Close to 40 demonstrators protested the rising number of burial disinterments at Kawaiaha’o Church this morning on the sidewalk fronting Honolulu’s oldest church on South King Street makai of City Hall.

The protesters, mostly students from the University of Hawaii, held signs and chanted in Hawaiian to express their opposition to the removal of iwi kupuna, or ancestral remains, that the church is carrying out to make way for construction of a $17.5 million multipurpose building.

Close to 300 burials have been removed to date.