First Light: Kanaka 'Oiwi Resistance to Settler Science at Mauna a Wakea [Paperback]

Understanding the Hawaii Island summit of Mauna a W
kea as a place of ancestral connection, cultural resurgence, and political resistance for Native Hawaiians

 

First Lightis a site-specific study of Native Hawaiian resistance to the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) on the summit of Mauna a W
kea, the sacred mountain on the island of Hawaii. Drawing on personal interviews, oral histories, archival research, participant observation, and popular, legal, scientific, and Indigenous discourses, Iokepa Casumbal-Salazar explores both the campaign to build the observatory and the movement against it. He asks how astronomers have become stewards of Mauna a W
kea while K
naka Liwi (Aboriginal Hawaiians), in protest, are recast as obstructing progress and clinging to ancient superstitions.

Contextualizing contemporary resistance to telescope expansion within the past 132 years of struggle against U.S. empire in Hawaii, Casumbal-Salazar argues the Kanaka-led efforts to protect their ancestral lands did not begin with the TMT and only become legible when understood in the broader history of resistance to U.S. settler hegemony as told through the voices and actions of kia?i ?
ina (land defenders).First Lightexplores how settler science, capital, and law have been mobilized in ways that rationalize industrial development projects like the TMT and promote a vision of coexistence that enables the dehumanization of K
naka Liwi and their alienation from ?
ina.

Challenging the assumptions and aggressions of neoliberal environmental policy, settler multiculturalism, and U.S. military occupation,First Lightreinforces calls for a moratorium on new telescope development and a literacy in Kanaka Liwi movements for life, land, and ea (independence, sovereignty).

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