Engaged Indigeneity

This chapter turns to engaged indigeneity in Hawai‘i. ‘Engaged indigeneity’ is framing language meant to encourage insights about indigenous representation, especially with reference to questions that drill down to explore the specific ways religion is articulated in the unfolding present. In order to explore a concrete instance of engaged indigeneity, this chapter is devoted to an analysis of Kūkulu: Pillars of Mauna a Wākea, an exhibit at the Hawaiian Cultural Center of Hāmākua about the protests over the prospective Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) on Mauna Kea, which took place during the summer of 2015. Rising to 13,800 feet, Mauna Kea is the highest point in the Pacific Ocean and a mountain regarded as sacred by many Hawaiians. It is also the site of 13 existing telescopes and the proposed site for another extremely large telescope, which has provoked a sustained, vigorous, and religiously generative response from many Native Hawaiians, including through legal channels, art and music production, direct action protests, as museum commemoration, as in the case of the Kūkulu exhibit. After an analysis of Kūkulu that unfolds by means of invoking and testing core INREL concepts and categories, the chapter turns to the Mauna Kea protests of 2019–2020 as a means to see how the themes and objects of Kūkulu came back to life in this movement of unprecedented scale and reach in Hawai‘i and what this dynamic tells us about the vitality of indigenous tradition(s).