Case 2: Mauna Kea

Demonstrators block a road on the Big Island’s Maunakea to protest the construction of a giant telescope on land that Native Hawaiians consider sacred, on August 5, 2019. (Image: Caleb Jones/AP via Vox)

My second case concerns the ongoing struggle over Mauna Kea: the sacred mountain in Hawai’i and the site of a controversial project to build the world’s largest optical telescope, known as the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT).

After the first permit for the project was granted in 2011, work was repeatedly halted by the mobilization of native Hawai’ians occupying the site as land protectors. The coverage thus unfolds over a number of years, with spikes in media attention coinciding with major mobilizations or decisions affecting the status of the project. While the Supreme Court of Hawai’i approved the resumption of construction in 2018, the project remains in limbo in light of continued native resistance as well as the impact of the coronavirus pandemic.

Binary framing

My review of 31 Mauna Kea articles revealed some noteworthy differences among the three establishment outlets. NPR, for example, places a strong emphasis on the clash between worldviews that are framed as representing “science” and “culture” despite the fact that natives quoted in the coverage repeatedly insist that they are not “anti-science.” As with the Australia coverage, NPR seems especially interested in the cultural aspects of the story but rarely links these aspects to the issue of sovereignty and never links them to colonization.

For its part, CNN also uses a binary frame, but it does provide one in-depth examination of native perspectives and also puts greater emphasis on native land claims than NPR does. Interestingly, CNN also emphasizes the role of celebrities such as Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Jason Momoa in supporting the native land protectors – an indirect admission that without the celebrity element, the story would have been seen as less newsworthy.

While the New York Times offers greater depth across the board and does include two very brief mentions of “colonization,” its basic framing of the issue doesn’t stray far what the other two outlets provide. Finally, I can’t help but note that the last Times article on the story, under the title “Will the United States Lose the Universe?”, places the Mauna Kea issue in the context of a transnational competition for astronomical “bragging rights.” Critical readers familiar with the emotional politics of white supremacy in the US will notice that the article concludes by unironically using settler tears as a symbol of American decline:

Screen capture from Dennis Overbye, “Will the United States Lose the Universe?” New York Times, December 23 2019.

An explanatory vacuum

What unites the three outlets in their coverage of Mauna Kea is that while all of them consistently identify natives as such and occasionally reference native land claims, none of them ever mention settler colonialism as such. Along the same lines, none identify Hawaii’s settler population as such, and none give any indication that current state and private sector actions – including the telescope initiative itself – might be connected to the colonial project.

The exnomination of settler colonialism here is significant as it leaves an explanatory vacuum which is then filled in a way that is most comfortable for US establishment journalists: with a binary frame, either “protesters” vs. “authorities,” “sacred space” vs. “economic development,” or, even more tendentiously, “science” vs. “culture.” When scholarly voices are included, they are presented either as neutral arbiters between the two “sides” or else as “scientific experts” backing the project.

This raises the question of why the coverage would not also explore the views of scholarly experts who oppose the project. Such critical voices, however, would almost inevitably bring an analytical framework grounded in settler colonialism. Such a framework, in turn, would explode the binary structure of the dominant narrative by pointing out that “science” is also “culture” and “culture” is also “science,” and the dominant understandings of both are products of a settler ontology that serves to justify and naturalize settler dominance on the land, in the economy and, indeed, in the news media.