Hidden Histories: The Untold Stories of Honouliuli

Register for the event using the following link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88062574509

When it was rediscovered by the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawaiʻi (JCCH), the Honouliuli Prisoner of War (POW) and Civilian Internment Camp was hidden in a densely vegetated gulch-- only 14 miles northwest of Honolulu, but worlds away. The site was buried not just physically, but also historically: although the mass removal and incarceration of Japanese Americans from the west coast of the United States was chronicled in books, movies, plays, museums, and countless articles, there was a widespread belief that there had been no internment of civilians in Hawaiʻi during World War II. Volunteers from JCCH and students from the University of Hawaiʻi braved the dense vegetation to document that the site indeed had many remnants of the prison camp. With those concrete slabs, rock walls, guard tower foundations, and fences, Honouliuli retains enough archaeological integrity to be listed on the National Register, an important first step on becoming a National Historic Site. As a unit of the National Park Service, Honouliuli will be able to tell its story of how the U.S. has treated its citizens and POWs in times of crisis.

Biographies: 

Jeff Burton is the Cultural Resources Program Manager at Manzanar National Historic Site in California. Although he has published reports on topics ranging from pre-contact Indigenous camps and Pueblo villages to Spanish missions and frontier Army posts, his passion is the archaeology of World War II Japanese American internment sites. He has conducted work at Poston, Minidoka, Tule Lake, and Manzanar, and has taught a summer field class at Honouliuli Internment Camp in Hawaiʻi. Since 1993 he has directed archaeological investigations at Manzanar, and his 2001 nation-wide overview of internment sites was cited in the national law that created the Japanese American Confinement Sites grant program. His documentation of still-extant remains at other incarceration camps has helped lead to the designation of three of the places as National Historic Sites: Minidoka, Tule Lake, and Honouliuli. In 2017 he received an award for excellence from the Society for American Archaeology. He has published articles in academic journals and his work is featured in site tours, visitor handouts, and in an NHK-Japan documentary.

Mary M. Farrell is a senior archaeologist for TEAM Environmental, Inc. (Bishop, California). Most of her career was with the U.S. Forest Service in California and Arizona, where she had the privilege of working with volunteers, Tribal members, and Mexico’s Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia and Universidad de Sonora on projects exploring public archaeology, historic preservation, and traditional perspectives on land use and stewardship. But some of her most important work has focused on World War II incarceration of civilians, working with Jeff Burton on projects at Manzanar, Minidoka, Poston, and Tule Lake, and leading an effort to honor Gordon Hirabayashi and other Japanese Americans who resisted the unconstitutional mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. With the University of Hawaiʻi West Oʻahu, she and Jeff led a field class at Honouliuli for four summers, prepared the National Register nomination, and contributed to the Special Resource Study that led to the designation of Honouliuli as a National Monument.