
First Light
Kanaka 'Oiwi Resistance to Settler Science at Mauna a Wakea
- 341 pages
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
Understanding the Hawai'i Island summit of Mauna a W?kea as a place of ancestral connection, cultural resurgence, and political resistance for Native Hawaiians?
First Light is 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 Hawai'i. 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 '?iwi (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 Hawai'i, 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 Light explores 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 '?iwi and their alienation from ??ina.
Challenging the assumptions and aggressions of neoliberal environmental policy, settler multiculturalism, and U.S. military occupation, First Light reinforces calls for a moratorium on new telescope development and a literacy in Kanaka '?iwi movements for life, land, and ea (independence, sovereignty).
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover Page
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Chapter Introduction: Pu‘uhuluhulu: A Sanctuary and Struggle
- Chapter 1. In Ceremony: Kū Kilakila ka Mauna
- Chapter 2. Neoliberal Environmentalities and Monuments to Science
- Chapter 3. Multicultural Settler Colonialism
- Chapter 4. A Continuum of Struggle
- Chapter 5. Composing Nature and Articulating the Sacred
- Chapter 6. A Fictive Kinship
- Chapter 7. Constellations of Resistance and Resurgence
- Notes
- Index
- Author Biography