeff Chandler, PuaNani Rogers and numerous other Native Hawaiians and others following the case, that constitutes a cemetery.

The proper action for such a small land area with so many burials is that the iwi, or bones, be left in place and nothing be built there, they say.

That’s actually what they thought — or hoped — was going to happen after the Kaua’i-Ni’ihau Island Burial Council voted April 3 to “preserve in place” all 30 sets of remains.

The council is charged under state law with deciding whether to preserve in place or move burials discovered before construction on a site begins. Disposition of inadvertent discoveries of bones after a project begins are handled by a state archaeologist in collaboration with the builder.

Brescia has every right to build a house over the graves on his land because he’s complying with a burial treatment plan for the property that the State Historic Preservation Division approved on April 24, his attorneys say.

But Chandler’s attorney, Alan Murakami, of the Native Hawaiian Legal Corporation, says that Nancy McMahon, the division’s deputy administrator for archaeology, improperly approved the treatment plan without consulting with the Burial Council and with lineal and cultural descendants of the iwi as is spelled out in state law.

McMahon also didn’t try hard enough, or require Brescia’s contract archaeologist to try hard enough, to inform members of the public of the 30 burials with enough detail about them, Murakami alleges.

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(Source: Diana Leone. Honolulu Advertiser)