Skiing, science and sovereignty: A material and political history of the road to Hawai‘i's Mauna Kea (1936–2020)

ABSTRACT

Mauna Kea, the tallest volcano on Hawai‘i Island, has become a mountain familiar to many in the Pacific and around the world, as a result of the massive mobilizations in which those who identified as kia‘i (protectors) of the mountain opposed the construction of a giant Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) at the summit. This article retraces the history of the Mauna Kea access road, based on a study of the English-language newspaper record as well as ethnographic and archival material. From the road's inception in the 1930s onward, economic interests, political conflicts, and relations of domination appear intertwined with the very materiality of the road: its route, surface, safety, maintenance, as well as features such as cattle grids, crosswalks, and guardrails. Three political strategies centrally involved the notion of a Mauna Kea access road. Starting in the 1930s, businessmen and government officials pushed for a road, and later for its improvement, in order to make the mountain more accessible, in particular for skiing. As of the 1960s, this push was paralleled and contradicted by another strategy which consisted in keeping the mountain not too accessible, in part because of what some perceived as a competition between recreational and scientific uses – skiing vs. science. A third political strategy involved the road as a site from which to question the notion of public ownership and to affirm sovereignty. The history of the Mauna Kea access road appears as a synecdoche of the political conflict over land and sovereignty that defines Hawaiian history since the nineteenth century.

KEYWORDS:

• Hawai‘i
• Mauna Kea
• development
• tourism
• science
• land
• sovereignty

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Benoît Trépied for his generous support in the early stages of this research, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 When measured from their underwater base.

2 Hi‘ilei Julia Hobart (2019) also shows that in the 1960s and early 1970s, Mauna Kea was used, along with other Hawaiian volcanoes (especially Mauna Loa), as a training site for Apollo astronauts heading for the Moon.

3 Apart from the newspaper articles cited, this section is based on a long ethnographic interview with one of the kia‘i, E. Kalani Flores (Waimea, 27 January 2020), as well as the detailed, concording accounts found in Fujikane (2019) and Casumbal-Salazar (2019).

4 Moanike‘ala Akaka died on 15 April 2017. Her important role in demilitarization struggles and the Native Hawaiian community is highlighted in Akaka et al. 2018, in particular the introduction by Noelani Goodyear-Ka‘ōpua.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique: [INSHS, Soutien à la mobilité internationale]; IRIS - Institut de recherche interdisciplinaire sur les enjeux sociaux: [Travel funding].