![]() The Philippines wears a dunce hat, and two children representing Cuban “Ex-Patriots” and “Guerillas” fight on a bench. In a cartoon titled “Uncle Sam Teaches a Class In ‘Self-Government,’” the island nations of Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Hawai’i were shown as schoolchildren under the tutelage of the United States. In the political cartoons of the late 1800s, Hawai’i was often contrasted with more unruly occupied nations. This passive graciousness aligns with the long-held image of the island nation in the American imagination. Crew of STS-26 sporting Aloha shirts for their in-flight crew photo in 1988. Built in 1961, Kōkeʻe Park Geophysical Observatory in Kauai was the first NASA outpost. 8 As a gesture toward the role of the state in exploration, the dwarf planet Haumea is named for the Hawaiian fertility goddess, and its moons Hiʻiaka and Nāmaka for her daughters. 7 NASA shows pictures of the astronauts posing in aloha shirts. 6 Engineer John Hirasaki recalled how “residents just lined ” to greet the quarantine pod used to transport the astronauts to Hickam Air Force Base. On their website they note the state’s role in several key events in history, from the building of tracking stations on Kauai in 1961 to the recovery of the Apollo 11 astronauts in 1969. ![]() Hawai’i’s statehood in 1959 coincided with the early days of the space race, and NASA has always cast a narrative of Hawai’i as a welcoming host to their development. A 2001 Nature magazine write-up on the building of the Keck Interferometer was titled “Astronomers bargain for use of ‘sacred’ site,” trading on racist stereotypes of native peoples trading away land and emphatic quotation marks around “sacred.” The rest of the article similarly drips with condescension, dismissing the Kānaka Maoli protests as “cultural politics.” William Smith, then president of the Association for Research in Astronomy is quoted saying, “The astronomy community was unprepared for this backlash.” 4 Nineteen years later, though, the same publication took a much more conciliatory tone, centering the concerns of Indigenous activists and the past injustices of the science program when discussing the construction of the TMT. Indigenous rights have gained support from the public and in the media even within the past two decades. Moreover, the agency and astronomy community at large have leveraged the alleged neutrality of science and greater national good of planetary exploration as markedly different from the violent history of manifest destiny, although NASA’s occupation of the island has been just as contested. Like many battles over native land, protests at Maunakea have been framed as a false dichotomy between technological progress and vaguely defined Indigenous spirituality, dismissing the centuries of scientific knowledge cultivated by Native Hawaiians. 3 Astronomers have cast Hawai’i’s landscape, intertwined with the cosmology, ecology, and very bodies of the Kānaka Maoli as a laboratory. 2 In particular, Hi’ilei Julia Hobart discusses how the “discourses of absence”-or how NASA has described the site as place that is uninhabited and barren-have systematically stripped Maunakea of its spirituality and nation, allowing the “ecological violence” of its development. ![]() The presence of the American space program in Hawai’i, which claims land on the far-flung reaches of the outer islands, has largely escaped the same kind of scrutiny that the violent colonial history of merchants, missionaries, and the military on the islands has received of late, even though a large number of Indigenous scholars have elucidated the parallels, especially in relationship to the TMT. 1 For many, the imagery and intensity of the protests was perhaps their first view of the Hawaiian landscape as one of struggle and subjugation rather than leisure and consumption. The planned construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) at Maunakea on the Big Island of Hawai’i has spurred an intense and lengthy standoff between the Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians), to whom the mountain is a sacred site, and NASA, which has invested untold millions in its development and sees the telescope as a new frontier in space exploration.
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