Cultural Practioners Respond to TMT

From Kealoha Pisciotta, President of Mauna Kea Anaina Hou and one of KAHEA’s Board of Directors:

As a former telescope system specialist on Mauna Kea, I value both Polynesian and modern astronomy. Unfortunately, the West Hawaii Today editorial endorsing the Thirty Meter Telescope Board’s selection of Mauna Kea over Chile contained several inaccuracies—and one insult to Hawaiians.

Portraying modern astronomy as an extension of traditional Native Hawaiian star and navigational knowledge is inaccurate and obscures the fact that modern astronomy now threatens to displace traditional astronomy on Mauna Kea and the people who practice it there. Hawaiians use Mauna Kea’s high elevation landscape for ceremonies that contain star and other knowledge essential to modern Hawaiian voyaging, knowledge our ancestors used to discover thousands of tiny islands spread over ten million square miles of the vast Pacific Ocean, before the time of Christ and millennia before modern astronomy.

But the constant building of new telescopes has destroyed critical landmarks and obstructed essential view planes that reveal star paths and astronomical alignments. Too much of Mauna Kea’s landscape has already been leveled, and TMT plans to bulldoze more. Eventually, thousands of years of traditional knowledge codified in the landscape will be lost, and practitioners will no longer be able to keep the knowledge alive. With TMT may also come nighttime access restrictions to areas we now use for traditional astronomy. These are among the reasons Hawaiians urged the TMT Board to build in Chile, which their own analysis suggests will inflict less environmental and cultural damage.