Column: Mauna Kea protest is new kind of indigenous world-making

As a non-Hawaiian observer, I applaud the respectful tone of the protectors.

Theirs is a new strategy, radically more inclusive and welcoming than the nationalism of past sovereignty movements. As one who lived through the “Settler Go Home” flashpoints of 1990s Hawaiian identity politics, I welcome this transformation. All who live here are enriched by indigenous values — kokua (interdependence), sustainable reciprocity (aloha ‘aina) — that link native wisdom to other global indigenous renaissance movements.

Every citizen should have access to the pu‘uhuluhulu “open university” practiced on Mauna Kea. So many of us have never had the opportunity to think robustly and humanely about Hawaiian values and history. So many feeling people, people of conscience, hope for such a homecoming.

That’s why I’m disappointed to see mean-spirited characterizations of protectors in Star-­Advertiser commentaries. Spasms of contempt claim Hawaiians want to take us back to the stone age, are hypocrites who drive cars and use cell phones, bully pro-Thirty Meter Telescope supporters, violate laws, show hostility to foreigners and hijack Hawaiian identity into an “identity based on victimhood” (“TMT supporters must be patient, but start taking action,” Star-Advertiser, Island Voices, July 24).

I find these claims lack context and misread new models in the struggle for indigenous rights. Mocking rhetoric stings in our island home, where our very survival depends on kokua and interdependence. TMT supporters who use such stereotypes evoke the “primitive savages” of colonial language alien to the traditions they aim to honor.

Others say Hawaiian resistance is unjustified. But the concerns of those at Mauna Kea are reflecting crises rather than causing them. The voices we’re hearing today expose structural inequalities that force Hawaiian diasporas to Las Vegas and beyond. They confront the monstrous wealth gap that burdens Hawaii’s people, denying families a living wage, a liveable society. The commercialization of our neighborhoods is proof that Hawaii’s tourist- nvestment-based economy shouts: “For sale to the highest bidder.”

It’s a call to awareness when they expose the indifference and rot of political leaders who violate every protocol of environmental carrying-capacity.

Are protectors violating the law, as TMT supporters claim? The example of Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 “Letter from Birmingham City Jail” argues eloquently that peaceful dissenters against unjust laws “serve a higher principle of justice, concern for the welfare of the whole community” and are thus part of the very fabric of democracy.

Further, there is the drumbeat that “not all Hawaiians agree” with the protectors. One respected expert, Hawaii Supreme Court Justice Michael Wilson, in his authoritative dissent in the court’s TMT decision wrote: “One of the most sacred resources of the Hawaiian culture loses its protection because it has previously undergone substantial adverse impact from prior development of telescopes.”

Far from a mentality of “victimhood,” the protectors engage the razor’s edge of colonialism as a crossroads upon which to build a new equitable future. The wounds of modernity and history cannot be wished away. Nor can TMT’s symbolic potency be wished away. A convergence of commerce and spirit have made it so. Memory is a contemporary phenomenon: While concerned with the past, it happens in the present, as a form of working through past injury, resolving contemporary conflict and clearing the ground for new ways of living together.

Today Mauna Kea is showing us a new kind of indigenous world-making. There is no claim to perfection. Things can easily go wrong. But the regenerating energy, the kapu aloha (non-violence) and aloha aina demonstrated by the protectors is a possibility worth supporting. This vision opens up new areas of life to political analysis and civic action. Mele, hula, teaching the Hawaiian language — all these cultural manifestations embody aloha and inspire the moral imagination.

Nancie Caraway holds a Ph.D. in political science and is the former first lady of Hawaii.