Despite the harsh penalties, criminalization has proved ineffective as a means of dealing with the problem. According to local judicial officials, 476 people were convicted of illegal mining under the Mining Act in 2009 and another 143 between January and April 2010.57 But Paiam’s magistrate told Human Rights Watch that this had little meaningful effect as a deterrent and that many convicted illegal miners were openly defiant. “In court they will tell you, “I will come back! That is my garden!” he said.58 According to Barrick, illegal miners staged more than 25,000 recorded incursions onto mine property (including the waste dumps) in 2009, and 9,600 during the first eight months of 2010.59

Several women said that after arresting them for illegal mining on the waste dumps, guards gave them a “choice” of submitting to gang rape or going to prison to face fines and possible jail time. But in some of those cases the women said that guards raped them even after they pleaded with their assailants to take them to jail.

These images were captioned with text that described the spectacle of the battle in terms of an inevi-table American victory. The images and the text that accompanies them depict an impossibly clear but reassuring story of winners ver-sus losers, finders and keepers, a story in which only the American male heroes have names and histories, and nearly all Others are either just dehumanized and written off as Japanese, “natives,” or women.

On Maui, carvers pass on stories about the tikis to the next generation. Some of these stories play a central role in reestablishing connections between Tonga and Hawai‘i. For example, Tēvita Māhina (see figures 17 and 20) pointed out that the Hawaiian god Kanaloa is the same as the Tongan god Tangaloa.

Like the previous story about Maui, this oral tradition is most likely an account of a chief from a foreign land (langi) who oppressed the people of Tonga. In Tongan oral tradition, langi is a metaphor for islands in the east of Tonga (Māhina 1992b, 56–88; see chapter 5), and the act of crawling is a sym-bol of oppression.

He also related vā to manava—the Tongan word for ‘breath of life.’ Manava, according to Halapua, is a compound word that is formed from the words mana (sacred power) and vā (human space).