Carmen Guzman-Simpliciano and her husband, Joseph Simplicano Jr., have seen it all at Kūʻīlioloa Heiau in Waiʻanae from a lack of educational signs to people taking inappropriate photos, riding dirt bikes around it, littering, feeding a cat colony, starting fires, climbing and removing stones from the heiau.
“To other people, they’re going to think, ‘Oh it’s just stones.’ No,” Guzman-Simpliciano said. “It’s a cultural site.”
Guzman-Simpliciano and Simpliciano are co-founders of the nonprofit Kingdom Pathways and have been stewarding Kūʻīlioloa Heiau located in the Pōkaʻī Bay Beach Park since the nonprofit was created in 2021.
Kūʻīlioloa Heiau is a navigational heiau named after a demigod dog, Ku, that protected travelers. The Royal Order of Kamehameha I, Moku O Kapuāiwa Chapter, and the Aila ʻohana also steward the site.
Kingdom Pathways aims to demonstrate mauka to makai stewardship through water testing, improving the jetty wall, advocating for amended Hawaiʻi Administrative Rules at Pōkaʻī Bay, supporting community health, among other initiatives. At Pōkaʻī Bay, Kingdom Pathways teach keiki and community members about native plants, protecting the ʻāina and proper protocols for when one enters a heiau. The nonprofit has replanted native species when shrubbery was destroyed and rebuilt a section of the heiau when an individual removed stones. The Waiʻanae community uses the Pōkaʻī Bay Beach Park for community and cultural events like Lā Kūʻokoʻa and Lā Hoʻihoʻi Ea.
For Simpliciano, stewarding cultural sites like the Kūʻīlioloa Heiau is crime prevention.
“Having these events and having these places around to be protected for future generations help to keep our community grounded,” he said. “Things like this give the kids and the community purpose."
Guzman-Simpliciano and Simpliciano noticed what they called a “huge gap in caring for sensitive cultural sites” between cultural sites on state land versus in City and County of Honolulu public parks.
Guzman-Simpliciano said that Kingdom Pathways has been working with the city and state since they got started in 2021. She said it was hard work to get all the necessary city and state departments at a table to discuss cultural stewardship at Pōkaʻī Bay.
“We need like a blueprint,” she said. “There’s other spaces that need protection as well, not just Pōkaʻī Bay.”
She wrote a proposal to Councilmember Andria Tupola to streamline partnerships between groups stewarding cultural sites and the city. Tupola sponsored Bill 31, which passed on Sept. 9 and is headed to the mayor’s desk.
Tupola said at the City Council meeting in July that she introduced the bill in response to I continued vandalism at the site.
“The bill itself is for us to strengthen how we treat these sites in our city and county parks,” Tupola said.
HPD Regional Patrol Bureau Acting Assistant Chief Gail Beckley stated in an email Tuesday that HPD has not documented damage-type reports to the heiau at Pōkaʻī Bay between January 2025 to the present, but has responded to damage reports in the bathroom area and to the playground equipment.
Guzman-Simpliciano said she hopes that it saves other organizations the work and time that she put into coordinating with the city and state and makes the process easier.
The bill adds “stewardship” of cultural sites to the Department of Parks and Recreation public parks program. DPR can approve or deny applications by individuals or groups to help steward a cultural site. People apply with their qualifications and a draft stewardship plan, which can include the boundaries of the cultural site, the identification of allowed and prohibited activities, cultural access protocols, and identification of signage or educational programs to implement. The department and cultural stewards will work with the Oʻahu historic preservation commission, the state historic preservation division, cultural practitioners and appropriate state or city agencies to develop the stewardship plan for the cultural site.
For Guzman-Simpliciano, this was her way to huli, or change, the system.
“My vision was to get in the system and work within that system,” she said. “That’s why we’re called Kingdom Pathways, we’re in the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi, and we as Native Hawaiians to find pathways within the state and find a better way for our people so they don’t have to keep protesting, and finding solutions.”
Simpliciano said that they work with aloha and hope to set an example for the next generation.
Applications to participate in the program should include community stakeholders and the department will review the applicant’s experience with community engagement, according to the bill.
Guzman-Simpliciano said that cultural stewardship includes a whole community, and cultural stewardship plans should be inclusive of that.
“We encourage the council to ensure that stewardship plans reflect a shared community vision, not solely the perspective of one adopter or organization,” she said. “It shouldn’t be one person’s opinion about what that place should look like.”
When there was controversy over the name of the heiau, Kingdom Pathways went to the local neighborhood board parks committee for community input. They landed on Kūʻīlioloa Heiau rather than Kaneʻīlioloa Heiau to reflect the name documented in the Bishop Museum and told in stories by their kūpuna.
Adam Wayson, one of the directors of Malama Rising, got involved at the Mauna Lahilahi Cultural Garden in Waiʻanae in 2020.
He said that the nonprofit’s involvement “came out of the city’s neglect to properly manage its spaces.” There was an encampment of about 100 homeless people, and the community has come together to clean up the area, restore native plants and advocate to improve stewardship of the park alongside the city.
The Mauna Lahilahi Cultural Garden is home to a heiau, petroglyphs, archeological findings and iwi kūpuna, according to Wayson.
Wayson told ASD that the bill aligns with Malama Rising’s mission and he appreciates the effort to include cultural preservation by the city, but he has his reservations.
“We got into this because the city and county and state neglected to do their jobs,” he said. “As nice as the bill looks on paper, talk is cheap because from my experience, it isn’t until the house is on fire that they aren’t willing to step in and do something.”
He said that the bill’s mandate that groups apply to be cultural stewards when they are already putting the hard work in may come off as insulting to some groups and gives the Department of Parks and Recreation too much power to approve or deny stewardship applications.
A resolution, sponsored by Tupola in March, states, “community-led stewardship, while commendable, should not be a substitute for the City’s responsibility to manage, invest in, and activate its public park lands in accordance with adopted plans, environmental approvals, cultural obligations, and established City practices for botanical and cultural gardens under the DPR.”
Haley Lehman can be reached at haley@alohastatedaily.com.
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