by Francis Duffy
“ ‘Sacred to Hawaiians’ means what?”
When her attorney mom debates with questions, Beth knows she can’t win.
Their once weekly lunch-then-Starbucks on the UH-Manoa campus allows for topics that somehow elude them in their Hawaii Kai home. With daughter an undergrad and mom teaching a once-weekly corporate law course, their paths don’t cross save for Thursdays.
“It means Mauna Kea is holy ground,” Beth says, “like Jerusalem and Lourdes are sacred for Catholics. . . the Vatican, also.”
Beth had arrived first, taking a two-chair table along a shaded wall of the university’s cavernous main cafeteria. Rather than walk 50 meters to a Starbucks after lunch then sit at an outdoor table in Oahu’s heat, Beth will fetch java to their cooler cafeteria table. Since she began college, mother and daughter converse more like elder and younger sisters. Both keep phones switched off during their Thursday sessions.
“Jerusalem is the Holy Land because Jesus was born and died there,” her mom replies. “Lourdes is sacred to Catholics because His Mother Mary appeared there and performed miracles, as Jesus did in the Holy Land. The Vatican is sacred because Saint Peter died and was buried there—after founding the church to which we belong.”. . .
Daughter knows mother will conclude with a question.
. . .“So, Beth, how is Mauna Kea sacred?”
“The mountain is vital to Hawaiians’ creation myth, as is Eden for Christians. It’s the umbilical cord where heaven and earth touch. Mauna Kea has been desecrated repeatedly to build 13 prior telescopes. . . as though their creation myth is dismissible nonsense but Eden isn’t. Access for pilgrims has been restricted and even denied—yet UH wants to build another telescope there,” Beth says, knowing it won’t appease her mom, who replies with another question.
“Why do you suppose no churches or synagogues, on the Big Island or Oahu, have voiced support for Mauna Kea protests?”
“Many protestors are Christian, Mom. It doesn’t prevent them from helping other religions whose sacred sites are being bulldozed,” Beth says, ethics bolstered by a dozen years at Catholic grammar and high schools. “Do we ignore desecration because their religion isn’t ours?”
At her downtown law office, Beth’s mom has heard colleagues sympathetic to protests against building the Thirty-Meter Telescope. None are Polynesian but rather Asian-American, like herself, or haole. Sympathetic because the issue taps Polynesians’ long-simmering resentment of colonial rule, racism, and dismissal of local traditions. Yet passive, hesitant to join the fray on social media, where anti-TMT youth predominate and fence-sitters are mocked as insufficiently ‘woke’.
To checkmate TMT backers who’d hoped Mauna Kea’s winter temps, howling wind and snow would quell protests till spring, savvy anti-TMT organizers have launched related protests on ever-balmy Oahu. Supporters lacking time and airfare to join protestors on the Big Island can quickly assemble near to home, roused and coordinated via social media. Linking arms to block access to construction sites at Kahuku (adding a third wind farm) and Waimanalo (removing woods for athletic fields), arrests earn TV coverage—and more recruits.
Hawaii’s pro-TMT government can’t keep pace with whack-a-mole protests. Just last week, young activists occupied the reception room of Honolulu’s mayor, demanding dialogue. “So far, 128 of us have been arrested for this cause to halt the construction of these wind turbines. . . yet no one has addressed us. Not the governor, not the mayor.”
Though long-dormant, Mauna Kea bares new fissures.
The Kingdom of Hawaiʻi was forced to adopt a new constitution in 1887, when King Kalākaua was threatened with violence by the Honolulu Rifles, a white, anti-monarchist militia, to sign it. Six years later, a coup led by haole U.S. businessmen deposed Kalākaua’s successor, Queen Liliʻuokalani. The USA annexed Hawaii a year later.
The invading culture’s message to Hawaiians was that of today’s China to Tibetans and Uighurs: shed your native superstitions and embrace ours, discard your language and learn ours, be ashamed of your traditions and celebrate ours.
None adopted invading values quicker than Hawaiians of Asian ancestry, advantaged by their ancestral zeal for higher education, and affinity to the Protestant work ethic. Some Polynesians resent Hawaii-born Asians (at least the older, less integrated ones) for having risen quickly to dominate Honolulu society, filling white-collar professions as Polynesians languished, like mainland Native Americans.
Yet Beth’s generation is more integrated (and intermarried) than their elders, not just passively sympathetic to political matters but passionate for or against. Still undecided on a major, Beth’s mom hopes she’ll choose law or medicine. Of late, however, her daughter seems skewed toward sociology, or even—God forbid—political science.
When Beth’s mom was a UH undergrad, there were one or two militant professors in its Political Science Department advocating for Hawaii’s secession and restoration of its monarchy. Too extreme to even pay them attention, much less take seriously.
Three decades later that period has come to be known as the Hawaiian Cultural Renaissance, a resurgence of distinct identity with traditional culture, and averse to Hawaii’s tourism-based culture. By targeting realistic goals achievable via nonviolent protest and social media skills, the nativist movement is surging among Hawaii’s young people—including non-Polynesians.
A judicious reminder to her daughter of their family’s tradition seems in order. An intervention, of sorts, although Beth’s mom wouldn’t call it that because her daughter is intelligent, sensible and disciplined, albeit at times willful.
“Yes, Beth, I see your logic, but to my original point: What, precisely, makes Mauna Kea sacred? The protest leaders know, yet they seem hesitant to specify.”
Beth sifts what she’s heard on Manoa campus, a hotbed of support for the anti-TMT movement, made volatile because UH administers the Mauna Kea Science Reserve, site of existing telescopes. To stimulate protest, some faculty have authorized students to attend classes via their laptops—from Mauna Kea, where activists block the only road to its summit.
Inverted State of Hawaii flags wave from many vehicles on campus (and across Oahu), as students continue a two-month occupation of Bachman Hall’s lobby, the university’s main admin building, to show solidarity with protestors at Mauna Kea. Weekend anti-TMT convoys of 200-plus vehicles slow traffic on all lanes on Oahu’s H1 and H2 freeways, raising public awareness to the conflict at Mauna Kea as well as other recent Aloha ʻĀina (love of the land) issues.
“Okay, Mom, the government’s 2010 Environmental Impact Statement listed 263 historic properties, including 141 ancient shrines, found within the Science Reserve. For decades, Hawaiians have been required to obtain ‘conservation use’ permits plus give fifteen days’ notice to worship on Mauna Kea, yet at least three observatories were allowed to build on the mountain without having to apply for such permits. Nor must scientists give fifteen days notice to go to the peak.”
“Beth, don’t you think Hawaiians would be better off moving forward, rather than returning to a bygone era of rustic simplicity?”
“No, because what has happened to Hawaiians for the last century is now happening to Uighur Muslims in China-controlled Xinjiang. As an Uighur scholar wrote, before being arrested and ‘disappeared’ by Chinese police, ‘If one were to remove our shrines and cemeteries, the Uighur people would lose contact with earth. After a few years we would not have a memory of why we live here or where we belong.’. . .
“Because Mauna Kea has been used as a burial ground for centuries, Hawaiians have made pilgrimages there to pay homage since long before the first telescope was built,” Beth says, confident she’s countered well.
“Homage to who?” her mother says.
Quick and short, which tells Beth they’re nearing her mom’s crucial point.
“To their ancestors. . .”
“And?”
“Of course to their . . . to the god of their religion,” Beth says, feeling exposed.
“Hawaii’s native religion has many deities, Beth, which certainly must be respected.”
“Not just respected from a safe distance,” Beth says, “but helped when needed, as they’d help those of other religions.”
“I agree,” her mom says, “but a major distinction we as Catholics cannot avoid is the First Commandment: ‘I am the Lord thy God, thou shalt not have strange gods before Me’. . .
“Unlike us, Beth, Hawaiians can worship Christ and their native deities concurrently.”
“But I don’t worship their deities. Rather, I support the right of Hawaiians to maintain their traditional culture, which includes them worshipping as they’ve done for centuries.”
“I understand, and admire your compassion.”
Beth knows her mom’s point isn’t quite made, and here it comes.
“The problem is this: our religion, Catholicism, is monotheistic—as is Judeo-Christianity. All before were polytheistic, many gods, as Hawaii’s religion still is. It’s why the commandment dealing with this matter is stated first and emphatically. We cannot worship the ‘one, true God’, as nuns would say, while concurrently acknowledging the possibility of there being other deities. It would negate monotheism.”
Beth almost rolls her eyes, as her friends would had she said as much, but doesn’t. Her mother never yells, listens well, and has been a faultless parent and friend, especially since her husband died nine years prior. Mother hasn’t opposed daughter’s waning attendance at Sunday mass since she began university. Yet today she’s lobbying Beth to obey arcane dogma nuns rarely cited (if ever) through a dozen years of daily catechism class.
“It’s why no churches or synagogues have endorsed the protests—doing so would acknowledge ‘strange gods’ coexisting with ours,” her mom says. “Mauna Kea is on the evening news daily, yet churches remain silent. What does it tell us?”
“That we should be neutral to injustice, Mom?” Beth says in a tone new to her mother.
“I will not, nor do I see helping those of another religion as sin,” says Beth. “I need not accept their gods to help Hawaiians worship within their tradition.”
“You don’t, and to an extent I agree, but Judeo-Christianity does,” her mom says. “It’s why that commandment is first and foremost. You need not accept other gods; just to acknowledge them negates monotheism. Especially for Catholics because ours is not a buffet religion: we cannot choose some tenets and decline others.”
Beth recognizes this as her mom’s key point, like a defense attorney’s summation to jury. Usually she would, if not yield, let their debate lapse at her mom’s apex.
Not today.
“You’re defending Catholic dogma, Mom, yet it forbids female priests.”
“It’s a separate issue from the First Commandment,” her mom says, albeit realizing they are in new waters.
“I say it’s related, because only males are authorized to decree how all Catholics must interpret the First and all Commandments. After two thousand years—women still aren’t capable?”
No response, Beth continues.
“Worse yet: male Catholic clergy have sexually assaulted children and seminarians—for decades! In Ireland since before you were born, Mom. Also Germany, England, France, Italy, Poland, Belgium, Australia, Canada, Chile, Argentina, Spain, the USA . . . too many to list.
“Males forbid female priests. . . priests cannot marry. . . priests molest children. Separate issues, Mom?”
Mother’s silence is atypical, as is daughter’s ardor.
“Just last month, Colorado’s attorney general said a seven-month investigation found at least 166 children had been sexually abused by Catholic priests in three dioceses since 1950. Unchecked for seventy years—in just one state of fifty!
“Our church shielding serial criminals, enabling their abuse of children for decades. Predators were moved to other parishes, where they continued molesting, ruining untold lives. Protected, as some rose to monsignor, bishop, archbishop, even cardinal. That tells me this criminality is systemic—males enabling male predators—and global like the church itself.
“Can we as Catholics dismiss all this as fake news? . . . Just a few bad apples? . . . God works in mysterious ways? . . . Or, perhaps our clergy having sex with children is okay if consensual, à la Harvey Weinstein?”
A precarious moment for mother and daughter, with neither spouse nor siblings to buffer them.
“I’m sorry if my views offend, Mom. But I do not accept supporting Hawaiians as sin. . . Nor do I acknowledge our clergy as qualified to decree otherwise.”
