Against Architectures of Degradation: Pōhaku and Protection on Mauna Kea

Abstract

This paper examines practices of erasure and resistance through the use of pōhaku (stone) on the Mauna Kea volcano Hawai‘i island, and within the boundaries of the Mauna Kea Science Reserve. Mauna Kea is a sacred site point of genealogical connection for Kānaka Maoli, it is also a contested landscape: Crown and Government land seized from the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1898, held in trust by the territorial and then state government, and leased in 1968 to the University of Hawai‘i to host an ever-expanding astronomy industry. Since the inception of the Mauna Kea observatories, Kānaka Maoli kia‘i (protectors) and environmental activists have resisted the increasing construction of large scale telescopes on Mauna Kea for both their degradation of the land and their violation of Hawaiian sovereignty. One way they have done that is through the built environment.

Pōhaku is a material that registers and refuses settler colonial attempts to expropriate land and control Indigenous political relationships to place. Through oral history and archival research this paper centers the stones erected as shrines within the jurisdiction of the Mauna Kea Science Reserve removed by Department of Land and Natural Resources officers and discounted by archaeologists only to be returned again and again by kia‘i. It brings these stones into dialogue with the Hale Pōhaku (stone house) architecture built for the astronomy industry in the 1970s and 80s, which became a site for direct action against the construction of the massive Thirty Meter Telescope from 2014-2019. During protests pōhaku became an essential architecture of protection that blocked construction equipment from ascending the road.