Because of an extraordinary confluence of events, including the fact that [Harry] Warnke had crashed into what are considered sacred Hawaiian grounds, his remains never were recovered, though they lay within miles of four active military installations where troops are indoctrinated to never willingly leave a fallen comrade behind.
[...]
Warnke's case has helped bring to light the nearly 3,000 military aircraft that went down in Hawaii with little public knowledge during the 1940s. It has pitted two federal statutes - one demanding recovery of dead service personnel and one protecting cultural and historic sites - against one another. And it has exposed the fault lines that exist between native Hawaiians who consider the Koolau Range sacred and the federal government they deeply resent for appropriating miles of prime land for military use in the decades since the attack on Pearl Harbor.

"This story is about a lot more than Harry Warnke," said Mahealani Cypher, a Hawaiian activist who is against the recovery mission. "It is another example of the concerns and traditions of the Hawaiian people being overshadowed by the military and the government."
[...]
In the late 1990s, when the military first began planning to recover Warnke's body, it had no inkling of the controversy that would ignite.

At the time, a sovereignty movement was in full swing in Hawaii. Some groups wanted Hawaii to secede (sic) from the United States; others wanted a nation-within-a-nation status similar to that granted to American Indians. Virtually all of them felt resentment for the U.S. overthrow of the Hawaiian kingdom in 1893, an event for which the Congress and President Bill Clinton had apologized in 1993.

The recovery mission became embroiled in the sovereignty debate, a movement that remains alive today.