Erika Klein
Kalaupapa National Historical Park, which encompasses the isolated Molokai peninsula where Hawaii’s two saints lived, served and died, has a new superintendent.
National Park Service has named Erika Stein to replace former Kalaupapa superintendent Steve Prokop who left his five-year Hawaii assignment in April to be superintendent of Redwood National and State Parks in California. During his tenure on Molokai, he saw the canonizations of Father Damien de Veuster in 2009 and Mother Marianne Cope in 2012 which bestowed the national park with a unique distinction of being the working field for Catholic saints.
Stein, who will take her position officially in late June, has been Kalaupapa’s acting superintendent for the past few months. Before that she had served there more than five years, first as an archaeologist, then as the cultural resource program manager.
She was also part of the planning team for events celebrating the canonizations of St. Damien and St. Marianne.
“Erika’s educational and professional background makes her the ideal candidate for this position,” said National Parks’ Pacific West regional director Chris Lehnertz in a news release. “She is a well-respected leader with a proven track record of working collaboratively with the Kalaupapa community.”
Stein, 32, grew up in Orange County, Calf. After she graduated from high school, her family moved to the Big Island where it had roots going back to her great-grandfather who had come over from the Philippines to work on the plantations.
She holds a bachelor’s degree in cultural anthropology from the University of California in Santa Barbara, and a master’s degree in maritime archaeology from James Cook University in Townsville, Australia. For her graduate work she participated in a field program in ethnography and marine sciences in the Solomon Islands.
Before joining the National Park Service in Kalaupapa in 2007, Stein was a contract archaeologist in Hawaii and California.
Klein’s experience in Kalaupapa will bring continuity to the park service’s efforts there.
“I am very devoted to Kalaupapa and its story,” she told the Hawaii Catholic Herald by phone last week. “I want to continue the great work that has already been happening there.”
She said she wants to “honor the history of the patients” who now number fewer than 20.
“I am excited about continuing the historic preservation projects … and educational outreach,” Klein said.
Kalaupapa is rich in “historic contexts” and “layered landscapes,” she said.
Stein, who is getting married on July 5 on Molokai, hopes to put down roots on the island. She is a triathlete who has regularly hiked the 1,500-foot Kalaupapa pali trail for the past six years.
Native Hawaiians had lived on the Kalaupapa peninsula for more than 900 years before the Hawaiian government in 1866 designated it as a place of permanent quarantine for people with Hansen’s disease, or leprosy. It remains the voluntary home for a final few patients, the last of thousands forced there under the isolation laws which were repealed in 1969.
Father Damien lived in Kalaupapa from 1873 to 1889, helping transform the lives of the people abandoned there into a community of dignity and hope. Mother Marianne took over Father Damien’s spiritual and physical guardianship of the place from the time of his death to hers in 1918.
Today Kalaupapa, which was made into a national Historical Park in 1980, is a place of pilgrimage, education and preservation, where families can reconnect with ancestors once considered “lost.”
The park is comprised of 8,725 acres of land and 2,000 acres of water, though only 23 acres are owned by the National Park Service. The remainder belongs to various other government and private organizations, which work cooperatively with the National Park Service.
