‘They literally took a chain saw to it’: Wooden tikis destroyed at Utah cemetery honoring LDS-Hawaiian ancestors

The last time Ruth Haws Pauni drove out to the lone cemetery in Utah’s remote and deserted Skull Valley, the tiki statues her family had placed there to guard their ancestors were still standing.

She remembers smiling as she walked past them on April 23, visiting her father’s gravesite two days before his birthday. Her nephew lovingly carved them to honor the generations of Pacific Islanders buried in this desolate place far from anywhere they had known.

In the early 1880s, their ancestors came to Utah from Hawaii to be part of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and help build the faith’s temple in Salt Lake City. But when construction was done in 1889, faith leaders instructed them to leave for the isolated desert of Tooele County to start their own outpost, which they named Iosepa after church leader Joseph F. Smith, who had proselytized in Hawaii.

Haws Pauni felt like the wooden tikis were a beautiful nod to that history and culture.

A week after she last saw them, though, they were destroyed and left in pieces.

Someone came to the Iosepa cemetery— all that remains of the town that was ultimately abandoned in 1917 — and cut the statues down.

They chopped the tikis into chunks and stacked the pieces next to the fire pit at the site, where families gather each Memorial Day for a celebration and commemoration that includes cooking a pig over a traditional imu underground oven. The faces carved into the colorful statues were sliced down the center. The leaf crown that had been on one was torn apart.

The only sign that they had once stood were the clean-cut remnants of their bases, which had been cemented into the ground when Haws Pauni’s family originally installed them in May 2024 ahead of the annual gathering.

“They literally took a chain saw to it,” Haws Pauni said, choking back tears. “It just broke my heart.”

Haws Pauni, 52, said she’s glad that her mom got to see the tikis while they were still standing.

She had brought her mom, Vermine Haws — or “Tutu” as most know her, which is Hawaiian for “grandma”— with her last month to visit the grave of Paul Haws, who was Haws Pauni’s dad and Vermine’s husband.

Vermine, who is 87 and has dementia, sometimes asks for Paul, forgetting that he died and is buried there now. And so Haws Pauni drives her to the site when she can. Vermine joined in strumming her ukele as family members sang “Happy Birthday” to his headstone surrounded by seashells.

The family learned the tikis were gone on May 1, after several members of the Iosepa Historical Association had gone to the cemetery to prepare ahead of this year’s Memorial Day event and sent Haws Pauni pictures of the toppled remains.

Her brother, Brook, jumped on his motorcycle and raced out to Iosepa to see for himself. Haws Pauni cried.

Reporting the vandalism

Haws Pauni feels the destruction may have been “premeditated.” She said she hadn’t heard until after they were cut down that some families who have relatives in the Iosepa cemetery took issue with them.

The two tikis were crafted to represent Wahine and Kāne, woman and man, in the Hawaiian tradition. It took Haws Pauni’s nephew about 100 hours to carve them from a dark wood with help from his dad, using a stain to color their teeth.

The female tiki was about 4 feet tall, with the leaf crown. The male was about 5 feet tall, with a red-stained top. Next to them, a wooden sign also explained, “Guardians and protectors of our ancestors’ sacred land.”

The family had intended to install a nicer, more permanent metal sign but hadn’t yet finished it. The wooden one was also chopped down when the tikis were destroyed.

Ron Manuela, the president of the Iosepa Historical Association, said he’d recently heard from a handful of members who “made their thoughts known” that having the tikis at the cemetery was, they felt, in bad taste.

“I was surprised that people had objections to it,” he said. “But they didn’t feel that was appropriate out there.”

Manuela said that ancestors in the past would make tikis when they lived in Hawaii and believed in many gods. He noted they are part of their heritage and on display, for instance, at Hawaii’s Polynesian Cultural Center.

But some community members, he said, felt that having tikis conflicted with their ancestors’ decision to switch to Christianity, and particularly at Iosepa, to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

“They just didn’t see there was room for both,” Manuela added.

It’s unclear why some took issue with the tikis when a separate metal-and-cement warrior statue has long watched over the site without complaint, he said. A new lei is placed around its neck each Memorial Day.

“Their native songs and dances filled this beautiful valley, which they made bloom as a rose with love and aloha,” the memorial below it reads.

There’s also a plaque recognizing the work of Hawaiian women’s suffragist Hannah Kaaepa, who is buried there, that Manuela said hasn’t drawn ire.

During the annual gathering on Memorial Day, families clean each grave at the cemetery, pulling the weeds that have cropped up since the previous year. They also place seashells and Hawaiian flags around the headstones and lay down traditional tapa cloths, woven from the bark of the paper mulberry trees in the Pacific Islands.

They sing Hawaiian songs and hold a Sunday service in line with the LDS Church.

Haws Pauni said tikis have historically watched over sacred sites, and that was the family’s only intention. “It’s not like we’re suggesting a return to paganism,” she said. “These were made with love. They were made with the most beautiful love. … It was just there as a symbol of our love for our ancestors.”

Manuela said he does not know who cut down the tikis, but he believes they should be held responsible. He has reported the vandalism to the Tooele County Sheriff’s Office, which confirmed to The Salt Lake Tribune that it is currently investigating.

Sgt. Brandon Light said the department believes the tikis were destroyed on April 30 or May 1, based on when people had last seen them standing and when the historical association documented they had been cut down.

“We’re still diving into it,” Light said. “It’s a ways out there, and it’s a lot to look into.”

The family’s history at Iosepa

The Iosepa cemetery is 46 miles from the closest major city of Tooele and 60 miles from Salt Lake City.

Before he died, that was something Paul Haws talked about often — feeling that it showed the tenacity of the Hawaiian Latter-day Saints who lived there.

“Finding a way to make their city grow, they went up here in the mountains and poured cement ditches to get the water to run down,” he said in a video recorded in May 2023, the last time he went to Iosepa before he died in October of that year.

He was 89 years old then and still working hard to clean the graves like he had done for about 70 years before. Family photos show him with a huge smile, gloves on his hands and spots of dust on his knees from bending down in the desert dirt.

Haws wasn’t Hawaiian — his daughter Haws Pauni describes him as a red-headed, blue-eyed Utah cowboy. But he met his wife, Vermine, in Hawaii in the early 1950s when he was stationed there during his military service.

Paul and Vermine married as teenagers and moved to Utah together, running a farm below West Mountain in Utah County. Vermine is a direct descendant of the Iosepa ancestors, and the two raised their children to understand that history.

Paul was particularly devoted to Iosepa, Haws Pauni said, and actually started the tradition of cleaning the graves when he brought his children to do it each year. He wanted them to know where they came from and to respect their ancestors. Their mom also taught them to dance hula and about the Hawaiian way of being.

Haws Pauni remembers visiting Iosepa every summer, getting eaten by gnats and sunburned as they removed the tall yellow grasses and thistles around headstones; soon, other families started joining.

“That’s something that was instilled in us,” she said. “We came here to honor our ancestors and clean up for them.”

After a time, though, as they grew up, she and her siblings stopped going. And, she said, her dad pleaded with them to return and bring their kids so it wouldn’t be forgotten.

Haws Pauni started going again in 2023, not knowing it would be her dad’s last time. She remembers him joking that he needed to give the younger generations a reason to visit. And so he declared then that he would be buried at Iosepa.

In October 2023, a week after he died, the family gathered there for his funeral. It was a beautiful mix, she said, of military, Hawaiian and Latter-day Saint traditions.

“Iosepa is even more important to us now because our papa is buried there,” Haws Pauni said. “It was just such a special place, and we pulled ourselves back into it.”

It was shortly after that, she said, that her nephew started working on the tikis.

Now it’s unclear, she said, if he will come out to the cemetery for the Memorial Day gathering this year; he is devastated. He declined to speak with The Tribune but agreed to be identified as a grandson of Paul and Vermine Haws.

‘We will go there with aloha’

Manuela said he’s not sure yet what the Iosepa Historical Association will do with the tikis. He’s still talking with the family to see what they want, including piecing them back together, making new ones or removing them altogether.

As of now, he said, he’s leaving the bases that mark where they stood until a decision is made.

He wishes, though, that instead of someone destroying the statues that the community could’ve come together and talked about what was best for everyone.

Haws Pauni agrees. And she said she is ready to forgive whoever cut them down.

“I was super angry at first,” she said, “but the more I learn about it, the more I think these are imperfect humans.”

She said she still plans to attend the Memorial Day gathering with her husband, kids and Vermine, who she plans to drive up from St. George. She hopes her mom doesn’t cry when she realizes the tikis are missing.

“We will go there with aloha. We will go there with love,” she said. “We’ll still go and honor our dad.”