College Studies Honouliuli Camp

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The National Park Service has awarded UH-West Oahu $26,148 to study the Honouliuli Internment Camp site.

“It’s great to know that our faculty and students will help answer many remaining questions about Hawaii’s history while also helping to preserve for generations a site that many people once thought was lost,” said chancellor Gene Awakuni.“There are firsthand accounts of the experience at the camp that have not yet been conveyed to researchers. This funding will help many of those stories to be told.”

The 160-acre World War II campsite is located on farmland owned by Monsanto, just west of what is now Kunia Road. Built in 1943, it was considered the last, largest and longest-used of an estimated eight confinement sites erected in Hawaii.

“Because Japanese Americans, German Americans and Italian Americans were confined there under the authority of martial law, the site provides a multi-ethnic perspective on a shameful and little-known episode in U.S. history,” said UHWO anthropologist Suzanne Falgout, a Mililani resident.

Students in the 2010 field study also will learn archaeological techniques as they work alongside volunteers and experts from around the world.