[petsfed]

Thank you for correcting me on how things are right now. The uniformity of resistance to the TMT has not been clear to me.

I will say that I don't think it's a question of the "right" side. Rather it's a question of trying to right a historic wrong, and to practice what the US preaches. Absent all else, I'm pro-telescope. I worked with a bunch of people who collected data on Mauna Kea, and one of the few astrophysical publications I worked on used data collected at Keck. But the history of American colonization is much too recent to ignore, and I think every interaction with native Hawaiians is necessarily done in the shadow of that history.

A through line of American interventionism is the claim that small nations ought to be free to chart their own course (be it freedom from Spain, or communist Russia, or the concept of communism). I generally advocate for the US to practice what it preaches, because another through line is that the US almost always operates according to the idea that it's only self-determination free of foreign meddling if the small nation works in concert with American ambitions. Queen Liliʻuokalani was overthrown in the midst of a campaign to restore suffrage to her subjects. The colonizers had previously forced her brother to sign a constitution that stripped most native Hawaiians of the right to vote in their own country, and grant the vote to non-native, non-subjects with sufficient wealth and/or land holdings. That constitution is frequently called the Bayonet Constitution because of the circumstances surrounding Kalākaua signing it.

[hokuula]

>Rather it's a question of trying to right a historic wrong

But blocking the TMT won't do anything to further that goal, as it has nothing to do with it.

> But the history of American colonization is much too recent to ignore

> The colonizers had previously forced her brother to sign a constitution that stripped most native Hawaiians of the right to vote in their own country, and grant the vote to non-native, non-subjects with sufficient wealth and/or land holdings. That constitution is frequently called the Bayonet Constitution because of the circumstances surrounding Kalākaua signing it.

I'm familiar with the Baynoet Constitution but I take issue with the blanket use of the term "colonizer". As far as I've seen, it's been used by the sovereignty movement and their (largely) progressive supporters to mean anyone at the time (and even today) that lived/s in Hawaii and is not Native Hawaiian. Many of those that were involved in the overthrow were subjects of the Kingdom. They and their families, not to mentions all the non-Hawaiian plantation workers - came there legally and were even encouraged. The sovereignty movement would have you believe that the story of Hawaii is exactly like the story of mainland tribes, but it's just not true. There was no colonization in the way that it happened on the mainland and the use of the Marines in overthrowing the Queen was illegitimate, even per the US government. A lot of the issues with Hawaii and Native Hawaiians can be traced back to the Kingdom times (but not all).

In any case, this is the major problem. People are trying to litigate past political issues by involving the TMT, a scientific project that has nothing at all to do with it, on a mountain that also had nothing to do with it and never really belonged to the public until after the monarchy.

[petsfed]

If you compare what happened in Hawaii vs. a variety of e.g. African colonies, the crucial difference is the absence of blood in the final fall of native Hawaiian rule.

Its kind of irrelevant that the Marine intervention was illegitimate, since the US government still accepted the new regime as legitimate. A lot like the US's eventual intervention in the Black Hills, after settlers ("colonists" if the parallel is too opaque) illegally entered the area and then required protection from the natives they were displacing. If my kid steals a toy from another kid, and all I do is say "gee, sweetie, that was mean", but I don't force my kid to return the toy, its still theft.

Its also irrelevant that the coup was led largely by Hawaiian subjects (6 subjects, 7 foreigners, according to wikipedia), since the committee of safety was, to a man, non-native, whose explicit intent was to disenfranchise native Hawaiians.

I also want to highlight this: > A lot of the issues with Hawaii and Native Hawaiians can be traced back to the Kingdom times (but not all).

As in, the Kingdom times that started less than a century prior with the unification of the Hawaiian islands? The same era that coincided with the first century of European contact with Hawaiians? Even if the modern problems are directly related to the policies of the Kingdom, saying that its just the Kingdom is like saying that Titanic sank because of low quality metal in the hull, while completely omitting the iceberg.