Overview

Understanding the Hawai'i Island summit of Mauna a Wkea as a place of ancestral connection, cultural resurgence, and political resistance for Native Hawaiians First Light is a site-specific study of Native Hawaiian resistance to the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) on the summit of Mauna a Wkea, the sacred mountain on the island of Hawai'i. Drawing on personal interviews, oral histories, archival research, participant observation, and popular, legal, scientific, and Indigenous discourses, Iokepa Casumbal-Salazar explores both the campaign to build the observatory and the movement against it. He asks how astronomers have become stewards of Mauna a Wkea while Knaka 'iwi (Aboriginal Hawaiians), in protest, are recast as obstructing progress and clinging to ancient superstitions. Contextualizing contemporary resistance to telescope expansion within the past 132 years of struggle against U.S. empire in Hawai'i, Casumbal-Salazar argues the Kanaka-led efforts to protect their ancestral lands did not begin with the TMT and only become legible when understood in the broader history of resistance to U.S. settler hegemony as told through the voices and actions of kiai ina (land defenders). First Light explores how settler science, capital, and law have been mobilized in ways that rationalize industrial development projects like the TMT and promote a vision of ""coexistence"" that enables the dehumanization of Knaka 'iwi and their alienation from ina. Challenging the assumptions and aggressions of neoliberal environmental policy, settler multiculturalism, and U.S. military occupation, First Light reinforces calls for a moratorium on new telescope development and a literacy in Kanaka 'iwi movements for life, land, and ea (independence, sovereignty). Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.

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9781517902452

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Reviews

""A significant accounting of the battle between Native sovereignty and colonial desires, First Light unpacks the specific and insidious violence of settler colonialism through a movement that has garnered worldwide attention. Iokepa Casumbal-Salazar masterfully situates the conflict within a constellation of colonial violences: settler colonialism, capitalism, big science, and militarism."" - Jamaica Heolimeleikelani Osorio, author of Remembering Our Intimacies: Mo'olelo, Aloha 'Aina, and Ea ""Sharp and deeply informed, First Light is an analysis of settler colonialism, multiculturalism, and the power structures that make the fiction of a ‘single universal reality’ difficult to transcend. Iokepa Casumbal-Salazar reminds us that we have the responsibility not only to learn our genealogies of struggle and resistance but to add to them as well."" - Emalani Case, author of Everything Ancient Was Once New: Indigenous Persistence from Hawaiʻi to Kahiki

""A significant accounting of the battle between Native sovereignty and colonial desires, First Light unpacks the specific and insidious violence of settler colonialism through a movement that has garnered worldwide attention. Iokepa Casumbal-Salazar masterfully situates the conflict within a constellation of colonial violences: settler colonialism, capitalism, big science, and militarism.""--Jamaica Heolimeleikelani Osorio, author of Remembering Our Intimacies: Mo'olelo, Aloha 'Aina, and Ea ""Sharp and deeply informed, First Light is an analysis of settler colonialism, multiculturalism, and the power structures that make the fiction of a 'single universal reality' difficult to transcend. Iokepa Casumbal-Salazar reminds us that we have the responsibility not only to learn our genealogies of struggle and resistance but to add to them as well.""--Emalani Case, author of Everything Ancient Was Once New: Indigenous Persistence from Hawaiʻi to Kahiki

Author Information

Iokepa Casumbal-Salazar is associate professor in the Department of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at UC Santa Cruz.

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