Of the 8,000 Hawaii residents diagnosed with leprosy who were banished to Kalaupapa from 1866 to 1969, there are nine people remaining today who have the right to live at the isolated Molokai peninsula, said Valerie Monson, former executive director of the nonprofit Ka ‘Ohana o Kalaupapa.

“We always say there are still nearly 8,000 people with us, and we often feel their presence,” Monson said Monday in a phone interview, speaking on behalf of the organization.

Since its founding in 2009, the organization has helped about 900 relatives — many of whom hadn’t known a member of their family had suffered from Hansen’s disease — reconnect with their ancestors and their stories, bringing to light a crucial segment of Hawaii’s buried past.

Until this century, most of the patients’ names had been unknown, she said, noting that there are only about 1,000 graves in Kalaupapa with legible tombstones or markers, but after decades of research led by Anwei Skinsnes Law, author of “Kalaupapa: A Collective Memory,” a full list of names has been compiled.

“In 1990 a resident said to me, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we had a memorial that was like the Vietnam Memorial that would list all the names?” said Monson, a former Maui journalist who began visiting the settlement in 1989.

Now a memorial has been designed that would display the 8,000 names, and last week a bill was introduced in the state Senate appropriating $5 million to build it on a hill in Kalaupapa.

“It’s been important for the patients that we do not forget what happened, what they went through, how they suffered, ” Maui Sen. Lynn Decoite, primary sponsor of SB 3338, said Tuesday in a phone interview.

In a companion effort, January was declared “Kalaupapa Month” in Hawaii in spring 2021, and the bill for a memorial “is a follow-up to make sure that the patients are recognized with a testament, a monument to show their strength and resilience, and never to forget,” said the Molokai native, noting that an earlier version was progressing through the Senate in 2020 when it was canceled by the Legislature’s COVID-19 shutdown.

The memorial, designed by Honolulu architecture firm Group 70 in collaboration with the Kalaupapa community, envisions stone walls making two interlocking circles on the now-vacant site of the Baldwin Home for Boys in Kalawao, on the eastern side of the Kalalau peninsula, where the colony was first established before being relocated to Kalalau on the western flank.

In a location approved during a public meeting in 2009, the memorial, with the 8,000 names engraved on slabs in the upper circle, “will stand across from St. Philomena Church and a field that contains many unmarked graves, backed by the tall cliffs, with a beautiful view of the ocean, light and sky,” Monson said.

“The lower circle represents the families left behind” when their relatives were removed to Kalaupapa, “and where the circles come together is bringing the people of Kalaupapa and their families back together again,” she said.

The acute desire of residents — 90% of whom were of Native Hawaiian descent — that their lives be remembered resonates through their diaries and other historical records, interviews by researchers such as Law, and testimony in support of the 2020 version of the memorial bill.

“I was in the third grade when I found out I was adopted, that my mother and father were sent as children to Kalaupapa,” said Velda Napua Akamu, testifying on behalf of the Kohala Hawaiian Civic Club, “and eventually met my parents, whom I loved and laid to rest” at Kalaupapa.

She added the remaining residents “want to see this memorial while still alive.”

In an excerpt from historical documents submitted in testimony by Ka ‘Ohana o Kalaupapa, “I think we deserve to be remembered,” said Catherine Puahala, who was sent to Kalaupapa as a child on May 15, 1942, “and people outside of Kalaupapa should know that we did one great thing: we were incarcerated here just for their sake” due to fears that the little-understood disease, found to be curable through antibiotics in the 1940s, was highly contagious.

“We are part of this world,” she said, “we didn’t want to be sent here — greater love hath no man than to give up his life for a friend (and) that’s what we did.“

“People at Kalaupapa were always thinking of others,” Monson said.

She said the bill’s proponents hope legislators will see “we need not only things to help us with roads and all of the infrastructure and things, we need to remember our past,” including not only the sacrifices of the people of Kalaupapa, but the warm, caring community they established.

Decoite, who also began visiting Kalaupapa in the 1980s, when the community was about 45 patients strong, said hearing their history and seeing “what some of the patients dealt with became for me an emotional and spiritual thing.”

Thanking her legislative colleagues for their broad support for the bill, “one way or another, there is a relationship to Kalaupapa for everyone in this state,” she said, “but you don’t understand it until you make the journey there.”

In other testimony, Marcia Weight Lyons wrote about her father, who was born in Kalaupapa but taken from his parents, whom he never knew, and raised elsewhere in orphanages and foster homes.

Revisiting Kalaupapa at age 81, “with these people he was able to open up and share a part of himself that was locked away,” Lyons wrote, “with these people he realized he was not alone; this is why I know that the Memorial will serve as a place of reconnection and healing for descendants.”

Monson remembered that decades ago, after Law had compiled a list of the names of the earliest Kalaupapa exiles, Clarence “Boogie” Kahilihiwa, a champion of the memorial who died in 2021, asked her to read the names aloud, “and he kept saying, ‘Oh, what a beautiful name. I love hearing these names.’ He was so moved by hearing the names of people who had gone before him.”