Mauna Kea Management Meeting 2014

Mauna Kea Management Meeting 2014
8 years ago
I was 25 years old
Around four years into standing for the protection of Mauna Kea with my family
Right around the same time we would be going onto our first frontline

I saw this picture today on my mothers post. Her caption said, “Hāwane, tell us what you really thinking?”

When I see my face and my body language and recall this memory, I can see very clearly that I was thinking about how angry I was that we were sitting in that room witnessing the management board present on how they would decommission the TMT when it no longer worked. They spoke about how they would return every single rock back to its original place as if we are stupid and gullible. I remember Uncle Kū challenging them and asking how they could restore an ancient lava flow. Of course they answered with empty words and formalities.

Today, I give love to the young woman I was in this picture. I was experiencing the abuse of this system but didn’t really know what was happening to me. I watched them gaslight my parents and tell us that we need to prove the legitimacy of our cultural connection to the northern plateau to even have a case. In meetings like this and in the court cases that would follow, their lawyers would say if we couldn’t prove there were traditional practices done in the area they want to build, then it didn’t need to be protected. They did this constantly as if we aren’t a living people with a living and evolving culture.

I didn’t have the language or the boundaries then to protect my heart, my mind, and my body from the psychological, emotional, and spiritual abuse that the legal process would do to me. And now, as I activity heal from all that I have personally been through in these past 12 years, I pause to love and thank myself and every single person who has held space for every phase of who I have been along the way and who has forgiven me for the ways that I misstepped in my life as a kia’i aloha ‘āina because I didn’t know how to communicate my profound pain.

I’m still here and I am turning all that rage into power and I know in my soul that TMT will never be built on our sacred Mauna Kea.

#protectmaunakea