Why Native Hawaiians Protesting Giant Telescope on Mauna Kea Aren't Going Anywhere | NBC Left Field

there are other places astronomy can exist there's no place else for us we have nothing against the science or against a telescope it could be anything that you're building on top of the mountain our religion is very environmentally connected you need to know your environment really where those are our aqua or our gods our gods are living touching elemental forms that that are the land that are the mist the rains kahoku akane waifu aquatic a pick a couple o ye o then you have the lily noise you know the layer whose and all the MIS forums and that the Kilohana is the key Lina is that really really really are prevalent and embrace this land just because we don't have a large Cathedral up there or an actual building that says that this place is sacred doesn't mean that it's less sacred we need to leave things just be I can't see anybody building anything on Mount Fuji so why constantly on our on our eyelids the TMT was just the straw that broke the camel's back every single telescope they came up they told us that was the last one there's 13 up there now they never kept one promise since July 15th Native Hawaiian protesters have formed something of a community of resistance on Mauna Kea to stop construction of the thirty meter telescope which everyone just calls the TMT from being built on the summit of this dormant sacred volcano we knew that construction trucks were coming and that's when we went from 30 to possibly 3,000 in a parking lot in a lava field the only access up to Mauna Kea that the equipment can take so we've been here for 17 days now please don't think that you can stay up past 10 and make big noise there are cakey and kupuna everywhere that we all need to hear muy what if they come in the middle of the night we're getting kind of relaxed here aren't we you know they could come at any time they might not and they probably won't but we are here to protect the mana this is not our pot enough and not all camping trip so what is the thirty meter telescope and why Mauna Kea Mauna Kea is the best place in the Northern Hemisphere if not the world for studying the universe and there's no doubt about that you know this is a 30 meter telescope the size of its mirror is ten times that the size of the Hubble Space Telescope it is you know designed to look for the conditions of life around over 2,000 planets around stars like our Sun and the vicinity so answering a fundamental question of where did we come from are we alone just to get this out of the way and one actually knows what's gonna have the TMT project in the meantime Hawaiian celebrities are adding their voice to the movement and more or less the loudest voices in this those positions haven't really changed in a decade we are determined to be here for as long as it takes well Monaco remains our our preferred choice to build TMT and we have followed a process for 10 years in order to get the right to do so so you know that's our hope and expectation we will we are excited I guess or we are thankful that these greater conversations are happening and we look forward to you know maybe Hawaii being a beacon for the world so astronomers want to build this telescope to look back in time into the origins of the universe of where we came from and in a way those are the exact same discussions that protestors are having you're a Hawaiian I mean you really ended up becoming an educator half the time because we're always having to justify why we're doing what we're doing and then you also end up becoming a social worker too as well because we do have generation or trauma that we have to work through our Hawaiian history and my Hawaiian culture is skipping my generation so I didn't learn the language I barely knew the history and everything so coming up here and seeing our mourning protocols and having my kids be a part of that and protecting you know our temple it's overwhelming but something that I really really believe that my kids need to be a part of because it's for them a next generation now Mauna Kea is not just about the thirty meter telescope it's about a unification of the people over the most sacred it's hard to estimate but academic consensus is that there was about 400,000 Native Hawaiians at the time that James Cook arrived in 1778 within several decades the majority of those people were wiped out through disease many elements of divine society were also lost but one of the more interesting things that did survive was the cumali PO an oral chant over two thousand lines long that explains the connection between the universe and the earth below and how Mount of Kea the tallest point in the world if measured from the base of the ocean is the meeting point between those two realms so we spoke with Larry Kimura oftentimes called the grandfather of Hawaiian language revitalisation he's now giving Hawaiian names to some of the discoveries found in part through Monica's observatories and he also has an unpublished translation of the prelude to the kuma leap oh this is how the Hawaiian origin chant begins okay oh Iike hula Bella kaha NOAA when fundamental space altered through heat when the cosmos altered turning inside out lowly Kalani the first line in Larry's translation is a fundamental space altered by heat so every astronomer out there will recognize that is what sounds a lot like the Big Bang absolute intense darkness it is simply darkness penetrating and fathomless very profound information that would have taken very brilliant people years probably put everything together to make sense to themselves how this great question about where we come from and how this space here has come to be listen it's a very I hope is a common question among all people of the world he certainly was for our people caught in the middle of this are the International scientists who work for the 13 observatories already on the mountain these telescopes remain the most productive sets of astronomical telescope any place in the world and at the moment they're really not able to work we are the moments of the collateral damage in a dispute that is really much broader than the bad astronomy and the mountain to do our jobs require sending something like 50 to 75 people up on a daily basis so to get through that initial crowd requires observatories to communicate an urgent critical needs the number of cars and people that would go up we pass that message through law enforcement which gets passed to protesters what we do here ends up in our school kids textbooks and that's that's why a lot of us are here me and Alyssa we are local people we were born and raised in Hawaii and we work for the observatories and so you know we have to contend with being part of the Astronomy community but also being part of our local community and so it's not fun this isn't a culture versus science into you not this isn't Hawaiians versus a telescope it is addressing all these issues that we have had here in our community for the past I mean decades it's my personal opinion that a lot of it is kind of misdirected I wish it wasn't so much stress in the Astronomy community because I do feel like we're doing good work and I do feel that we're being responsible stewards of Mauna Kea even if we agree on a lot of the same things that you know more things need to be done for Native Hawaiians the conclusion that we come to you about TMT is completely different [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: NBC News

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Keywords: NBC Left Field, Left Field, NBC News, NBC, MSNBC, TODAY Show, news, world news, politics, documentary, best documentary, journalism, video journalism, video journalist, video production, hawaii, mauna kea, tmt, Pu'uhonua o Pu'uhuluhulu, Thirty Meter Telescope, Native Hawaiian, indigenous, native american, telescope protest, mauna kea protest, jason momoa, tmt protest, astronomy

Id: hxdV7i54Rfc

Length: 10min 25sec (625 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 13 2019