![]() “There were county police, units from Honolulu and Maui, DLNR, and the sheriff’s department, they were dressed in riot gear and a sound cannon was being rolled out,” she recalls. “We decided we would get arrested because our hearts are burdened by what you folks went through,” she says about younger activists arrested in previous protests.Īna Nawahine Kahoopi’i, 66, says the protests in 2019 that led to her arrest was a sight she’d never seen in her entire life. Kahaulelio says the decision to have the elders arrested as opposed to the younger activists was made in a friend’s garage days prior. The standoff continued until law enforcement zip tied the 38 elders’ hands and escorted them to nearby vans. ![]() Photograph: Caleb Jones/AP ‘Our hearts were burdened’ĭuring the 2019 protest the group of elders were told to move but did not. The sun sets behind telescopes at the summit of Mauna Kea in Hawaii. “It’s like a shrine, our temple,” she says. Supporters of the TMT say it will bring jobs and educational opportunities to the community, through scholarships like the THINK grant, that would provide $1m a year to Hawaii Island students.īut for Kahaulelio and other elders, Mauna Kea is considered sacred in the Hawaiian creation story. ![]() More than a dozen telescopes have been built there in the intervening years.īut the project the kūpunas were protesting against was the construction of one of the world’s largest telescopes – the $1.4bn Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) to be built by TMT International Observatory LLC. Some elders have been speaking out against construction on Mauna Kea since the 1970s, when the area began to be used by the University of Hawaii (UH) and government for astronomy purposes due to its lack of light pollution, its above-average number of clear nights and its dry atmosphere which allows more detailed studies. The arrests of Hawaiian elders was the climax of a decades-long debate over construction on the mountain, and in Hawaii in general. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |