Maunakea: Lost in Translation

Introduction

Maunakea rises from the seafloor to 13,803 feet on Hawaiʻi Island, making it the tallest mountain in the world measured from base to peak. Its elevation, dry atmosphere, and distance from light pollution make it one of the best places on Earth to observe the sky, and thirteen telescopes have been built on its summit since the 1960s. 

For the Kanaka Maoli, the Native Hawaiian people, the mountain is a genealogical ancestor, the firstborn of the sky father Wākea and earth mother Papahānaumoku, whose care is a kinship obligation rather than a management decision. The summit is also a fragile alpine ecosystem, home to species found nowhere else, including the wekiu bug.

Hawaiʻi was an independent kingdom until it was illegally overthrown and annexed into the United States. Over the following decades, Kanaka Maoli were dispossessed of their land, their language, and are now a minority on their own islands. The telescopes on Maunakea were built within that history, through state leases that prioritized science over conservation, cultural practice, or Native Hawaiian authority.

The central tension is between Western scientific and conservation management ontologies and Kanaka Maoli understandings of land as sacred kin and genealogical ancestor, frameworks that may not be reconcilable through integration alone. When conservation initiatives incorporate Indigenous knowledge, questions emerge about who defines what counts as knowledge and whose frameworks structure the collaboration. The history of Maunakea raises the question of whether conservation and science can operate on that summit without reproducing those same structures. What would it mean for Kanaka Maoli relationships with ‘aina to be treated not as a perspective to consult, but as a governing framework in itself? Yet even posing that question requires Kanaka Maoli to translate living, relational ways of knowing into terms legible to the very institutions that have historically dismissed them. This demand is inherently a form of epistemic violence, forcing Indigenous thought to justify its validity on colonial ground.

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Learning Through Doing

Originally, we had planned a mapping exercise. We imagined splitting the class into groups, assigning each group one of our research lenses, and asking them to place objects related to the case study on a map of Hawaiʻi Island: telescopes, military land, conservation areas, and ceremonial sites. Unfortunately, this activity assumed the island could be divided that way, which was not the case.This approach worked for the government, military, and scientific lenses, but it was impossible to form to Kanaka Maoli beliefs, where land is not only a resource to be sorted by use. We realized the activity seemed to reproduce the same framework we were trying to question.

We ran the activity in the birdcage and garden area on Old Campus, behind the Sunken Garden buildings, with around twenty students participating. The physical layout of the space set the boundaries, and the location slips were the only preparatory material. The activity largely worked as intended, most pairs found their locations, but the process demonstrated how quickly meaning shifts when language is constrained. It also revealed something unplanned: several groups bent the rules or quietly declared success before fully completing the task. One pair, for instance, was supposed to land on “prettiest flower” but settled for “beautiful flower” and moved on. The difference matters. “Prettiest” implies a relationship among all the flowers in the space, a comparative judgment, while “beautiful” describes only the one in front of you. The substitution felt close enough, but something specific was lost. That kind of drift turned out to be one of the more instructive moments of the activity, because it mirrors what happens in the Maunakea case. When Native Hawaiian relationships to the mountain are translated into government or scientifically-determined categories, the original meaning, and the relational logic behind it, does not survive the translation intact.

After the activity, each group member briefly presented their research window. The debrief helped connect the exercise back to the larger project: conservation and planning systems often ask people to translate place-based relationships into terms the system already understands. Our activity could show the frustration and distortion of that translation, but only in a limited way. The stakes were low, the participants could leave at any time, and no one in our class was being asked to defend an actual ancestral relationship to land. The activity did not reproduce the Maunakea conflict, but it helped us see why translation itself can become part of the conflict.

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Perspectives

Any serious engagement with the Maunakea case means sitting with the fact that the people involved are operating from fundamentally different starting points. The perspectives below reflect distinct institutional, cultural, and historical positions, each carrying its own answer to a more basic question: what is Maunakea, and who has the right to determine its future?

Native (Kanaka Maoli)

When the Thirty Meter Telescope was proposed for Maunakea’s summit, many dissidents thought the best solution would be to give Native Hawaiians an opportunity to work with the government and identify alternative areas for the telescope. This approach assumes that the island as a whole is a resource with some parts more sensitive and sacred than others. However, Native Hawaiian epistemology doesn’t work that way. As Kealiikanakaoleohaililani and Giardina write, in Hawaiian thought “all forms and functions — biotic and abiotic, physical and non-physical, observable and non-observable, dynamic, inert, internal, external — are akua expressions. As a result, all interactions are by definition akua or potentiality, and so are sacred” (p. 62). The entire island is a living ancestor. There is no summit, slope, or rock that falls outside that relationship, and therefore no compromise location.

The central tension here is one of incommensurable ontologies: the Hawaiian framework for what Maunakea is cannot be reconciled with a state permitting process that treats it as land to be allocated. Native Hawaiians were forced to defend Maunakea inside a legal system that has no category for a genealogical bond with a mountain. Arguing within that system requires translating the relationship into bureaucratic language precise enough to lose what it is trying to protect. This is where the conflict begins — and it is the tension that shapes every other perspective that follows.

Scientific

The Maunakea Observatories are the most scientifically productive observatory complex in the world. This productivity was built through the original 1968 lease, which gave the University of Hawaiʻi control of over 11,000 acres of land for $1 per year, with telescope time as the real currency and no revenue reaching the Office of Hawaiian Affairs. In 50 years of observation, only 3 Native Hawaiians earned astronomy PhDs. Observatory directors have since admitted that the lease was designed for science, not for conservation or cultural practice, and that uplifting the Native Hawaiian community was never an objective. Native Hawaiian astronomers who support the telescopes describe the same history from the alternative point of view: underfunded schools, inaccessible financial aid, and a scientific culture that treated their knowledge as irrelevant, all of which kept the local community out of the very institutions operating on their land.

The tension within the scientific perspective is between a discipline reckoning with its own history and the limits of what institutional reform can actually fix. Everyone involved now seems to agree that the relationship between astronomy and Maunakea needs to change. Act 255, passed in 2022, created a new governance authority that includes Native Hawaiian cultural practitioners for the first time. But the same law designates astronomy as a “policy of the state,” raising the question of whether Native Hawaiians can hold meaningful authority over Maunakea under a law that already guarantees astronomy a place there. Inclusion without structural change may reproduce the same hierarchy it claims to dismantle.

Federal & Military

My research examines the federal government’s perspective on land-use tensions in Hawaiʻi, with a specific focus on the military. This emphasis stems from the military’s massive physical footprint and its strategic importance within the Pacific region. The 2025 Final Environmental Impact Statement (FEIS) for the Pōhakuloa Training Area (PTA) provides a window into this tension. While the document doesn’t explicitly mention the Thirty Meter Telescope, it reveals how the federal government understands and values land: the Army frames land retention as a requirement for national security, treating the landscape as a tool for combat readiness rather than as a place with its own history and relationships.

The central tension here is between strategic utility and ancestral obligation. The FEIS acknowledges that military land use causes historical trauma and cultural displacement, but acknowledgment does not change that land is still treated as something to be controlled and optimized for a predetermined purpose. This mirrors the TMT conflict directly. In both cases, a federal or state institution arrives at the mountain with its own definition of what the land is for, and Native Hawaiian relationships to that land are acknowledged only as complications to manage, not as frameworks with their own authority. As a veteran, I have seen this disconnect firsthand: the military’s focus on combat effectiveness is not inherently malicious, but it operates from assumptions about land that are structurally incompatible with indigenous stewardship.

Local Government

The county government approaches Maunakea through planning frameworks that emphasize balance: between development, conservation, and community engagement. The Hawaiʻi County General Plan promotes “collaborative biocultural stewardship” and frames land-use decisions as processes that should incorporate community values and local knowledge. On paper, this looks like a meaningful attempt to include Native Hawaiian perspectives. In practice, the tension lies in who controls the terms of that inclusion.

The county ultimately determines how land is classified and used, and that authority shapes what kinds of participation are even possible. Indigenous perspectives may be incorporated, but the planning system has already decided what categories are available, ex: “community values,” “cultural resources,” “stakeholder input” — before anyone arrives at the table. The deeper relational logic of Kanaka Maoli land stewardship does not fit those categories, and the plan does not create space for it. A governance system can present itself as inclusive while the limits of participation are quietly fixed in advance. Like the scientific and federal perspectives, the local government framework assumes land is something to be managed and allocated, and that assumption is exactly where the conflict with Kanaka Maoli worldviews takes root.

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Reading & Reflections

Understanding Maunakea required reading across frameworks that do not always speak to each other clearly; including scientific literature, legal documents, Indigenous scholarship, and historical accounts that each tell a different version of the same story. The annotations below reflect that range, and the friction between them.

• U.S. Army Garrison-Hawaii (2025). Army training land retention at Pōhakuloa Training Area: Final environmental impact statement (Vol. 1). Prepared by G70 and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

  This federal document details the Army’s plan to retain over 22,000 acres of state land for military training at Pōhakuloa. It highlights a fundamental conflict where the government treats the land as a strategic utility for national security. This mirrors the Thirty Meter Telescope issue because Western institutions in both cases prioritize their own objectives over Native Hawaiian authority. For our core question, the document is useful precisely because it is not about Maunakea: it shows that the same framework (land as a resource to be controlled and optimized) operates across federal institutions regardless of context. The tension is structural and not unique to the field of astronomy.

• Beamer, K., & Duarte, T. K. (2006). Mapping the Hawaiian Kingdom: A colonial venture? Hawaiian Journal of Law and Politics, 2, 34–52.

  Beamer and Duarte examine how 19th-century land surveying methods initiated the transition toward treating land as a utility rather than through native kinship. By mapping the islands into a standard grid, the government was able to track and manage specific parcels as state assets, giving the U.S. a legal framework to later claim these “ceded lands.” This source helped us understand that the translation problem at Maunakea did not begin with the telescopes. It began when Hawaiian land was first forced into a Western cadastral system that had no category for genealogical relationships. The framework that makes the TMT conflict possible was built much earlier.

• Cuby, Jean-Gabriel, Christine Matsuda, Rich Matsuda, Andy Adamson, John O’Meara, and Nadine Manset. 2024. “Astronomy’s Relationship with the Lands and Communities of Maunakea.” Proceedings of SPIE 13094, Ground-based and Airborne Telescopes X: 1309419. 

  Written by Maunakea Observatory directors, this article documents how astronomy was physically and legally established on the mountain through a 1968 lease, $1-per-year subleases, and a governance structure designed for science rather than conservation or cultural practice. The authors admit that no lease revenue reached the Office of Hawaiian Affairs and that “uplifting the Native Hawaiian community simply wasn’t an objective of the endeavor” (p. 9). For our purposes, this source is significant because it comes from inside the scientific institution. It demonstrates that even when the people responsible for the harm acknowledge it, the governance reforms they helped create, like MKSOA, still operate within a law that guarantees astronomy’s presence on the summit. Acknowledgment, this source suggests, does not automatically restructure the framework.

• Dill, Kimberly M. 2025. “A Fork on the Road to Knowledge at Mauna Kea: The Thirty Meter Telescope, Perspectivalism, and Epistemic Injustice.” Ethics, Policy & Environment. Published online July 7, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1080/21550085.2025.2517585

  Dill argues that building the TMT without Native Hawaiian consent causes an epistemic harm, a harm at the level of knowledge itself, because the telescope physically declares that Western astronomy’s way of knowing has priority over Hawaiian ways of knowing. She critiques calls for collaboration by pointing out that thirteen telescopes were built on Maunakea while Native Hawaiian objections were documented and overridden, and that a Native Hawaiian member of the MKSOA board describes still feeling “a feeling of powerlessness, and a feeling of inequity in that power relationship” even after being included in governance (p. 19). This source pushed our thinking most directly on the core question: Dill gives us the language to articulate why inclusion is not enough. Being brought into a framework is not the same as having your framework recognized.

• Kealiikanakaoleohaililani, Kekuhi, and Christian P. Giardina. “Embracing the Sacred: An Indigenous Framework for Tomorrow’s Sustainability Science.” Sustainability Science, vol. 11, 2016, pp. 57–67. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11625-015-0343-3 

  The lead author, a Native Hawaiian scholar and cultural practitioner based in Hilo, explains why land becomes sacred in Hawaiian epistemology through the concept of akua, in which all forms, such as lava, water, wind, a rock formation, are understood as expressions of divinity and therefore as kin. For the Maunakea conflict, this reframes the entire question: rather than asking which specific sites are sacred and should be protected, this framework indicates that sacredness is the baseline condition of all land. This was the most foundational source for our argument, because it shows why compromise locations and partial protections cannot resolve the conflict. You cannot negotiate around sacredness when sacredness is not a special designation but a description of everything.

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Whose Terms?

Each perspective we researched arrived at Maunakea with its own definition of what the mountain is, and its own framework for what a solution would look like. What became clear across all of them is that the conflict is not primarily about a telescope. It is about which frameworks get to define the terms of the conversation in the first place, and who bears the responsibility of translation and integration when those frameworks do not align.

Our classroom activity gave us a small, low-stakes glimpse of that cost. Stripping away language revealed how much meaning depends on the categories we take for granted, and how quickly something specific can get lost when we reach for the closest available substitute. Of course, the stakes in that garden were low. On Maunakea, they are not.

What the literature and the perspectives together suggest is that the reforms already underway, new governance bodies, cultural practitioners at the table, formal acknowledgments of past harm, are meaningful, but they are happening inside structures that were not built to accommodate what Kanaka Maoli are actually asking for. Inclusion is not the same as recognition. Being invited to speak is not the same as having your framework treated as a legitimate basis for decisions.

We cannot claim to know how this conflict should be resolved, and we are cautious about the impulse to propose solutions from the outside. What we can say is that any path forward that asks Kanaka Maoli to keep translating their relationships into terms the system already understands is only a continuation of the same problem under a different name.

“We are not anti-science… We have been standing successfully for 12 years against the building of a huge telescope. Not because it’s a telescope, but because it’s an 18-story building of any kind that would be built on the northern plateau in a pristine landscape on a sacred mountain.””

Pua Case, Mauna Kea activist

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Image Sources

Introduction: Rainbow over Maunakea

Perspectives Carousel: Hula Girls

Perspectives Carousel: Scientist on Volcano

Perspectives Carousel: Military on Hawaii

Perspectives Carousel: Hawaii Governor

Perspectives/Native: Blockade/Protest Hug

Perspectives/Scientific: Telescope

Perspectives/Federal & Military: Testing