The National Science Foundation’s decision not to fund the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) on Mauna Kea has been a long time coming. The decision left me feeling saddened by the victory of the Protectors and, yet, satisfied that the consortium of scientists, countries and institutions learned a hard lesson: religion is very often the deciding factor in human conflicts.
As a historian of religions, I understand that it gives meaning to human collectives and is the basis of national identity. Religious conflicts revolve around land, one of the essential foundations of community. Hawaiians are a colonized people. These islands are their ancestral place. Their oral history, language, dance, practices and all that makes them who they are takes place where significant things have happened. Those places are sacred.
In Hawaii the land has been monetized by the invaders. Waikiki was a wetlands, now turned into a world destination that helps draw up to 10 million visitors a year here. To replenish the beaches and secure an industry that the state economy depends on, tourists will pay a daily tax on their hotel rooms.
Lahaina lost its wetlands to agribusiness and ultimately lost itself from fire on a dried-out landscape. Mauna Kea and Haleakala are the highest mountains from base to top in the world. Their uniqueness is established in Hawaiian culture by their status as abodes of the gods. In all religions, myths instruct a people how to organize their earthly society. Myths orient people, bring order out of chaos, regulate society, and give a sense of meaning to individuals. A society that loses its religious orientation is rudderless, atomized.
Detachment from ancestral land is the reason why so many indigenous nations have suffered social disorder, high rates of poverty, lower life expectancies, substance abuse, imprisonment and broken families. Loss of meaning is directly related to the loss of land and all the significant memories, rituals, practices and food that land gives to its people.
Religious conflict over land leads to the longest and most irresolvable wars. In our time the salient examples are the Irish rebellion and the Palestinian-Israeli wars. A determined people will fight successive enemies over decades in order to retain control of their land. Religion is about ultimate things, concern for what matters to a people over time: land/sacred place, myth/sacred stories, and ritual/sacred practices.
When the land in Aotearoa was lost to the Maori, the plaza in front of the meeting house became a reminder. When Jews were captured by Titus and taken to Rome, their Torah replaced their temple and traveled with them. Symbols sustain people when they are colonized, but ultimately, it is the land that successive generations yearn to reclaim.
So, Mauna Kea cannot be monetized by the enterprise of astronomy.
Yet, the loss of the TMT to the northern hemisphere has significant impact on the future of our keiki. My grandson is a hapa teen who just received a science award. Students at University of Hawaii Manoa will be deprived of a major resource for extending our knowledge of the universe — and of the origin of all things. When we don’t go forward, we shrink like space collapsing back on itself.
Ideally, the kanaka maoli would decide for decommissioning the existing telescopes and building the TMT, reasoning that the practice of astronomy honors the gods and enriches the people, that it is an extension of the navigation science of the Polynesians that led them to travel farther than any other nation. The disrespect and underestimation of the power of religion and its life-enhancing properties led to the zero-sum-game conflict over the mountain.
A powerful, secular consortium was defeated by a determined group of the people of the land.
It is a hard lesson, but a necessary one. Meaning cannot be monetized. Religion is intrinsic to the well-being and continuation of a people. Until our eyes have really seen each other and acknowledged who we are, we cannot turn them upward to the stars.
Jean E. Rosenfeld, Ph.D., is a retired historian of religions and author.
