Protectors of the Future, Not Protestors of the Past: Indigenous Pacific Activism and Mauna a Wākea

Abstract

This essay explores ways Native Pacific activists enact Indigenous futurities and broaden the conditions of possibility for unmaking settler colonial relations. When settler colonial relations are built on the enclosure of land as property that can then be alienated from Indigenous peoples, as well as demarcated to privilege certain racialized, classed, and gendered groups of settlers, then such unmaking requires different ways of relating to land. I highlight two instances of “blockades”—the Pacific Climate Warriors at Newcastle Harbor in Australia and the protectors on Mauna a Wākea in Hawai‘i. While colonial discourses frame such direct actions as obstructions on a march toward a narrowly imagined and singular “future,” I argue that this activism works to open space for multiple futures in which Indigenous epistemologies and practices renew intergenerational connections and in which the possessive, jurisdictional borders of private property can be reimagined as zones of compassionate engagement. This kind of futures-creation is not only in the interest of Indigenous people. Indigenous resistance against industrial projects that destroy or pollute our territories concerns the health of multiple communities of humans and nonhumans.

Apparatuses of observation and occupation: Settler colonialism and space science in Hawai'i

“…In this section, we situate TMT and HI-SEAS in the history of colonial imaginaries of islands as abstract laboratories for scientific experimentation. We then consider how this erasure of space is entangled with Western conceptions of time that relegate Indigeneity to the past while producing linear, progressive futures (Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua, 2017). We bring these reflections together through Barad’s notion of the apparatus, which we employ to critically examine TMT and HI-SEAS.…”

“…The Hawaiian archipelago’s tallest mountain is home to 13 observation facilities within the Mauna Kea Science Reserve and is regarded as a premier site on Earth for astronomical observation. Since 2014, Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) land protectors have been locked in a heated political and legal battle to prevent construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), sparking arguments around the politics of science and the ongoing colonization of Hawai'i (Brown, 2016; Casumbal-Salazar, 2017; Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua, 2017; Maile, 2015). On nearby Maunaloa, the Hawai'i Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) has been used by NASA researchers to simulate a Mars habitat, where would-be Mars colonizers experiment with human adaptation to life on the red planet.…”

Medicine lines and COVID-19: Indigenous geographies of imagined bordering

“…However, the settler-colonial state views Indigenous checkpoints as akin to a blockade and a threat to settler sovereignty and jurisdictional totality (Spice, 2018 ). However, as Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua (2017) states, checkpoints are different than blockades, as Indigenous Peoples use them not as an act of political resistance against state violence but to protect Indigenous Peoples’ health and safety. The construction of borders as places of violence within the discipline of geography is evidence that geography has long been a western colonial science (Curley and Smith, 2020).…”

Moving Birds in Hawai'i: Assisted Colonisation in a Colonised Land

“…Relationships and connections that can hold open, generate, and protect possibilities for what Noelani Goodyear-Ka'ōpua has described as multiplicitous, Indigenous, futurities. 33…”