Finding Space for Advocacy and Scholarship on Mauna Kea and Beyond
Keywords:
Mauna Kea, activism, direct action, non-violent, repatriation, Paiute, Hawai’iAbstract
Reflecting upon the role and place of advocacy in realtionship to scholarship in the context of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) dispute on Mauna Kea (Hawai’i), I chart shifts in my career regarding activism and advocacy with reference to moving away from the ‘purity’ demands on scholarship common in religious studies and toward an ethics of engagement more common in Indigenous studies. This framing is in the service of addressing questions about the entailments of public engagement, including its demands, rewards, and costs. My primary argument is that in some contexts engaged scholarship is the condition of possibility for ethical and theoretically generative scholarship. I distill three basic lessons from my experiences on and around Mauna Kea: (1) the importance of foregrounding community relationships, (2) the formative role of community led decision-making for charting research and advocacy efforts, and (3) a willingness to recalibrate expectations around academic timelines and outcomes.
References
Avalos, Natalie. 2020. ‘Taking a Critical Indigenous and Ethnic Studies Approach to Decolonizing Religious Studies’. Contending Modernities. https://contendingmodernities.nd.edu/decoloniality/critical-indigenous-approach/
Brown, Marie Alohalani. 2016. ‘Mauna Kea Ho’omana Hawai’i and Protecting the Sacred’, Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture 10.2: 150–69. https://doi.org/10.1558/jsrnc.v10i2.27795
Case, Emalani. 2021. Everything Ancient Was Once New: Indigenous Persistence from Hawai’i to Kahiki (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press).
Clifford, James. 1988. The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Cambridge: Harvard University Press).
Cultural Survival. 2019. https://www.culturalsurvival.org/news/native-hawaiian-coalition-submits-cerd-early-warning-urgent-action-update-protection-mauna-kea
Fujikane, Candace. 2021. Mapping Planetary Abundance for a Planetary Future: Kanaka Maoli and Critical Settler Cartographies in Hawai’i (Durham and London: Duke University Press).
Goodyear-Ka’opua, Noelani, Ikaika Hussey, and Erin Kahunawaika’ala Wright (ed.). 2014. A Nation Rising: Hawaiian Movements for Life, Land, and Sovereignty (Durham and London: Duke University Press).
Johnson, Greg. 2014. ‘Off the Stage, On the Page: On the Relationship between Advocacy and Scholarship’, Religion 44.2: 289–302. https://doi.org/10.1080/0048721X.2014.888027
———. 2017. ‘Materialising and Performing Hawaiian Religion(s) on Mauna Kea’, for Handbook of Indigenous Religion(s), edited by Greg Johnson and Siv Ellen Kraft (Leiden: Brill): 156–75.
———. 2018. ‘Ritual, Advocacy, and Authority: The Challenge of Being an Irreverent Witness’, in Irreverence and the Sacred: Critical Studies in the History of Religions, edited by Hugh Urban and Greg Johnson (New York and London: Oxford University Press): 131–55.
———. 2020. ‘Engaged Indigeneity: Articulating, Anticipating, and Enacting Tradition on Mauna Kea’ in Siv Ellen Kraft, Bjørn Ola Tafjord, Arkotong Longkumer, Gregory D. Alles, and Greg Johnson. Indigenous Religion(s): Local Grounds, Global Networks (London and New York: Routledge): 154–81.
———. Forthcoming. ‘The United Nations Declaration and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and Religion in Hawai’i: Implementation Efforts, Pragmatic Leverage, and Conceptual Friction’, Indigenous Religious Traditions 1.3.
Johnson, Greg, and Siv Ellen Kraft. 2017. ‘Standing on the Sacred: Ceremony, Discourse, and Resistance in the Fight against the Black Snake’, Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture 11.1: 131–47. https://doi.org/10.1558/jsrnc.32617
Lincoln, Bruce. 1996. ‘Theses on Method’, Method & Theory in the Study of Religion 8.3: 225–27. https://doi.org/10.1163/157006896X00323
Maile, David Uahikea. 2021. ‘On Being Late: Cruising Mauna Kea and Unsettling Technoscientific Conquest in Hawai’i’, American Indian Culture and Research Journal 45.1: 95–121. https://doi.org/10.17953/AICRJ.45.1.MAILE
McCutcheon, Russell. 2001. Critics Not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion (Albany: State University of New York Press).
Osorio, Jamaica. 2021. Remembering Our Intimacies: Mo’olelo, Aloha ‘Aina, and Ea (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).
Richland, Justin B. 2021. Cooperation Without Submission: Indigenous Jurisdictions in Native Nation-US Engagements (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press).
Risling Baldy, Cutcha. 2018. We are Dancing for You: Native Feminisms and the Revitalization of Women’s Coming-of-Age Ceremonies (Seattle: University of Washington Press).
Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 2021. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 3rd edition (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, Inc.).
State of Hawai’i. 1978. Constitution of the State of Hawai’i, amended. Article 12, section 7.
United Nations. 2007. United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. G.A. Res. 61/295.
University of California. 2021. Repatriation Policy. https://policy.ucop.edu/doc/2500489/NAGPRA
