{"id":58469,"date":"2015-05-25T12:00:11","date_gmt":"2015-05-25T11:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=58469"},"modified":"2015-12-14T13:06:20","modified_gmt":"2015-12-14T13:06:20","slug":"science-time-and-mauna-a-wakea-the-thirty-meter-telescopes-capitalist-colonialist-violence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2015\/05\/science-time-and-mauna-a-wakea-the-thirty-meter-telescopes-capitalist-colonialist-violence\/","title":{"rendered":"Science, Time and Hawaii’s Mauna a W\u0101kea: The Thirty-Meter Telescope\u2019s Capitalist-Colonialist Violence"},"content":{"rendered":"

The \u202aTMT is, in fact, a part of a legacy of colonial-capitalist violence committed against Hawaii and Hawaiians, regardless of its scientific merit. <\/em><\/p>\n

13 May 2015 – Editor\u2019s note: Originally published in The Red Nation<\/a>, this essay by kanaka maoli David Maile examines the Thirty-Meter Telescope (TMT) in the context of a history of colonial-capitalist violence, making it clear that the TMT project is, in fact, a part of that legacy of violence against Hawaiians.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"defend<\/a><\/p>\n

On April 16, the Hawai\u2018i Tribune-Herald<\/em> published an article covering a University of Hawai\u2018i (UH) Hilo Board of Regents meeting regarding the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) project at Mauna Kea. The article featured incisive, anti-TMT testimony. Its headline read: \u201cScience and money do not supersede the sanctity of our mountain.\u201d This statement, which was made by Kalani Makekau-Whittaker, a professor of Hawaiian language at UH M\u0101noa, reverberated alongside other \u2018a\u2018ole (no) TMT testimony that opposes TMT construction because it will desecrate and destroy Mauna Kea. Mauna Kea is also known as Mauna a W\u0101kea, a sacred mountain to K\u0101naka Maoli (Native Hawaiians), my people, and our L\u0101hui Hawai\u2018i (Hawaiian Nation).<\/p>\n

I write this essay in the enduring political spirit of Makekau-Whittaker and others, including K\u016b Kia\u2018i Mauna (guardians of the mountain), po\u2018e aloha \u2018\u0101ina (Hawaiian patriots), k\u016bpuna (ancestors), and those who, in the words of Samuel C. Amalu, \u201clove that soil.\u201d I write out of a kuleana (responsibility) bestowed upon me by my great-great grandfather, C.B. Maile who, in 1897, challenged U.S. notions of democracy and morality by signing both the K\u016b\u2018\u0113 Petitions against annexation and the Citizens\u2019 Committee Memorial. I also write against the peoples, institutions and discourses that seek to ravage Mauna Kea and stymie our defense of ea (life, land, and sovereignty). This is a response to incursion. It is a kuleana I\u2019ve been given.<\/p>\n

It speaks to Jon Kamakawiwo\u2018ole Osorio\u2019s caution in Dismembering L\u0101hui<\/em> that \u201chistory should instruct the living, not merely memorialize the dead.\u201d<\/p>\n

If it is not obvious by now, I am against TMT. But, this essay is meant less as a political tract and more as an intervention into the diverse and difficult discussions unfolding as this issue plays out. It is thus meant for both the protectors of the mountain and those who support TMT. Its purpose is to make sense of the discourses of science and time that are being deployed to understand the entanglements of Mauna Kea, TMT and Hawaiians.<\/p>\n

This essay is not meant as a totalizing narrative of the struggle at Mauna Kea. It does not recenter institutional power located in the settler state, law, or academy. And while it is definitely not in the genre of scientific inquiry, it also cannot be called anti-intellectual, for it assumes westernized scientific knowledge as its site of critique and analysis. In following, this essay suggests that the categories of science and time used to describe the TMT justify capitalist-colonialist violence done to Mauna a W\u0101kea. As I will demonstrate, capitalist-colonialist violence is the concealed and sometimes overt brutalization of Indigenous peoples and land through interconnected processes of colonial domination and capitalist development.<\/p>\n

Part one of the essay critiques the role of science in the discourse surrounding TMT, arguing that science works with racist and militaristic ideologies to further the colonization of Hawai\u2018i. Part two of the essay critiques the role of time in the discourse surrounding TMT, arguing that time works within scientific discourses to conceal racist developmentalism, capitalist exploitation, and colonial violence under the idea of \u201cprogress.\u201d<\/p>\n

Science Matters<\/strong><\/p>\n

In From a Native Daughter<\/em>, Haunani-Kay Trask asserts, \u201cThis is Hawai\u2018i, once the most fragile and precious of sacred places, now transformed by the American behemoth into a dying land. Only a whispering spirit remains.\u201d<\/p>\n

Trask\u2019s notion of a \u201cdying land\u201d should not be read as a state of emergency that requires resuscitation by settler colonization or so-called \u2018scientific transformation\u2019. Rather, her statement speaks to how science matters as a practice and a discourse that can impede upon the \u201cfragile,\u201d the \u201cprecious,\u201d and the \u201csacred\u201d like Mauna Kea. However, the spirit that remains in opposition to TMT is anything but a whisper. Young K\u0101naka Maoli leaders, such as H\u0101wane Rios, Kaho\u2018okahi Kanuha and Lanakila Mangauil, loudly protect Mauna Kea from the TMT. Despite threats of criminalization and the arrests of 31 protectors by county police on April 2, it was Rios, Kanuha, Mangauil and other steadfast protectors that sustained a physical blockade at the road leading to the summit of Mauna Kea in order to refuse passage to TMT vehicles transporting heavy machinery to begin construction.<\/p>\n

Yet, Mangauil plainly states, \u201cOur stance is not against the science.\u201d Mangauil goes on to state in a March 31 article in the Hawai\u2018i Tribune-Herald that the blockade is \u201cnot against the TMT itself. It\u2019s against their choice of place.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even though anti-TMT proponents have qualified their stance on science, criticism from sources like Bronson Kaahui in Civil Beat<\/em> suggests that protests against TMT are \u201cnew age anti-science activism.\u201d He goes on to depict protestors as \u201cblind sheep\u201d because they are \u201ceconomically disadvantaged and lacking a proper education.\u201d Kaahui\u2019s article, like others that are critical of the anti-TMT position, also claims the TMT is a celebration of Hawaiian tradition in celestial navigation. In The Hawai\u2018i Independent<\/a><\/em>, kuualoha hoomanawanui refutes the idea that the kind of science represented by the TMT is a Hawaiian tradition by, instead, illuminating how spiritual faith and \u201clove for our land\u201d recasts tradition away from practices recognized under the rubric of westernized science. The defense against the TMT continues to align itself with these kinds of Hawaiian cultural beliefs about \u2018\u0101ina (land), arguing that its opposition is to the TMT LLC\u2019s choice to build on sacred land, not to the project\u2019s scientific significance.<\/p>\n

The multiple narratives offered by media sources and stakeholders about opposition to the TMT clearly demonstrate how science matters. In fact, it is the hinge of the discourse on this issue: protestors oppose astronomy-industry development; they signal the intent of their opposition by stating that their position is not anti-science; critics claim opposers are anti-science; and critics and other commentators like Kaahui mark the pursuit of science as a Hawaiian tradition.<\/p>\n

Science Is Colonialist<\/strong><\/p>\n

Richard Ellis, a cosmologist at Caltech\u2014one of the driving institutions of the Thirty Meter Telescope International Observatory LLC (TIO) and a major funder for the TMT\u2014spoke to the Los Angeles Times<\/em> in 2001 about the UH\u2019s push to develop the astronomy-industry at Mauna Kea. He said, \u201cWe\u2019re searching for truth and knowledge, the kinds of things that have motivated countries for centuries. We don\u2019t need to apologize.\u201d<\/p>\n

Why is it that anti-TMT arguments must be qualified with pro-science statements like \u201cwe\u2019re not against science\u201d while pro-TMT ones unapologetically pursue scientific knowledge even if, in the process, Mauna Kea is bulldozed, developed and desecrated?<\/p>\n

Trask\u2019s statement explicitly flags the \u201cAmerican behemoth\u201d as the source of death for Hawai\u2018i. In so doing, she also points to how westernized science advances imperial and colonial projects that marginalize and dispossess Indigenous peoples. In The Transit of Empire<\/em>, Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd critiques the ways in which astronomical inquiry about the transits of Venus produced and abetted conquest and colonial ideologies also known as colonialism. She posits, \u201cTransit refers to a rare astronomical event, the paired transits of Venus across the sun, that served in 1761 and again in 1769 as global moments that moved European conquest toward notions of imperialist planetarity that provided the basis for Enlightenment liberalism. The imperial planeterity that sparked scientific rationalism and inspired humanist articulations of freedom, sovereignty, and equality touched four continents and a sea of islands in order to cohere itself.\u201d<\/p>\n

Simply put, in the scientific pursuit to stablize absolute Truth about the transits of Venus, astronomy-industry development as part of the larger Enlightenment project for the pursuit of truth and knowledge emerged through the dispossession of Indigenous lands and the elimination of Native peoples like Hawaiians. For example, explorers like Captain James Cook exercised the doctrine of terra nullius, assuming Indigenous lands were unoccupied or empty, to justify colonization in pursuit of astronomical knowledge. This process of colonization was and continues to be facilitated through capitalism by developing land for the astronomy industry, which is how violence is hidden within structures of power such as colonialism and capitalism.<\/p>\n

Anti-TMT proponents have made the same connections between colonization and the search for astronomical truth so exalted by Richard Ellis. As former physicist Ben Lillie stated in a May 1 article appearing in Slate<\/em>, \u201cAstronomy has its evils, and as with Mauna Kea, they are often connected to the mistreatment of native peoples.\u201d<\/p>\n

The TMT is imperialist and colonial to its core because it belongs to a centuries-long genealogy of Enlightenment that only came into existence through violent imperial conquest. Jake Flanagin\u2019s article in Quartz<\/em> notes how justifications for the TMT deny this legacy and \u201cfurther \u2018scientific colonization\u2019\u201d of Mauna Kea through claiming scientific benefit and triumph.<\/p>\n

In sum, when we talk about the TMT project, we must foreground colonization.<\/p>\n

Science Is Racist<\/strong><\/p>\n

The discourses of science that surround the TMT are also underpinned by racism. A pervasive example is justification for the TMT by proponents like Kaahui or astrophysicist Paul Coleman in MANA<\/em>\u2019s article, on the grounds that Hawaiians studied the stars. This statement works to shore up colonization of our sacred mountain by employing racist ascriptions. M\u0101ori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith attests in Decolonizing Methodologies<\/em> that westernized science \u201c\u2018steals\u2019 knowledge from others and then uses it to benefit the people who \u2018stole\u2019 it. Some indigenous and minority group researchers would call this approach simply racist. It is research which is imbued with an \u2018attitude\u2019 and a \u2018spirit\u2019 which assumes a certain ownership of the entire world, and which has established systems and forms of governance which embed that attitude in institutional practices.\u201d As I hope to have shown, institutions like the UH, TIO, astronomy-development, and Enlightenment science more generally exhibit this attitude of superiority.<\/p>\n

On April 20, an email message sent to the astronomy community by Alexei Filippenko, a professor of astrophysics at the University of California (UC) Berkley, leaked to socal media. The message was originally authored by Sandra M. Faber, a professor of astronomy at UC Santa Cruz, and stated, \u201cThe Thirty-Meter Telescope is in trouble, attacked by a horde of native Hawaiians who are lying.\u201d In response to this ergregious racism deployed to discredit K\u0101naka Maoli, cosmologist Chanda Prescod-Weinstein wrote, \u201cThere is no excuse for \u2018lying Hawaiian hordes.\u2019 It\u2019s racist.\u201d<\/p>\n

Science, colonialism, and racism clearly work hand-in-hand to insult, dehumanize, and silence Hawaiians. Racist remarks are produced in scientific discourses to support the idea that westernized science has supremacy over other considerations. Such remarks also work in tandem with scientific discourse to hide the actual colonial violence being done upon Mauna Kea.<\/p>\n

Science is Militarist<\/strong><\/p>\n

We might also understand this colonial and racial violence leveled at Hawaiians in the context of astronomy-industry development\u2019s collaboration with the U.S. military. In her Civil Beat<\/em> article, Jessica Terrell admitted that some of the 13 pre-existing telescopes at Mauna Kea are utilized to develop military technology. According to Terrell, \u201cA military use is improved for astronomy and then that improvement is taken up by the military.\u201d She quotes Don Hall, a former director of the UH\u2019s Institute for Astronomy, who claims that \u201cuniversity researchers never work on technology for military use.\u201d He follows up with, \u201cIn some instances the upgrades piggyback off each other.\u201d While perhaps not outright duplicitous, Hall\u2019s statement certainly attempts to downplay the actual intimate relationship between the Mauna Kea telescopes and U.S. military operations.<\/p>\n

The truth is that current telescopes at Mauna Kea are working on technology that bolsters U.S. military power. Meanwhile, the U.S. maintains an army training ground at P\u014dhakuloa in the saddle between Mauna Kea and Mauna Loa, and militarization of Hawai\u2018i has been and continues to be incredibly violent and seemingly insatiable. Although my central focus is a critique of the TMT\u2019s capitalist-colonialist violence, its relationship with the U.S. military-industrial complex, as well as Hawai\u2018i\u2019s violent and ongoing militarization by U.S. empire, should not be disregarded. This is especially concerning as the TMT\u2019s potential collaboration with U.S. empire is being funded by governments like Canada, Japan, China, and India.<\/p>\n

These discourses of science should continue to be interrogated for how they hide (settler) colonialism, racism, militarization, empire building and capitalism.<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 hawaiiindependent.net<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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