A protest against the takeover of public tours of Hawai‘i’s infamous leprosy settlement by the National Park Service briefly blocked a tour group from accessing Kalaupapa National Historical Park on Thursday.

About two-dozen Moloka‘i residents, including a Maui County Council member and several longtime antidevelopment activists, gathered at the trailhead in Pālāʻau State Park shortly before 7 a.m., some of them hoisting homemade signs that read “No tours on Kalaupapa” and “Feds get out.” 

When a tour group led by NPS rangers approached at about 7:30 a.m., Council member Keani Rawlins-Fernandez held the gate to the trailhead shut, temporarily blocking access to the steep, 3.5-mile trail that serves as a primary access point to the remote Kalaupapa peninsula.

After a 15-minute-long interruption, during which protesters voiced concerns about changes in park tour management, Rawlins-Fernandez said she heeded a park ranger’s request to step aside and the tour continued as scheduled.

A Moloka‘i police officer was present at the protest but there were no arrests. 

“To me the dangerous thing is these tours were started up without any community consultation,” Rawlins-Fernandez said. “There was no community meeting. As this island’s council member I did not know. We know that Kalaupapa can be a cash cow for NPS and that has always been a real fear.”

Park Superintendent Nancy Holman did not respond to a request for comment for this story.

The protest coincided with the launch of new commercial tours of Kalaupapa facilitated by the park service. Federal law and NPS policy require commercial tour companies on the peninsula to be owned by former leprosy patients who live there until no more are interested. 

Last month former leprosy patient Meli Watanuki died at age 92. Her company Kalaupapa Saints Tours, working in partnership with Honolulu-based Seawind Tours, had been the only outfit permitted to offer commercial tours.

Two of Kalaupapa’s former Hansen’s disease patients still reside at the Kalaupapa settlement with support from the state health department, which provides them with furnished homes, nursing staff and stipends for food and clothing. However, none of them have operated a tour company.

Watanuki’s estate shut down the tours three weeks after her death. About a week later, the NPS announced that for the first time it would launch its own ranger-led tours.

Federal rules do not spell out how the NPS ought to proceed if there are no patients left who wish to facilitate commercial tours. However, a 1995 lease agreement between the park service and the Department of Hawaiian Homelands, which owns 1,247 acres on the peninsula, states that Native Hawaiians must be given the next opportunity to run commercial tours on DHHL-owned park lands. 

DHHL spokesman Diamond Badajos did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

Thursday’s protest underscores anxieties about the future of the peninsula amid competing interests from federal and state agencies, Native Hawaiians with land rights on the peninsula and the descendants of those forced into exile. The rugged outcropping off Moloka‘i’s North Shore is subject to a series of joint land ownership and stewardship agreements that are subject to change when Kalaupapa no longer has a living patient population. 

Whether and how Native Hawaiian beneficiaries will be able to access DHHL lands on the peninsula when there are no living Kalaupapa patients left has been the subject of decades of debate. 

“We know that Kalaupapa can be a cash cow for (the National Park Service) and that has always been a real fear.”

Maui Council member Keani Rawlins-Fernandez

A few things are certain: One year after the last patient dies, Kalaupapa, which currently constitutes its own county, will become part of Maui County. State policies that govern Kalaupapa will dissolve and management of the peninsula will turn over to the National Park Service.

Nearly 10,000 acres currently owned by the state Department of Land and Natural Resources are expected to be absorbed by NPS, which now owns roughly 23 acres.

Thursday’s protest was organized by Walter Ritte, a well-known Moloka‘i activist who said he plans to organize an even bigger crowd of protesters to gather at the trailhead on Saturday, when the NPS has scheduled its second tour.

“What concerns us is we have no voice in the National Park, we have no voice in how many people are going to be down there and they are making changes that are going to affect the whole island without any input from the community,” Ritte said. “We can’t be shooting dice about our future.”

All-day $21 tours of Kalaupapa National Historical Park booked through the NPS are set to run twice a week and require participants to hike up to eight strenuous miles down and up a cliffside trail to enter and exit the historic leprosy settlement. 

Tour guests, who must pack their own lunch, visit historic churches, cemeteries and landmarks on the isolated Kalaupapa peninsula where for more than a century thousands of disease-stricken victims were brutally separated from their families and forced into permanent exile.

Moloka‘i’s top tourist destination is sought after by history buffs, descendants of some 8,000 people who were sent there to live and die in isolation and religious pilgrims eager to visit the original resting place of two Catholic saints. 

Whereas other national parks welcome millions of people annually, Kalaupapa has historically allowed a maximum of 100 daily visitors, including staff. Last year the visitor cap was reduced to 30 people a day, a decision that respects the privacy and lifestyle of former patients who still reside on the peninsula, according to park staff. No one under age 16 is allowed to enter the park.

Kalaupapa reopened to commercial tour groups last September after a nearly five-year public closure triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic. Even after the roll-back of pandemic-era health and safety restrictions, the park remained off-limits to the public for more than a year while NPS staff said the agency reformed its tour permit application process.