Episode 5 - State Division of Historic Preservation (SHPD)

In honor of National Historic Preservation Month, we talk story with SHPD’s Jessica Puff and Susan Lebo about protecting Hawaiʻi’s cultural treasures—from Lahaina’s historic structures to iwi kūpuna. Discover why preservation matters, how you can get involved, and what makes Hawaiʻi’s heritage so unique. As our theme music by Kawika Kahiapo says: Preserve what we have. It’s our future.

Transcript

 [Music]

Dan Dennison: Aloha and welcome to the Hawaii Conservation Kuleana, brought to you by Hawaii's Department of Land and Natural Resources. I'm Dan Dennison.

Patti Jette: And I'm Patti Jette. We're here to explore conservation issues from land to sea with expert insights and stories from the field.

[Music] 

Jessica Puff: I don't know of any other state that has a history and cultural component to their preservation office that really grounds you in why you're doing what you're doing. What are the most important things? How do we preserve not just the contemporary history or the colonial history, but the rooted history of the people who really make this place important? 

[Music] 

Dan: May is National Historic Preservation month, so we thought it was a good time to connect with our state Division of Historic Preservation, or SHPD as we call it here. 

Patti: Today we have SHPD administrator Jessica Puff and archeologist Susan Lebo. Thanks for joining us.  

Jessica, Susan: Thank you. Thank you.  

Patti: Let's just start with a basic question. Jess, we'll start with you tell us a little bit about your background, your Ohana and what led you to come here to SHPD? 

Jessica: Okay? Well, I am originally from Michigan, sort of Northwestern Michigan, in a really small town called nueco. I was raised in a very small, little historic town that was rooted in logging, and so as a kid like you were always taught the story of your town, and we were surrounded by like a little mixture of historic buildings, and you felt really connected to place. And so when I went to college, I was really interested in architecture, and so I went to Syracuse University for Environmental Design. And then after the recession, there weren't a whole lot of jobs in the architecture field. So I went back to grad school, and I always thought that historic preservation would be a really cool way to express and to get in to the architectural field as well, not just building new buildings, but preserving old ones. So I got my master's degree in historic preservation from Eastern Michigan University. And while I was there, I volunteered for free to work at the State Historic Preservation Division, which is Michigan's SHPD. And I volunteered for free because they were doing this really great survey project of all these mid century modern architectural resources in Michigan across the state, and that inter- that that volunteership turned to an internship, and then it turned to a job, and then when that job was like coming to an end, there was a job opening here in Hawaii, and I applied, and now I'm here.

Patti: So Susan, what about you?  

Susan Lebo: So I'm from Richland, Washington. It's a very small town in the eastern side of Washington State, and my father got a two week vacation every year. And so we would pile into our station wagon. There were six kids, and we would visit historical sites. We would look at everything across the country in terms of, you know, historical sites, natural sites, go to museums, that's always had an interest in the cultural and natural world and in museums, archeology. I ended up going to school at the University of Washington in Seattle, and eventually I got my PhD there. But I also went to school in Texas and worked on projects throughout the US, doing archeology and also in the Pacific. Went to Guam, the Marianas, and also in Hawaii. So when the opening came at SHPD, initially, I started as a reviewer on backlogged projects, and eventually moved into a regular position at SHPD. I've been there for coming up on 13 years, and so I love historic preservation. I love looking and preserving cultural and historical sites. 

Dan: Susan, I'm afraid we've dated ourselves, because I'm also from a family of six kids, and we also piled into the station wagon, but mostly just drove throughout Colorado. But did see, I think Mesa Verde, which is obviously an enormous historical site, was the first national park I went to as a kid, so I kind of share that love as well.  

Susan: I went to every national park I've been to every state in the US and every province in Canada. Dan: Wow.  

Patti: So tell me how each of your backgrounds has influenced your sense of kuleana for the natural and cultural resources that we are pledged to protect here at the DLNR.  

Susan: For me, it's all about trying to preserve the cultural, natural history, heritage of the Hawaiian Islands, and I do that through site visits, through talk story, through some of the work we do in historic preservation, regarding some of the rules and statutes, working with agencies at the county, state and federal level to take historic properties into consideration to avoid, minimize their effects on on those resources, and then, if necessary, to deal with mitigation. If there's an impact.  

Jessica: I'll take it. I'll take it from another perspective too, like I think growing up learning about and liking history and just liking it because it was cool, old stuff was one thing. And so you don't really know that as a kid, just driving down the street seeing cool old buildings, that you're like, I want to do that when I grow up. And so what Susan's talking about is, like you, you, you start to learn, as you get into this profession, that the impacts that, like time and growth and politics and just everything has on our communities, on our land, and how these laws are created to kind of make us take a step back and think really hardly about what we're doing, the choices that we're making, and the long impacts that they have. And so out of the National Historic Preservation Act was created the National Register of Historic Places where we actually honor those historic places that are important to us in order to remember them. And then there's the Section 106 process that forces people to consider before they do a project, like what they're doing, and see, is there another way to do it? And the State Historic Preservation Law or preservation policy works very similarly, where we have 6E which, like kind of forces people to take a step back before they implement a project to see, what am I doing? How am I impacting my community, my property, the land, the historic resources there. Is there another better way to do it, or if I can't do it another way, what can I do to mitigate the impact to these resources? And then we have things like the state register and things like that as well that kind of mirror the federal law. But I think that your question about where I've come from, I don't think that coming from, where I've come from, or where anybody comes from. As a kid, they imagine that policy that they work in is what it is, until you're in it. So it's kind of really hard to understand the nuances until you start experiencing it firsthand. It's a lot of like learn on the job sort of stuff.

Dan: Over the past two years, certainly, SHPD, along with many other agencies, have been thrust more into the public eye because of the tragic Lahaina fires of August 2023 so we'll we'll address that further in a moment. But in addition to really watching over some of the really famous historic structures in Lahaina and elsewhere, what other assets, what other things does SHPD do to protect our cultural and historic resources here in Hawaii?  

Jessica: Well, I think for me, it's really hard for SHPD, in and of itself, we don't have the power, the authority, to really take on an active role in preserving. What we are, in some respects, are a tool to help people understand how they themselves can preserve, to empower other people, or inspire other people to take an active role in preservation. We don't really own land. We don't really own historic resources. There's a couple like unique situations where we do have land ownership, where we are responsible for preservation of those resources, but our work is mostly in helping to manage programs like the register programs that help people document their own historic resource., Managing the 6E and the Section 106, the cultural resources management side of things where we enforce preservation law, or we don't really enforce it, but we have an active role in the enforcement of preservation law, where we talk to agencies and project proponents about how they can preserve their own historic resources, or the resources within their project area that they're going to be impacting, like taking into account things that that may happen, like for natural causes like the Lahaina wildfire. It's, our role is mostly making people aware of the larger impacts that these natural occurrences, or even if they're man made occurrences can have, the loss that they bring. And then, in some cases, you know how to react to it, but then how to proactively maybe use examples like the quote, unquote “miracle house,” learn from those instances of, how did that building survive, and is that what they did at their their property, appropriate to do in other locations, like other historic resources as well, or what pieces are appropriate that we can adopt in other places so that we can preserve those resources and get that information out to the public, about this is why this worked here. You could do it too, that kind of thing. We're like a cheerleader. 

Susan: Also, we do a lot of public outreach, education, working with community members to help identify the resources, get them documented. Try to encourage landowners, even if they don't have a project, but they do have resources on their land, to try and get them to document them, to preserve them, to work on maybe establishing a preservation plan for them. Work with community groups to establish stewardship agreements or hui that want to take on the kuleana of maintaining and preserving particular cultural resources, being able to share them with the community. And we also internally, we do things like we build a state inventory of historic places, we compile GIS information also that we know where various resources are, so that when we do have to do compliance reviews, whether that's state, federal or county reviews, we know where those resources are, so we are better able to interface with those agencies and say, here are the resources that are here that have been identified by historic preservation professionals as well as community members as significant resources, and we need to look at how we can avoid impacting them. Maybe you could redesign your project. We rely a lot on community input regarding which resources are significant and how they might be preserved or how they might be avoided.  

Dan: Jess, you've only been on the job for about a year, and you kind of walked from the frying pan, literally into the fire in this job. One of the things that SHPD has been rightfully or wrongfully criticized for is the approval process and how long it takes, and I believe that's been a function mostly of staffing. So just curious how that's going now, and not only for Lahaina, but just in general, in terms of getting through the backlog that you seem to constantly face.  

Jessica: Well, I'll say this when, when it came to Lahaina, like early on, we had agencies from, similar agencies from across the US reach out on how they could support and the state of California actually loaned us one of their archeologists to kind of help with some of the initial emergency response work. And under Susan like this is a staff archeologist from California that went from that office to working with Susan to figure out how they could help with our need for additional archeologists. Because, like, you said, like, we are at a little bit of a deficit, and we're currently in the hiring process. By the time this podcast airs, hopefully we'll have both Maui Island archeologist positions that are there. We're in the hiring process right now for filled, and we have a number of other positions that we are posting. So if there, if you are interested in archeology or working in historic preservation, feel free to reach out to us, because we can direct you to any open postings that you have on the state website. A lot of what our staff does on a day to day basis is showing people or teaching people how to submit their project to us, what material that we need, things like that. So in addition to bringing on more personnel, I think we've been actively been working with different agencies and internally to figure out, how can we communicate this process and make it easier for people to navigate so we spend more time reviewing permits and less time explaining how to submit the permit to us to begin with.  

Patti: Something I'm curious about is how is working in historic preservation in Hawaii unique? I mean, we have people here who can trace their ancestral lineages way back, you know, and how are how, in other ways, is it unique to work in historic preservation here, as opposed to, say, the continent. 

Susan: I think one way is the sheer diversity of cultural and ethnic backgrounds that we have represented here in Hawaii. So it's very rare that you would get, for example, a Chinatown like the one we have here in Honolulu that has always been a mixture of Hawaiian and Chinese and and other other groups. And then across every single Island, we have a diversity of resources related to the different groups that are represented here in Hawaii. So the opportunity to help preserve such a diversity doesn't happen everywhere. And so it's really been, you know, a privilege for all the people here in the historic preservation division to have that opportunity to learn about all of those different cultural groups and, you know, the resources and what is significant and why they need to be preserved, and how those individual communities want them preserved, and how they want them represented. You know, I've worked a lot of places on the US mainland, and yes, I worked in places that we were looking at Chinese resources, or Native American or or African American, so forth, but never where we had all of them, you know, together in one place. So it's all about the opportunity to bring all of those different groups and perspectives together, and all of those resources being able to preserve.  

Dan: Could we back up for a minute for a couple of definitions? What makes a building a place historical under the law? And then also, you know, we people hear about iwi kūpuna all the time. You guys deal with remains all the time. What defines an iwi kūpuna versus remains otherwise?  

Jessica: Well, I would say there's, I think there's multiple definitions of historic property. Just generally, the federal definition is anything that's 50 years old or older and is eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places. And there is a caveat in the national definition for properties that are less than 50 years old. So it's a special circumstance, but it can happen for places like Ground Zero, where the 9/11 terror assist attacks happened, or other places like where they're all seated in tragedy that I'm thinking of, but like the hotel where Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated at. Those sites were assessed as being historically significant before they turned 50 years old. In the State of Hawaii right now, the definition is anything that's 50 years old or older. That being said, the popular definition of historic property is essentially whatever you yourself deem it to be like, is there something important to your family or your community that you think is historic? Is it a school that you went to or a theater that you went to, or a restaurant that you used to dine in every Sunday with your family that was built in the 80s or 90s? But to you, it has historic significance because it impacted your life, and I think that's the basis for a lot of evaluations that then turn to technical definitions that are defined in law. 

Dan: And just to extenuate that and I'm going to hearken back to the famous banyan tree at Lahaina, which appears to be doing very well right now. But when I was first covering that, some native Hawaiian folks said, you know, cut it down. It's not native Hawaiian. I interviewed a native Hawaiian who was involved in the recovery of that tree. And he said, you know, I played on this tree. I swung on this tree. I climbed this tree when I was a little kid. So to extenuate your point, it was important to this individual, even though it was planted by, you know, colonists, apparently. And so there was some objection to that, but, but you're right, it seems like it's kind of in the eye of the beholder as much as anything. 

Jessica: Yeah. And I think it's also that that places are dynamic. They're like onions, they have layers. So Susan was using the example of Chinatown when we're talking about historic properties. Well, even Chinatown here in Hawaii, like before it was Chinatown. It was someplace else. That, being said, the banyan tree in Lahaina, on one hand, yeah, it is a symbol of colonization, but on another hand, somebody made a new chapter for that tree that's important to their family, that now tells another story. So you can almost in a way, colonize the colonized thing and turn it into something that that is for you, instead of something that was meant to sort of erase your story and replace it with something else, you can, then again, erase that colonial history in part and replace it with yours again. So history is funny like that. It repeats, it rhymes. And, you know, it does all sorts of fun things.  

Dan: And Susan back to iwi kūpuna. How do you define that? And when does SHPD get involved?  

Susan: So SHPD gets involved whenever iwi kūpuna or human remains are identified on a project. It could be a project that somebody's just doing on their property and doesn't need a permit or review. And then which case they would, they would make notifications to the police and so forth. And then SHPD would get involved to go out and confirm that indeed this these are human remains. They are at least 50 years old. They're native Hawaiian. And theyʻre our jurisdiction or whether or not they may be the result of a crime, and then which case they would be the police's jurisdiction. So we have rules regarding how do we go about identification and treatment, and so our first and foremost responsibility is, one, to ensure that they're properly identified, that they are indeed human remains, and then two, that they're properly treated, that every effort is made to avoid impacts, to preserve them in place to the extent possible. And all of those decisions involve SHPD consulting with recognized descendants from the area the island burial council, usually it's the geographic rep for that that council consulting with the Office of Hawaiian Affairs, or also known as OHA. The whole purpose is to wherever possible, to preserve them in place. And then if a decision is made that they need to be relocated because they're in a in a location that they are further threatened by future activities, such as it's close to a sewer line, or it's in the middle of a highway or something. Then if a decision gets made to relocate, then to work with the landowner and the descendants as to where to relocate them. And the preference, of course, is to relocate them as close as possible to where they were identified. So our job is to help educate the public, as well as working with descendants and others regarding understanding what constitutes, as you say, what is an iwi kūpuna, and then everybody's roles and responsibilities to malama them to ensure that they are properly cared for. 

Patti: So I know that's something that comes up frequently for for you to deal with. What are some of the other important or continuing issues that are facing the division? 

Jessica: Important issues that impact our division, I mean, it changes from day to day, and it can change from month to month or year to year. Going back to working with local communities, is to really teaching people how simple it can be, how uncomplicated it can be, combating the perspective, or the belief that preservation is hard and it's expensive and that it's easier to remove this, old thing that seems to be an obstacle, rather than to rehabilitate it and give it a second or a third or a fourth life. I think that outside of everything else, like whether or not we have enough staff, or how many things come into our office, and how quickly we review things, it's refocusing, or trying to refocus the conversation on how people can be proactively involved. There's so much community passion and care for the land and historic and cultural resources here, there is a way that you can expand your historic your building or your home or and still keep the historic part of it that you grew up with. I mean, I think that is the biggest issue every day that we are constantly dealing with that doesn't change, is how to get those messages across. That really preservation is for everyone, that can include everyone. It's not as hard as you may think it is. SHPD is here if you need anything or any advice. 

Susan: I think a couple other things are, one, we live on islands, and so obviously climate change and sea level rise is a huge issue here, and because there are a lot of resources that are that are located along the coastlines. Whether that's natural resources, cultural resources, iwi kūpuna and so forth. And the question is, how can we be proactive? How can we help the communities identify and preserve as many of those resources as appropriate? And so that's a challenge. Part of what we're trying to do is we're putting a lot of effort into identification, and that is recording sites and putting them into our state inventory. Also it's about reaching out to the community, having talk story, having community members tell us there are resources here that they haven't been recorded, that their family knows about their community, and helping them to decide how to to share information about those resources, to determine which of them they want preserved and known, and which ones maybe they just want to keep carrying down in their their family or in their community, but not take any effort to relocate them or do proactive preservation. The other part is, is looking at development, everybody has their own opinion about development, good, bad, etc, and that's not our role. Our role is that when a project is proposed, and that could be an affordable housing project, for example, do we need affordable housing? Absolutely, but do we get to decide that this is a good project or not? No, that's not our role. Our role is that if this project is proposed and it's in this location, we try to work with everybody to identify what resources are there, and then look at how they might move forward with their project, but at the same time, avoid or minimize impact. So some of that is helping people to understand that redesign is something that should be really looked at and implemented. Sometimes it's just about moving the building. And you can preserve this resource over here. It can be in an open space or or some sort of preserve, but it's there and it's available to the community. That's one of the things that is a growing strength within SHPD, is that focus on being proactive, communication, looking at how can we accomplish this? Because it's doable. SHPD has very little land, but the few places that we do have, we have stewardship groups that are working on, on preserving and restoring those places. So that's really cool, something that has happened in, say, the last five years. 

Patti: With your background, you could work anywhere, right? You could work anywhere on the continent. Why the Hawaii DLNR? 

Jessica: I mean, as someone who, who I did, like in my history, work at SHPD once before, and then I left to go back to school, and then I came back, I think that, and then, having worked at the Michigan SHPD version of SHPD, I think that DLNR and SHPD in particular is probably one of the most interesting and challenging, and is the closest to doing the preservation work that I thought I was going to be doing when I went to college. Some state agencies can be very bureaucratic and very clinical, and it's just the same process every single day. A lot of what we do is writing letters and reviewing projects, and it seems very technical, but there's such a community aspect to it. There's the importance of having conversations, and the personal nature of everything that we do here is so important for the field. I think it's so important for the future of the field. I think it's so important for our communities. I think it's so important for our staff to have that connection. It just creates a family that that you're connected to in a lot of ways, like I think at SHPD, it develops the kind of relationships where, you know, the architecture branch and the archeology branch and the history and culture branch -it is so unique to have a state office where all three branches are working so closely together, especially the history and culture side of things, I don't know of any other state that has a history and cultural component to their preservation office that really grounds you in why you're doing what you're doing. What are the most important things? How do we preserve not just the contemporary history or the colonial history, but the rooted history of the people who really make this place important, and why we're all here. So I think that in terms of why DLNR and why staying at DLNR, it's bad. It's the people. It's the opportunity that we get to work in this unique environment. It's the resources here themselves that are so cool. Those are all factors, but really it's just the people.  

Susan: Going back to Jess’s point, I worked at one historic preservation office before coming here, I worked in Maryland, and again, I worked a lot of places in the US and in Guam and the Marianas. In each case, my career has been focused on coming someplace that is in transition in terms of it's looking to improve how things are being done. It's maybe like, in this case, our State Historic Preservation Division, when I arrived, had a huge backlog. And for me, it's about that challenge of, how do we get an organization or agency to improve in terms of how it's doing, doing its job, how it's communicating and coordinating with the public. I really liked that challenge, and I really enjoyed the opportunity to do that all in one place. Was, for me, was very exciting. Here we have the opportunity to really look at having as many voices out there and as many perspectives out there, to tell those stories, to share those memories, to build the understanding going forward of what that history was and how it influences today, and how we are building new history all the time, and How do we want those messages and actions to occur, and how we can all benefit from that, and not have everybody think of Hawaii as just some place to come visit as a tourist, but as a place that people live here, and there's tremendous history here, and there's so much to learn about this place. There's so much significance in cultural history that is not just come here and I'm going to be a tourist. I'm coming here to actually learn about the people and the place and the culture and the history, because it's all very valuable. 

Patti: All right, that wraps us up for this episode. Mahalo to you both, Jess Puff and Susan Lebo from the State Division of Historic Preservation.

Dan: And mahalo to you for joining us today. I'm Dan Dennison  

Patti: And I'm Patti Jette.  

Dan: Our theme music is provided by Kawika Kahiapo.  

Patti: Thanks for tuning in to Hawaii Conservation Kuleana. A hui houʻ 

[Music]