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OPEN TO THE PUBLIC |  This event has been canceled. 

When Governor of Hawaii David Ige announced in the summer of 2019 that construction would commence immediately on the Thirty Meter Telescope atop Mauna Kea, Kānaka Maoli opponents immediately placed their bodies as an obstruction before construction vehicles, and they issued a statement with a simple, emphatic title: “WE ARE NOT ANTI-SCIENCE.” Their defense of Mauna Kea as a genealogically related and living mountain had long been construed as a fundamentally religious animism, and their opposition therefore fell into a well-worn public narrative of not only science versus religion, but of science versus inanimate nature’s obstruction of progress. In this talk I explore the history of Kānaka mobility and its relationship to science, religion, and the geopolitics of knowledge. I trace two moments in the histories of Kānaka canoes and wayfinding across time and space in the South Pacific. First, I explore the encounter between objectivist British colonial bark ships and Kānaka animist canoes in the 18th century as recorded in the spaces between Captain Cook’s journals. Second, I trace the construction and launch of the Hōkūleʻa in 1975 by the Polynesian Voyaging Society. The Hōkūleʻa, known by her first crew as the “spaceship of the ancestors,” was the first wa’a kaulua (double hulled canoe) built in centuries and it was a critical component in the development of Kānaka Native science. Finally, I return to the pressing political questions surrounding Muana Kea and the debate over Kānaka opposition to the TMT from the perspective of Hōkūleʻa and the temporalities, epistemologies, and ontologies she embodies and engenders.

Dr. Eli Nelson (haudenosaunee/kanien’kehá:ka) teaches in the American Studies and Science and Technology Studies Programs at Williams College. He is also the Director of Research at The Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies.

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