What Are the Mauna Kea Protests?

Brut America

"There is a particularly special connection between the Native Hawaiian people and this site." Brut spoke to an activist about protesting the construction of a giant telescope on Mauna Kea — a mountain considered sacred to many Native Hawaiians.

Transcript

00:00Stand together, it is now and forever to raise your voices.

00:08Hold the banner high, we shall stand as a nation.

00:16They have torn down religious sites just in the last couple of weeks.

00:21They've arrested people in their wheelchairs.

00:23Things are very tense right now and there's a lot of

00:27concern that law enforcement will become aggressive again.

00:49Mauna Kea has been mismanaged by the state for 50 years.

00:53It's on what are called crown lands.

00:55Lands that were effectively taken from the Hawaiian kingdom

00:59and then placed in trust with the state of Hawai'i for the Native Hawaiian people.

01:02So there's a particularly special connection between the Native Hawaiian people and this site.

01:08It's not a new situation in that the issues of injustice and land rights

01:13are a common theme over the last 126 years.

01:23We didn't believe in, you know, creating permanent damage to natural resources.

01:38So I think that's really the dialogue for us is how do we

01:42innovate even in these modern times without causing permanent environmental or cultural

01:47damage and that's where we feel like TMT has not taken those ethics into consideration.

01:54This occupation, this sort of reclaiming of Mauna Kea, I think it was the experience

02:10of Standing Rock that taught a lot of the people on the front line

02:13how to mobilize that number of people in a safe, non-violent manner.

02:17Hawaiians now have their language back, they have culture back.

02:21As a whole, as a people as a whole are so much stronger in culture than they were 40 years ago.

02:43I think, one, we have the benefit of things like Google now.

02:46You know, we're able to communicate much more.

02:48We're able to go to the UN at the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Peoples.

02:53So we're able to have these gatherings that have allowed us to work together,

02:58to grow together, to really form this beautiful global Indigenous community.

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