Alyssa Navarro
Staff Writer
Loren Dyck, assistant professor of management, lectured about the transformative cooperation at the Honokahua Burial Site as part of the faculty lecture series Monday in the President’s Dining Room.
Transformative cooperation is a process designed to produce agreement and collaboration to create understanding between parties.
Dyck began the lecture by asking the 20 students and faculty a question.
“By a show of hands, how many of you have ever been in a situation where you had to get agreement from someone who holds opposing views or values than you hold?” Dyck said.
Almost everyone in the room raised their hand.
Dyck explored components of the transformative cooperation process as a part of his doctoral work. He researched the controversy regarding the Honokahua Burial Site in Maui, Hawaii.
The dispute occurred between the native Hawaiians and the Maui Land & Pineapple Company.
The Honokahua Burial Site contained more than 2,000 ancient Hawaiian burials dating between A.D. 610 and 1800. Developers wanted to create of a five-diamond $200 million resort complex requiring the removal of human remains.
People of Hawaii were upset the state was issuing permits allowing landowners and developers to remove ancient bones buried in the island.
He played a video provided by the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Honokahua displaying the protests of the Hawaiians trying to preserve their sacred land.
“It was interesting seeing how passionate the natives were about the cause when they stood on the streets with signs and rallied as many people as they could to do something,” sophomore chemistry major Jacky Castaneda said.
The natives claimed it was a sacred, spiritual place of Hawaiian culture. The Maui Land & Pineapple Company argued that the body of land was a key to completion of a master plan for resort complex.
The two parties eventually came to an agreement. The ongoing protests and negative coverage in the news led to the governor’s decree to stop digging.
The bones were put back and put into a reservation site. The hotel relocated off of the burial site and was put on a higher elevation providing a better view and closer access to golfing amenities.
“It got me thinking that since Hawaii is an island they are going to run out of space faster than everyone else,” sophomore liberal studies major Ashley Hoffman said.
“Society is growing and will continue to grow so what will they do then? Because they will run out of space no matter what.”
Professor of Humanities Al Clark said the issue that we will eventually be faced in future decades.
“With 7 billion people on earth, all of us are going to be facing this multiple times in a lifetime,” he said. “The Hawaiians did a good job of taking on the issue.”
The next lecture “Making American Politics Work: Coping with Fear and Anger AKA: A Political Self-Help Guide” by Richard Gelm, professor of political science, will be at noon Monday in the President’s Dining Room.
Alyssa Navarro can be reached at alyssa.navarro@laverne.edu.
