How finding a skeleton in a Hawaii cave changed this man’s life

Keoni Alvarez was just an 8-year-old boy when his Native Hawaiian family made a startling discovery 35 years ago. Deep in the forests of the Big Island of Hawaii, his brothers found a hidden cave when they were playing near their home in Puna — and inside the cave, they found iwi, or human skeletal remains.

Their mother called the police, and with the help of a state archaeologist, they determined that it wasn’t a missing person or homicide but part of an ancient Hawaiian burial.

Now knowing that it was there, Alvarez developed a strong sense of responsibility to the iwi. His family acted as guardians over the cave, keeping it a secret, until encroaching development made that impossible.

In the early 2000s, the affordable land around them was parceled and sold, including the burial ground. When Alvarez and his mom saw the landowner and a bulldozer leveling the land, they confronted them, yelling and demanding that they stop.

“He wanted to bulldoze the burial cave to build over it,” the now-43-year-old Alvarez told SFGATE. “I was heartbroken and sad that foreigners would ever do such a thing.”

Alvarez thought the state would have intervened, knowing that his family had documented the find years ago. He called the Hawaii State Historic Preservation Division, a department entrusted with protecting Hawaii’s historic places, and Alvarez learned that it had lost the file.

In Hawaii, construction must stop if human remains are found, and developers must inform the state about it so it can investigate. Whether or not the developer does that, however, is based on an honor code system. Even if a burial is there, the state still allows purchasing of the property, and if the developer follows a government burial process, it can even be built over.

In this case, Alvarez said the landowner knew there was a burial site, but since the state had lost the record and didn’t provide any mandatory procedure, the landowner claimed ignorance.

“An archaeologist retired, and they lost the records,” said Alvarez, “so I had to actually play catch-up before the burial was going to get desecrated.” 

In disbelief of the problems he was facing, Alavarez, a filmmaker, picked up a camera to document his fight to save the burial cave that lasted 23 years. 

“I thought there were laws that protected these kinds of places,” he said. “And realizing that it was a problem, I decided to start to document and interview people, you know, different elders.” His completed documentary film “Kapu: Sacred Hawaiian Burials” premiered at the Maui Film Festival last year and can be streamed on PBS.

Through the years, he has become an expert in sacred Hawaiian burials. He studied the different processes of traditional burials, how to care for them and the laws governing their protection. He went on TV news and talk shows to raise awareness of the loopholes developers use to desecrate them and how much the laws differ from the belief of Native Hawaiians.

“Because the state only protects from the top down, they don’t protect like the integrity of the cave. And throughout history, in our culture, when you put one burial within a cave, the whole cave is considered a burial site,” said Alvarez. “That was part of their eternal life, and how and where they believe that their souls and their spirits have gone.”

“I found out that my family actually came from this area,” Alvarez said. “That’s the Kaui lineage, and that is my family name and my great-great-grandmother was actually from Hawaii Island, which I didn’t know.”

This new realization allowed Alvarez to be recognized officially by the state as a descendant of the iwi. The new status required the government body overseeing the burial to duly consider and give “appropriate weight” to Alvarez’s wishes when determining what to do with the burial on the landowners’ property, whether that means moving it or not, or building over it.

As he was campaigning for the protection of the cave, he received a text from the owner saying that he would sell him the property for $50,000. Alvarez started fundraising to purchase the land, but then something else unexpected happened: He received a letter in the mail from a real estate agent, who said the landowner had died.

“There were three developers on that property and they all passed away,” Alvarez said. “There was a Realtor who was trying to sell it. She passed away under weird circumstances. The landowner passed away within like two or three months of what he was wanting to do.”

Alvarez ultimately bought the land from the beneficiaries so he could control what’s done to the property. “But for me, that’s not how we’re supposed to be doing it and there should be laws that already gives a mandatory buffer zone around these places to protect it, and we shouldn’t be saying that, ‘Oh, well, we got to try and raise the money to protect it,’” said Alvarez, who’s also become a teacher and author of a book on traditional Hawaiian burial practices. 

He has since bought two other burial properties to watch over and protect from development while he advocates for a separate Hawaiian board not governed by the state that can ensure Hawaiian burials are not destroyed. 

“People are still developing on burials. There’s no real law to stop them,” Alvarez said. 

Editor’s note: SFGATE recognizes the importance of diacritical marks in the Hawaiian language. We are unable to use them due to the limitations of our publishing platform.