ka piko ke aloha o ka ʻāina

I stood trying to steady myself on the sloping southern flank of the puʻu, the red ground, ancient and uneven under my feet, throwing up giant hills of cinder and rock. The puʻu, the silent sentinels of the mountain, were named long ago for their lofty heights, named for the beloveds. 

Here was Puʻu Līlīnoe and there over her western shoulder - Puʻu Wēkiu, and away to the east, across the rugged and rust-colored landscape - Puʻu Poepoe, Puʻu Ala, Puʻu Mākanaka. And here, just in reach, not a puʻu but a lone monolithic stone known for its connection to Līlīnoe and her powers of healing – an ancestor stone who had received millennia of pilgrimages before my own.

The voice of our alakaʻi, Uncle Ed Stevens, was carried up-slope to where I stood. He was talking to the rest of the group, a captivated band of cultural specialists and professors, anthropologists and archaeologists, about the power and sacredness of the stone and its key to the puʻu beyond. Just minutes before, Uncle Ed had calmly instructed me to “go and touch the rock,” so here I stood as instructed, my hand hovering in hesitation. 

Here I was a twenty-two year old aspiring archaeologist, a product, in part, of the Papahana Kaiapuni Hawaiʻi, a recent college grad who had majored in History and Anthropology with a focus in Pacific Studies. Here I was all of these things and still I had yet to make my own deep and personal connection to the mauna.

Fast-forward seven years to the morning of April 2, 2015. For many people in and outside of Hawaiʻi, the eruption of events that would happen that day would seem, at first, like a spark in the dark - a sudden flame catching everything and everyone on fire. For many others including the aloha ʻāina that gathered in the road that morning, this fire had been burning for weeks, years, some among them had been stoking the flames for decades. There were embers here whose smoldering stretched back over a century. 

Then came the arrests, thirty-one of them - the singing, the chanting, the shouts - ʻauē! - ringing out into the atmosphere, out into the webosphere. This was the moment. This was the feeling of being ripped awake – the sudden welling up of pain, old and deep, and along with it an incredible rush of awareness – the thrill of suddenly seeing, with great clarity, the way to go, of finally naming the greatest yearning of our hearts. Aloha ʻāina. Aloha ʻāina.

The arrests would spark the kind of intense inquiry whose answers not even a $1.4 billion dollar telescope would be able to find. For weeks the questions poured out and suspicions mounted:

What is this Thirty Meter Telescope? How many acres will be added to the science reserve's death toll? Why did the governor sign off on an EIS that determined that the TMT would most definitely add to a growing list of substantial adverse impacts on the mountain?  How could the Board of Land and Natural Resources approve a Conservation District Use Permit for a project that clearly violates regulations on conservation district use? When is the University of Hawaiʻi's prostitution of this most precious cultural, environmental, and spiritual resource going to be stopped? What does any of this mean in the context of the continued illegal occupation of Hawaiʻi? As a society, can we allow scientific privilege to render our sacred ʻāina and the people who revere it inconsequential?

These scientists and their friends, they were unprepared. For all their far-off gazing into space, they were blind. They are still blind. This insatiable desire - to fathom the deep darknesses, to annex the uncountable myriad of stars, to quantify for the dull of the wit what our emotional intelligences already know - has made them lose sight of the most essential, the most precious - the soils, the waters, the hallowed ground on which they stand. 

This kind of sightlessness cannot be tolerated, not on Mauna Kea, not in any sacred spaces. But the mountain will endure. It is older and wiser, after all, stronger too with an immortal patience that will wait out any of our flawed endeavors. The mountain is our piko. It will pull us always into its gravity, teach us as many times as is necessary the greatest lesson we have to learn – connection, connection, connection.

So I go back to that day again and again, the day I touched the stone at Puʻu Līlīnoe, the day I ascended the summit of Kūkahauʻula with my heart stretched open as wide as its great vistas that overlook our paeʻāina out to the blue-rimmed edges of the world, the day I learned that which can not be taught in our books, in our discussions, that which can only be learned alone and small at the foot of the mountain, the unshakeable thing – that we are one, the mountain and I, that we share a mother, that we share a knowing of what has come before and what must continue to be, and that if I ever begin to lose sight of these things, if I am ever hesitant, I need only look to the mountain, to go to the mountain, to stand at its feet, to touch the rock and Mauna a Wākea will remind me of all I need to know.

Thousands have made this personal connection and they are standing now, WE are standing now and we will continue to stand with aloha in our guts, with fearlessness in our countenances, until the last song, the last stand, until the very last aloha ʻāina!

Eō e nā kini, nā kū kiaʻi mauna, e huli i ka piko, e kūpaʻa ma ke aloha i ka ʻāina. E kū, e kū!