ABSTRACT
Wild seas crash onto lava rocks spit long ago from the peninsula’s volcano; the devil-winds of Pelekunu bend trees to the ground; a cataclysmic landslide formed 2,000-foot cliffs from the sloping tableland of the rest of the island. It is a place set apart by nature, the perfect place to isolate those with the separating sickness. From 1866 until 1969, people afflicted with leprosy or Hansen’s disease2 were quarantined for life at Kalaupapa (lit. flat leaf in Hawaiian), the remote northern peninsula of Molokai, an island roughly in the center of the Hawaiian Islands chain. Two Catholic religious from their community have been beatified and today 30 patients, sent to the settlement as young children, still call the National Historic Landmark of Kalaupapa their home. It is a place where human nature has created a community of both extraordinary and ordinary people, and where “beauty springing from the breast of pain” can be clearly seen in both (Stevenson 1889: n.p.).3 e conservation work at Kalaupapa has had to adjust in the last twenty years to the active nature of the settlement in order to provide for continuing care of the patients and to interpret a resource like no other.
