KAPU: Sacred Hawaiian Burials | movie | 2022 | Official Trailer
Death is an intimate experience, and how we lay our loved ones to rest, varies between cultures. KAPU: Sacred Hawaiian B | dG1fWFFmYkdqTGNyT1E
Transcript
00:00 I set myself out on a journey to learn of a traditional Hawaiian burial practice.
00:07 On the island where I live, hidden beneath the forest, my family discovered a cave.
00:17 It holds the remains of my ancestors.
00:21 In the Hawaiian culture, burials are kapu, which means forbidden and sacred.
00:29 And Hawaiian laws were so clear, you knew if you were or were not a kapu breaker.
00:34 The penalty for kapu breaking was death.
00:37 Federal prosecutors charged two Big Island merchants with stealing more than 150 repatriated Hawaiian artifacts.
00:45 Outsiders don't realize what they're doing to our family.
00:50 One day he came with a bulldozer.
00:53 I told him that if he lands that bulldozer on this property, I'm going to call the cops and get arrested for desecrating our burial.
01:00 Two swipes on this little piece of property, it's gone and it's gone forever.
01:03 But some native Hawaiians say it's running roughshod over ancestral remains.
01:08 I love my dad, and he loved every one of us.
01:15 And today, I'm going to honor him.
01:18 And the only way I can do that is Hawaiian.
01:22 What other people think of our iwi is irrelevant.
01:27 As long as we know what our iwi means to us, that that's our kupuna, that's our loved one.
01:36 One and one that we respect.
01:39 This is the way we're taught.
01:41 People don't get that. This is Hawaii.
01:44 Before anybody came here, we had a people, a population of people who lived here.
01:51 Thousands of years before anybody came here.
01:54 This is a culture, a beautiful one, that we accept, that we know what went into it.
02:01 I'm talking about these moral things that every race respects the most.
02:06 It's their ancestors.
02:08 [music]