Skiing, science and sovereignty: A material and political history of the road to Hawai'i's Mauna Kea (1936–2020)

Abstract

International audience ; Mauna Kea, the tallest volcano on Hawai'i Island, has become a mountain familiar to many in the Pacific and around the world, as a result of the massive mobilizations in which those who identified as kia'i (protectors) of the mountain opposed the construction of a giant Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) at the summit. This article retraces the history of the Mauna Kea access road, based on a study of the English-language newspaper recordas well as ethnographic and archival material. From the road's inception in the 1930s onward, economic interests, political conflicts, and relations of domination appear intertwined with the very materiality of the road: its route, surface, safety, maintenance, as well as features such as cattle grids, crosswalks, and guardrails. Three political strategies centrally involved the notion of a Mauna Kea access road. Starting in the 1930s, businessmen and government officials pushed for a road, and later for its improvement, in order to make the mountain more accessible, in particular for skiing. As of the 1960s, this push was paralleled and contradicted by another strategy which consisted in keeping the mountain not too accessible, in part because ofwhat some perceived as a competition between recreational and scientific uses – skiing vs. science. A third political strategy involved the road as a site from which to question the notion of public ownership and to affirm sovereignty. The history of the Mauna Kea access road appears as a synecdoche of the political conflict over land and sovereignty that defines Hawaiian history since the nineteenth century.