Management of Mauna ʻAla, the burial place for many of Hawaiʻi’s monarchs, is at a crossroads.

The state Department of Land and Natural Resources picked a new curator for the burial grounds in Nuʻuanu without consulting with key Native Hawaiian organizations or the family that has cared for the remains for the last 200 hundred years.

That set off a fierce debate that will spill out into the Legislature next year. Lawmakers will propose that the state lands department step aside and transfer management of the grounds to the Office of Hawaiian Affairs.

Meanwhile, descendants of the customary caretakers — who say the lands department broke with decades of tradition in picking the new curator — are trying to build support to hand over management to a private nonprofit.

Burials in Hawaiian culture — and those of royal lineages in particular — are considered highly sacred. The debate over which entity gets to manage Mauna ʻAla is intertwined with who should be responsible for caring for those remains.

Amid the debate, one thing has become clear: keeping Mauna ʻAla under the state lands department is unpopular to many involved.

“I don’t think it being housed in DLNR is a good fit,” Sen. Tim Richards, who chairs the Senate Hawaiian Affairs Committee, said.

Proposals to transfer management authority come with many unanswered questions, including who pays for the upkeep and what would happen to the current curator, Doni Chong.

Kai Kahele, newly elected to chair the board of trustees of OHA, said his agency, established to represent the interests of Hawaiians, is the right pick to oversee the burial grounds.

“We have the talent here to do it, we just have to work with the administration to bring that to fruition,” Kahele said.

Sen. Lorraine Inouye, who chairs the Senate Water and Land Committee, said she plans to introduce a bill transferring management of the grounds to OHA.

Inouye is worried that keeping Mauna ʻAla under the land department, whose director is a political appointee of the governor, means that policies could change with each new administration every four years.

“If we leave it with OHA, that would be continuous,” Inouye said.

While Inouye supports transferring management authority, she’s not sure that lawmakers would approve of giving OHA additional funds for Mauna ʻAla.

Inouye thinks the office, which oversees vast trust resources worth $600 million, should be able to cover the costs for Mauna ʻAla itself.

OHA has some experience managing historical sites. In 2012, the office acquired the land in Wahiawā that houses the Kūkaniloko birthing stones, the birthplace for many of Oʻahu’s high-ranking chiefs.

But Inouye also acknowledged that OHA comes with some baggage. The office and its trustees have previously been criticized for mismanaging the office’s finances. An audit two years ago found possible instances of waste, fraud and abuse in OHA contracts within the last decade, which prompted the office’s leadership to tighten its internal controls.

In addition to the state, the Aliʻi Trusts, whose namesakes are buried at Mauna ʻAla, have also contributed to improvements at the site under an agreement with DLNR from 2013.

Three of the largest trusts — Lunalilo Home, Liliʻuokalani Trust and The Queen’s Health System — either declined to comment or didn’t respond to requests for comment on the future of Mauna ʻAla.

In a written statement, Kamehameha Schools said that the care and guardianship of Mauna ʻAla “demands the highest standards from all who are entrusted with this sacred responsibility.”

“We trust that OHA and DLNR will continue to work together, alongside the community, to malama this special place.”

After Chong was appointed earlier this year, DLNR Director Dawn Chang said that she met with the Aliʻi trusts, royal societies, Hawaiian civic clubs and members of the family that have traditionally cared for the burials, but there was no consensus among them regarding the proposed transfer of Mauna ʻAla to OHA.

There was also a proposal at one point to create a new position to deal with the cultural aspects of Mauna ʻAla. Chang said there also wasn’t consensus from those groups on what exactly that position would entail.

At recent land board meetings, testifiers and board members have raised concerns that the land department planned to turn parts of Mauna ʻAla, including the curator’s house, into a sort of museum.

While the department is undertaking a $325,000 renovation project of the curator’s house, Chang said the goal isn’t to turn it into a commercial enterprise. After the renovations are complete, Chong and future curators would still live on site.

Chang said she believes Chong has been doing a good job. She said that Chong has been getting assistance from Kahu Kordell Kekoa on cultural protocols and recently hosted a graduating class of Honolulu firefighters.

“I have not received any concerns or complaints,” Chang said. “If anything, we’ve been receiving positive comments about her work there.”

Prior to Chong, a family that traced its lineage to chief Hoʻolulu had served as caretakers of Mauna ʻAla for decades. Hoʻolulu, along with his brother, hid the remains of Kamehameha I.

In Hawaiian tradition, iwi, or bones, contain a person’s mana, or spiritual power. In ancient times, high-ranking chiefs would often have their remains hidden from people who sought to steal that power.

Hoʻolulu and his descendants were entrusted with protecting the remains of Hawaiʻi’s aliʻi into the afterlife.

Mauna ʻAla was established in 1864 to house the remains of Kamehameha’s descendants and their close advisers. It later became the resting place for relatives of David Kalākaua and other royal lineages.

Now, the descendants hope to see a nonprofit established that could manage Mauna ʻAla in partnership with the Aliʻi trusts — removing the site from state government management entirely.

“The OHA solution is just too political,” Mary ‘Amaikalani Beckley Lawrence Gallagher, one of the Hoʻolulu descendants, said.

James Maioho, who comes from a branch of that family, is trying to get support from the Alii trusts and other royal societies to eventually transfer management to a nonprofit run by the family.

“You’re giving that 3.3 acres back to Kanaka control, back as sovereign land,” Maioho said.

Gallagher said that family members have already been discussing who could be the next caretaker and who should be trained to succeed them should the family take over management of Mauna ʻAla.

She said the family has weathered through numerous regime changes over the years as management passed from the Hawaiian Kingdom, to the territory and now to the state.

“We’ll keep our chins up,” Gallagher said, “and keep ourselves out of the monkey business.”

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