Restoring Molokai Light's Keepers' Houses at Kalaupapa, and Training the Next Stewards

For Joseph Kaiama, working at Kalaupapa National Historical Park on the Hawaiian island of Molokai is a way of preserving his culture and his family's history, brick by brick. In 2022 he received a Pacific West Region Award for Cultural Resources for restoring two of the lightkeepers' buildings at Molokai Light while passing his skills on to a young crew.

Molokai Light in Kalaupapa National Historical Park. NPS Photo/Rob Ratkowski.

The separating sickness

Kalaupapa preserves the settlement where people with Hansen's disease, historically called leprosy — a contagious disease of the skin and nerves — were exiled. The disease was brought to Hawaiʻi by colonizers, along with other illnesses Native Hawaiians had little resistance to, and there was no cure until the 1940s. Hawaiians called it maʻi hoʻokaʻawale, "the separating sickness."

From 1866 to 1969, the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi and later the territory and state exiled approximately 8,000 people to Kalaupapa, separating them from their families on the grounds that it would stop the disease spreading. Patients were stigmatized, and ideas about leprosy became entangled with racist portrayals of Hawaiians that were used to justify U.S. efforts to control the islands politically and economically. Even so, the residents made their place of exile a home and a community, fought for dignified treatment and asserted control over their own lives.

Kalaupapa National Historical Park: the settlement lies downhill and to the left of Molokai Light, at the point of the peninsula. NPS/National Historic Landmarks Program.

NPS Photo.

That history is personal for park staff. Kaiama's aunt was diagnosed as a young girl, lived in the settlement the rest of her life and is buried there; as a boy, his father hiked the four miles up and down the steep trail and hid in a closet to visit and comfort her.

A window on the outside world

Molokai Light stood outside the settlement and its rules. No one under 16 was allowed in the settlement, and children born to patients were taken away at birth. Families have told the park of patients driving out to the lighthouse to watch children play, passing candy to them through the fence — brief contact that eased the loss imposed by quarantine. In more ways than one, the light was a beacon of hope.

Bringing the houses back

The keepers' houses, long vacant, were overrun with rats and termites and battered by wind and rain. Kalaupapa poses special challenges: large materials don't fit on the single-engine planes that serve it and arrive only once a year by barge, so the park had one chance to get everything it needed. Historic restoration also means matching the original fabric — colors, brushstrokes, profiles — so the crew often makes materials in the park's shop, milling rough lumber into the exact historic trim for a window, for example. Even so, they restored both buildings from foundations to roofs in three months, and the restored houses now serve Kalaupapa's remaining residents.

A windowsill in need of repair. NPS photo.

The same windowsill restored. NPS photo.

A restored lightkeeper's house, with Molokai Light behind it. NPS photo.

Passing it on

Before joining the Park Service in 2003, Kaiama did new construction and roof framing, spending twenty years following work from Molokai to Salt Lake City and back. The birth of his first child changed that: he took a steady job with the NPS Historic Preservation Training Center and became the park's resident preservation expert. On every project he teaches his crew, many of them Native Hawaiians with family ties to Kalaupapa — how to read elevations on floors, how to frame a window jamb — so they can compete for construction or preservation work anywhere. Crew members credit him with nearly all their carpentry skills, and one repeats his motto: with accuracy comes speed.

Kaiama sees the work as protecting his people's footsteps and reminding the world how they were treated, and he hopes his crew will one day lead the park themselves. Kalaupapa National Historical Park was established in 1980, managed jointly by the Park Service and the Hawaiʻi State Department of Health, and the law creating it guaranteed patients the right to live at Kalaupapa as long as they wished. The park's mission honors their resilience.

Kaiama (center) and his crew. NPS photo.

Sources

Rewritten from the National Park Service article "'Working in Our People's Footsteps': NPS Employee Trains Future Generation of Stewards at Kalaupapa National Historical Park," on the 2022 Pacific West Region Awards for Cultural Resources (public domain), in hubnx's own words; remarks by Kaiama and his coworkers are paraphrased. Pictures an earlier version of this page left out were restored on 2026-09-26.

• Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.