At the Jaggar museum the “integration” of science and spirituality is the work of a team of NPS designers in collaboration with the artist Herb Kawainui Kane whose paintings of Hawaiian volcano gods, and especially Pele, shape the exhibition and signage. Greg Johnson, in his published research on a 1996-1997 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) case, reports on Kane’s participation in the hearings. In the course of his testimony, Kane self-identified as “part Hawaiian,” in the sense, he added, that “we’re all part Hawaiian these days”. In 1984, about two years prior to Kane’s selection by the NPS, the Pure Land Buddhist Honpa Hongwanji Mission of Honolulu celebrated him as a “living treasure of Hawaii,” perhaps informing the NPS’s invitation to participate on the Jaggar Museum exhibition design team. The museum displays Kane’s artwork, woven seamlessly into its educational programme and NPS gift shops sell reproductions of Kane’s paintings as well as his book on Pele, a work “inspired by” the museum design assignment.
Here and elsewhere, in the Hawaiian Islands and among other “native” populations, the U.S. National Park Service puts “spirituality” explicitly into formal circulation. In this process, this most porous of “religious” categories accomplishes substantial work. Scripting a range of behaviors and sensations at Kilauea’s rim and in the caldera, it simultaneously frames, protects, invites, discourages, and facilitates “spiritual expression” of various sorts.
Agreement about this spirituality of place is shared by at least some park employees and visitors at HVNP. On the day of my recent visit, for example, on hearing of my interest in the public display of religion, one park ranger volunteered that he settled there in part to learn spiritual lessons from “native Hawaiians” and that he consequently belongs to a nearby Hawaiian language Christian church choir. He recommended that I stop to hear self-described “Praise and Worship leader” Rupert Tripp, Jr. who was singing at the main Kilauea Visitor Center. According to his web-pages, Tripp lives in Volcano, HI, and writes and records “music of the heart” “for the glory of my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” When I went to listen, the musician had gone on break, but the literature he left on his table, including a flyer on NPS letterhead, identified his performance as part of a “series of Hawaiian cultural programs sponsored by HVNP and Hawaii Natural History Association.”
At the Jaggar Museum, furthermore, two practitioners of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, perhaps responding to the “spiritual” license of the place, set up their table of pamphlets near the main entrance to the museum and observation deck. No one on site the day of my visit recommended music of any other sort or offered literatures disconnected from the place’s spiritual performances. The NPS’s official embrace, even promotion, of the “spirituality” of this place apparently sets in motion its selection for the exercise of religious freedoms protected by the first amendment to the Constitution of the United States. The volcanic landscape, and the NPS characterization of it in its signage, did not specifically anticipate Rupert Tripp or the Jehovah’s Witness literature arrayed on a table in the sun at the Jaggar Museum’s entrance gate. The NPS did, however, script the possibility of such performances into its signage.
Spirituality, in its very fluidity, can be also constraining and regulatory. The NPS designation of HVNP as “wahi kapu,” attended by their translation of the term as “sacred landscape,” provides an interpretive frame for another sort of Big Island signage beyond the park’s borders. Invariably the first and largest word on these sometimes manufactured, sometimes hand-lettered signs is an uppercase “KAPU.” Often, but not always, the signs mark national, state, or local government property, sites of significance for Hawaiians who claim descent from ancient island ancestors. “Kapu” here signals the borders—and thus fixes the boundaries—of contested spaces, contested ethnic and religious “properties.” These “sacred” spaces display literal “no trespassing” signs that carry with them a touch of the mortal threat of ancient Hawaiian religious systems where, tourist guides repeatedly remind visitors, “kapu” also meant “taboo” and the penalty for violation was frequently death.
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