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

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Understanding the Hawai'i Island summit of Mauna a Wkea 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 Wkea, the sacred volcano 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 Wkea while Kanaka 'iwi (Aboriginal Hawaiians), in protest, are recast as obstructing progress and clinging to ancient superstitions.

Contextualizing contemporary resistance to telescope expansion within the past 125 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 kiai 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 Kanaka '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).

Author Bio

Iokepa Casumbal-Salazar is assistant professor in the Department of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at UC Santa Cruz.