Mauna Kea and the Thirty-Eight Kupuna

On July seventeenth, twenty nineteen, thirty-eight Hawaiian elders sat down in the road at the base of Mauna Kea and waited to be arrested. They were kupuna, the Hawaiian word for elders who carry cultural knowledge and genealogical authority. They had chosen the access road to the summit deliberately, and they had chosen to sit rather than march, to be still rather than confront. One by one, the officers came.

What the elders were blocking was the construction access for the Thirty Meter Telescope, a next-generation astronomical observatory planned for the summit of Mauna Kea, a mountain that stands thirteen thousand seven hundred ninety-six feet above the Pacific and is, in Hawaiian tradition, the meeting place of Wakea the sky father and Papa the earth mother. The summit is a site of burial, prayer, and genealogical significance that predates any observatory by more than a thousand years. Thirteen telescopes already stood on the summit when the Thirty Meter Telescope project sought to break ground.

The arrests of the kupuna on July seventeenth drew hundreds of younger Hawaiians to the mountain, many of them from the continental United States, some from across the Pacific. The gathering grew into a months-long encampment called Pu'uhuluhulu, governed by a protocol the organizers named Kapu Aloha, a code of nonviolent conduct rooted in Hawaiian tradition. No confrontation. No drugs or alcohol. No disrespect.

Construction has not resumed. As of twenty twenty-six, the Thirty Meter Telescope project remains in legal suspension, the subject of court challenges and ongoing negotiation. The mountain is still being disputed. What the elders who sat down in that road accomplished was to make the dispute impossible to ignore.