Counternarratives of Maunakea

Crossing Digital Spaces, Claiming Ancestral Knowledge in Hawai’i

Abstract

This article focuses on the resistance to the proposed construction of the TMT telescope on Maunakea, exploring the legal and cultural clashes behind the protests and the strong social media presence of the Maunakea protectors. Digital activism allowed the Kū Kia’i Mauna movement to enhance the grassroot organizing and to take back the narrative of the protest, countering an overwhelming settler colonial media discourse, establishing connections across “webs, rhizomes, and rivers” with Indigenous movements worldwide. Building on the scholarly work about Hawaiian spatial practices and colonial cartography and on the intersection of storytelling and the reconstruction of the ‘ike kupuna (ancestral knowledge), this article explores how Indigenous scholars and activists productively negotiated digital mediascapes to disseminate counternarratives. Finally, digitalization has enabled the creation of a Maunakea social media archive, to collect and organize multimedia materials, for the sake of research for activists and educators across the globe.