![]() Narration: On the other hand, settler-scientists, backed by the University of Hawaiʻi and the State of Hawaiʻi government are pushing for the Thirty Meter Telescope through the rhetoric of scientific advancement and discovery-much of which brushes over or ignores completely the importance of Mauna Kea to Hawaiians and the mountain’s place within Hawaiian cosmology. colonialism that began with the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893 and has continued through increased settlement, military presence, and the rise of tourism after Hawaii became a state in 1959. Moreover, kiaʻi and their allies are standing to protect the life of the land that is rightfully theirs. These people are standing for the place they consider their living ancestor as traced through the Kumulipo or Hawaiian creation chant. Those standing for Mauna Kea call themselves kiaʻi, which translates to guardians or protectors. Narration: There’s a battle going on over this part of the mountain - and who has claim to it and why. ![]() Our community has been unhappy about the development of the summit area of Mauna Kea, which we consider a papa lani or a wao akua, the most sacred part of the mountain. Noenoe Wong-Wilson: What's at stake is just more and larger desecration of the summit area of the mountain, which is the most sacred area of our mountain. And, astronomers argue that it would allow them to see deeper into space and with more detail than any of the other existing telescopes elsewhere, or on Mauna Kea. ![]() It would be the largest development built on the summit of Mauna Kea. Scientists have been planning a fourteenth –a Thirty-Meter Telescope - or “TMT”. They vary in size, range and technological sophistication. Switch Narrator: There are now thirteen telescopes atop Mauna Kea. As the tallest mountain in the world from base to peak and with its location in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, Mauna Kea offers isolation from human made light sources. It’s become famous for its “unique astronomical conditions” including cloudless skies, scatter free atmosphere, easterly trade winds, and very little boundary layer turbulence. That’s because settlers and scientists started to build telescopes on the mountain. Narration: But since the early 1960s, humans have been on Mauna Kea almost every day. So it is not a place where humans belong to begin with. So literally a human cannot survive there for any length of time and be healthy. There is less than 30 percent of the Earth's oxygen, up at the 14,000 foot level. Noenoe Wong-Wilson: It is where man cannot live. Reader: Poliʻahu, ka wahine kapa hau anu o Mauna Kea / Poliʻahu, the woman who wears the snow mantle of Mauna Kea.ĭr. Including the goddess Lilinoe-“the mist that meanders over the mountain.” She tends to Poliahu, the snow goddess referenced in the ʻōlelo noʻeau or Hawaiian proverb: Narration: The summit area of Mauna Kea is called the wao akua or realm of the gods. And it's from that union that the mountain was born where constellations were formed, where eventually the humans in the genealogy of mankind that emerges. Noenoe Wong-Wilson: It is where in our Hawaiian cosmology, our Earth mother and the Sky father meet. He had visited the Pu'uhonua, and attended a seminar at the university about Mauna Kea and its sacredness.ĭr. Narration: Heidi and I were driving up from Hilo to Saddle Road, to visit the Pu'uhonua, the place of refuge, that protectors of Mauna Kea had set up a few months before. You know, there's now, what? Like 13 or something like that. No, but really, like, I don't know what other way to put it. Heidi: Oh yeah, what do they look like as we’re driving up? Matt: Ope you can kind of see the telescopes.
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