Mauna Kea

“The mountain brought us together,” Luana Busby-Neff tells me. It’s 200 days into the prayer vigil and blockade that brought the proposed Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) to a stop in Hawaii. The 14th giant telescope in Hawaii has been met with major resistance. Busby-Neff is one of the Kapuna, or elders, who was arrested in July 2019 for protesting the construction of the TMT. This is the first major Indigenous-led occupation since Standing Rock, and, like Standing Rock, it’s a moment that unites people and understanding with water and land. Thousands have come. Looking through the lens of a battle over the TMT, one also sees a story which is not just about a telescope, but about who gets to decide the future and understand and interpret the world. It’s about whether we will look to the stars or to the Earth. And it is about if we want bombs or water.