Sacred Duty
Photos Courtesy Keoni kealoha Alvarez
Keoni Kealoha Alvarez is an artist, author, cultural practitioner, caretaker and award-winning filmmaker.
The Pāhoa native was part of the PBS Frontline team that produced Maui’s Deadly Firestorm, which won the 2025 Emmy for Outstanding Climate, Environment and Weather Coverage.
The 54-minute documentary draws much of its power from the testimony of survivors who describe frantic escapes on clogged roadways, frenzied efforts to find loved ones, and a lack of communication and foresight from government officials. Those officials, in turn, recount a catastrophe that spiraled out of their control. The picture that emerges is one of tragedy and missed opportunities. When the smoke finally cleared, 102 people had died, making it one of the deadliest natural disasters in U.S. history.
By the time the PBS Frontline crew arrived on the Valley Isle, survivors had been approached by media from around the world. Their stories would become one more piece in a larger narrative about climate disasters. But after the interviews wrapped up and the cameras disappeared, they struggled to rebuild their lives.
The PBS Frontline team was aware of this, and behind the scenes Alvarez worked as a field producer, ensuring survivors understood how their stories would be used and offering feedback to the film crew.
“I always made sure the director called (the survivors) up and gave them a follow-up about what’s going on and where the film was at,” Alvarez says. “It was out of respect for their time. I wanted to make sure their time wasn’t just being used to get a story.”
A filmmaker, Alvarez understands that a lot of footage ends up on the cutting room floor, but the folks who contributed may not understand why. While editing is important, he says, so are transparency and empathy.
“Keoni was instrumental in guiding us through our outreach to fire victims and community leaders,” says the film’s director, Xinyan Yu. “Key characters like Uncle Ke‘eaumoku only answered our interview request after speaking to Keoni.
“We approached the story with lots of patience and respect. Instead of pointing our camera at fire victims, we first spent a lot of time talking to them at shelters and on the beach,” she continues. “We followed community leaders like Uncle Ke‘eaumoku and Lahaina Strong, and made sure we listened to their sides of the story.”
Back To The Burial Cave
Yu and Alvarez are both graduates of Firelight Media, a nonprofit in New York that supports underrepresented minority filmmakers. There, talent are mentored by award-winning documentary filmmaker Stanley Nelson, whose works includes The Murder of Emmett Till and Freedom Riders.
But to understand how someone from the Big Island was able to connect a mainland documentary crew with the Maui community, we need to go back more than 30 years to 1990.
That’s when an 8-year-old Alvarez and his brothers discovered human remains in a cave near their home in Pāhoa. These remains would be identified as iwi kūpuna, and for the next decade, Alvarez says, he and his family made sure the cave was left undisturbed.
Although he is Native Hawaiian, he hadn’t grown up speaking Hawaiian or learning traditional Hawaiian customs and rituals. Still, he always knew the cave was kapu, or sacred.
So, when a “for sale” sign appeared on the property in 2000, alarm bells went off in his head. He notified authorities. That’s when he found out there were no records of the iwi kūpuna, even though he says his family had reported it and an archaeologist had confirmed it all those years ago.
“I had to start from scratch again and really quick,” he recalls.
The Pāhoa High & Intermediate School graduate was already filming community events for Nā Leo ‘O Hawai‘i, the public access television station on the Big Island. In 2001, he began documenting his fight to preserve the burial cave. This marked the start of what would become KAPU: Sacred Hawaiian Burials, his two-hour-long documentary.
“It was very much a personal journey,” Alvarez says of KAPU, which was screened at the 2022 Hawai‘i International Film Festival and aired on PBS Hawai‘i in 2023.
In the film, he takes viewers along as he re-connects with his Native Hawaiian culture and lineage. His mother, Aileen Alvarez — who he refers to as his pōhaku, or rock, because of the unwavering support she has shown him — guides him to cemeteries where his ancestors are buried. He searches through archives to reveal their photos. He even traces his ancestral roots back to the same area where the burial cave was located.
Eventually, he is deemed a cultural descendant of the iwi kūpuna in the cave.
But Alvarez doesn’t stop with his own journey. He delves into historic laws pertaining to Hawaiian burials and speaks to Native Hawaiian elders who share their na‘auao, or wisdom, about traditional burial practices.
“People don’t know that there was so many different ways of (doing) burials,” Alvarez says. “And it was practical to where they lived. Here on Hawai‘i island, there’s no sand, there’s no dirt, so they buried above ground or in caves.
“The people that I learned from were people who actually did burials. I’m first-hand being told they did this for their family member. That’s what made it more personal to me, like wow, we’re talking about real things that happened.”
He notes that these interviews were conducted over decades — the film took him 20 years to produce. He even traveled to Kaua‘i and Maui, where he met others fighting to preserve iwi kūpuna in their communities.
“When I made the commitment to the people who were being interviewed, I told them that I would finish this film,” he says. “Even though they didn’t see me every day, I saw them every day because I’m editing or trying to create this story.
“They were always on my mind. Even after they passed. And many of them passed away. But I still have their voices, I still have their images to tell and share their story.”
This is how he built a foundation of trust that would help the PBS Frontline team tell the story of the Maui wildfires.
Looking To The Future
Today, Alvarez leads Hawaiian Burial Conservation, a nonprofit he started in December. He keeps watch over the burial cave he fought so long and hard to save, as well as another property with iwi kūpuna that was donated to his care.
In the end, beneficiaries of the individual who’d bought the land with the burial cave had agreed to sell it to Alvarez. He plans to preserve it and the surrounding forest on the land.
One day, he hopes to run a cultural center to educate the community about Hawaiian burials in a space that supports preservation, cultural stewardship and continued learning.
He realizes that his efforts shed light on cultural practices his ancestors had kept secret. Ancient Hawaiian burial rituals were sacred and highly personal. But in today’s world, what was once held in reverence is in danger of being forgotten or lost to time. If the cultural knowledge is not passed on, Alvarez says, it risks being wiped out — like the burial cave itself almost was. He says his work reflects a careful balance between honoring kapu and recognizing that many in contemporary society must learn what was once understood naturally.
For now, he’s looking for volunteers to help him take care of the burial sites under his stewardship, and for ways to build a solid foundation for Hawaiian Burial Conservation. He’s also finishing another film. This one, Resting In The Sands, focuses on sand burials on Maui.
“It happened for a reason,” he says of his journey. “I did what I did so I wouldn’t have to have the next kanaka go through what I went through.”
However, he hasn’t forgotten the darker days of uncertainty.
“I didn’t know how it was going to turn out,” he says of the fate of the burial cave. “I was just hoping my ancestors would pull through.”
