Mauna Kea

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A traveler approaching Hawaiʻi Island from the open Pacific sees, on a clear winter morning, something the latitude has no business producing: a dome of snow standing white above the warm blue water, nineteen degrees north of the equator, in a sea that never freezes. That whiteness gave the mountain its name. Mauna Kea, the white mountain, rises 13,803 feet — 4,207 meters — above sea level, the highest point in the Hawaiian chain; measured from its true base on the ocean floor it climbs more than ten thousand meters, taller from foot to crown than any peak on the dry land of the earth. It is a dormant volcano, last in eruption some four and a half to six thousand years ago, and in the reckoning of the people who came to live on its flanks it is not a thing to live beneath. It is the eldest of the family.

The firstborn of sky and earth

In the genealogical understanding that orders the Hawaiian world, the islands and their features are not scenery. They are kin, ranked by birth-order in a single descent that runs from the first emergence of the cosmos down through the gods to the chiefs and the people. The frame is set out at greatest length in the Kumulipo, the long cosmogonic chant of 2,102 lines that carries the world out of pō, the primordial darkness, through the coupling of paired beings, into ao, the daylight world of human genealogy — a chant written down and printed under King Kalākaua in 1889 and translated into English by Queen Liliʻuokalani in 1897, during her confinement after the fall of her kingdom. To recite such a genealogy is to locate oneself in the line, and the line begins very high.

Mauna Kea’s full name is Mauna a Wākea, the mountain of Wākea. Wākea is the sky-father; his consort is Papahānaumoku, “Papa from whom lands are born,” the earth-mother. From their union the islands are born as children, and Hawaiʻi Island is the first of them — and the mountain at its center is the firstborn, the kupuna, the senior of the whole line of descent. The Hawaiians who climb it, then, do not stand before a sacred object. They stand before an elder sibling, the eldest child of their own parents, the one born before the chiefs and before the people themselves. The hierarchy of birth-order that governs every Hawaiian relationship — the older owed deference by the younger — places the living below the mountain not as worshippers below a shrine but as the junior members of a household below their senior. This is the load-bearing fact of the place, and everything sacred about it follows from it.

The descent does not stop at the mountain. In the genealogical tradition Wākea and Papa go on to produce the taro plant, Hāloa, as an elder sibling of humankind, and then the first human chief, and from that point the moʻokūʻauhau — the recited line of ancestors — runs unbroken down to the living aliʻi. The whole arrangement is a single family tree in which land, plant, and person are graded branches of one stock, and the order of seniority is the order of birth: the island first, the mountain at its head, then the staple food, then the people. A Hawaiian who knows the genealogy knows, therefore, not only who the mountain is but where the mountain stands in relation to the self — above, ahead, owed the deference a younger sibling owes the eldest. This is why the language used of Mauna Kea is the language of kinship rather than of awe. It is addressed as kupuna, elder, ancestor; and a slight to it is a slight within the family.

The same sky-and-earth pairing recurs across the wider Polynesian world from which the Hawaiians descend — in Aotearoa it is Rangi and Papa, whom Tāne forces apart to let in the light — and the deep relatedness of the family is itself the inheritance of a single voyaging people. The ancestors of the Hawaiians were Polynesian navigators, heirs of the Austronesian expansion whose Lapita horizon (c. 1500–500 BCE) seeded an ancestral society in the Tonga–Sāmoa region, from which the eastward voyages carried settlers across the largest triangle any people has ever occupied, reaching Hawaiʻi in the closing centuries of the first millennium. They brought the cognate vocabulary of the sacred with them: mana, the realized potency that flows through gods and chiefs and acts; kapu, the sacred-prohibition that protects and channels it. On Mauna Kea both words found their highest concentration.

Mauna Kea, snow-capped above a tropical sea, seen from the ocean. Photograph by Vadim Kurland, 2007, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The realm of the snow-goddess and the navel of the sky

Above a certain elevation the mountain leaves the warm world entirely. The summit region is alpine desert, frozen at night, dusted or covered in winter snow, and it belongs in the tradition to deities of the cold who are the opposites and rivals of the fire below. Poliʻahu is the goddess of the snow, who dwells on the white summit; with her are Lilinoe, goddess of the fine mist, and Waiau, who presides over the mountain’s hidden waters. They are reckoned the antitheses of Pele, the volcano-goddess of Kīlauea on the island’s flank, and the chants tell of open war between snow and fire. In one account Poliʻahu is sledding the grassy slopes in the hōlua game when a beautiful stranger joins the contest and, losing, breaks open streams of lava beneath her — Pele, revealing herself; Poliʻahu flees upward, recovers, and throws down her mantle of snow to freeze the advancing flows and drive them back toward the island’s southern end. The geography is read as the residue of that struggle: the cold mountain in the north, the living fire in the south, the boundary between them held.

To be high on Mauna Kea was therefore to enter the country of the gods, and access to it was governed by kapu. The summit and its upper reaches were ground so sacred that under the old order the right to ascend above a certain line was reserved to the highest chiefs, the aliʻi of the most exalted rank, and to the priests whose office gave them business there. The makaʻāinana, the common people, did not climb to the top; the mountain’s heights were not a place one visited but a threshold one was, by birth or office, entitled or forbidden to cross. The restriction was not arbitrary exclusion. It was the same logic of birth-order and concentrated mana that placed the highest chiefs nearest the divine source and screened the sacred from contact that would profane it or, conversely, be destroyed by it.

The upper mountain is, in this understanding, a temple not built by hands. Across the Hawaiian landscape the formal house of worship was the heiau, the walled and terraced platform raised to a particular god and tended by a particular order of priests; but the summit needed no such construction, being itself the meeting of the realms. Its features are read as the furniture of a sanctuary. The cinder cones near the top are the dwellings of the goddesses; the lake is the navel; and shrines, cairns, and burials were placed in the high ground over generations, so that the summit became a landscape dense with the work of remembrance even where it bore no single building. The cold itself was part of the sanctity. To climb above the warm life of the lower slopes into the wind and frost and the alpine desert, where almost nothing grows and the night freezes, was to leave the world of the living and stand at its upper edge — a passage out of the ordinary that the kapu marked and protected. The thin air that strains the breath of a climber today was, in the older reading, the medium of the gods, not of men, and to enter it lightly was to mistake one’s place in the order of the family.

The summit is understood as a piko. The word names the umbilicus, the navel, and by extension any point of vital connection — the cord that joins a child to its mother, the genealogical center that joins a person to the ancestors, the place that joins one realm to another. Mauna Kea is the piko that joins the island to the sky: the point at which the firstborn child of Wākea reaches up to touch the realm of the sky-father, the cosmic cord through which the descent itself runs. Near the top, at 13,022 feet, lies a small lake, Waiau, the highest in the Pacific, cupped in a cinder cone in a place where the porous lava holds almost no standing water anywhere else on the mountain. Its water is associated with the god Kāne, the giver of fresh water and life, and it is a place of the deepest sanctity. Among its observances was the carrying-up of the piko in the literal sense: the dried umbilical cord of a newborn child was brought to Waiau and given to its water, binding that child’s life-cord to the navel-lake of the firstborn mountain, and so to the land and the ancestral line. To this the practice answers the metaphor exactly — the child’s piko placed in the island’s piko, the individual descent knotted into the descent of the whole.

Lake Waiau, near the summit of Mauna Kea, the highest lake in the Pacific and a place of umbilical-cord offerings. Photograph by Thomas Tunsch, 2012, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Healers still draw on the water of Waiau, and the upper mountain remains a place of prayer and observance for Hawaiian practitioners. The sacredness here is not the antiquarian residue of a closed system. It belongs to a living people, whose religious life survived the collapse of the formal kapu order in 1819, the arrival of the Calvinist mission in 1820, and the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893, and who have carried the genealogical understanding of the mountain forward intact into a century in which the summit became something else as well.

The contest on the summit

The very thing that makes the summit sacred makes it valuable to another kind of seeker. The air above Mauna Kea is thin, dry, and unusually still; the mountain stands above the inversion layer that traps the Pacific’s moisture, so that the sky over the summit is among the clearest and steadiest on earth. To an astronomer this is a resource of the first order — the place from which the faint light of the most distant galaxies can be gathered with least interference. An access road was cut to the summit in 1964, and the first major instrument, the University of Hawaiʻi’s 88-inch telescope, was completed in 1970. Over the following decades a community of great observatories rose on the summit cones, funded by a consortium of nations: by the present count some thirteen facilities, among them the twin Keck telescopes and the Japanese Subaru telescope, made Mauna Kea one of the most important sites of optical and infrared astronomy in the world. From here came many of the measurements that built the modern picture of the cosmos.

The summit observatories, with the cinder cones of the upper mountain. Photograph by Frank Ravizza, 2019, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

The observatories sit on the very ground the old kapu reserved, on the cones near the dwelling of Poliʻahu, on the piko that joins the island to the sky. For many Hawaiians the building of an industrial astronomical complex on the summit of the firstborn was, and is, a desecration — the leveling of cinder cones, the disturbance of burials and shrines, the routine traffic of construction and tourism across ground that birth-order and kapu had set apart for the gods and the highest chiefs. For the astronomers and for the State of Hawaiʻi, which leases the land, the summit is a scientific instrument of irreplaceable quality and a contributor to knowledge and to the island’s economy. Both descriptions are exact within their frames, and the two frames have not been reconcilable on the summit’s small ground.

The contest came to a head over a single proposed instrument. The Thirty Meter Telescope, an optical-infrared telescope whose primary mirror, nearly a hundred feet across, would make it among the largest in the world, was sited for a new and previously undeveloped area below the summit. Its groundbreaking on 7 October 2014 was interrupted by protesters, and in the spring of 2015 demonstrators blocked the summit access road; thirty-one people were arrested over those weeks, and the dispute went from a local objection to a sustained movement. The Supreme Court of Hawaiʻi invalidated the telescope’s building permit in December 2015; a new permit, issued in 2018, was upheld in court the following year. When construction was set to resume in July 2019, the kiaʻi — the protectors — returned to the mountain in numbers and held the access road. On 17 July, thirty-eight people were arrested, all of them kūpuna, the elders, who had placed themselves at the front. The blockade held for weeks; it closed all of the existing observatories — the longest shutdown in their half-century on the mountain — and the encampment at the base of the access road, with its ceremonies conducted three times a day, became the visible center of a Hawaiian movement larger than any single telescope.

The state declined to clear the mountain by force, and the road was reopened only at the end of December 2019. The telescope was not built; the encampment dispersed but the question it raised did not. In 2023 the prosecutions of the arrested elders were ended. In 2022 the legislature passed Act 255, creating the Mauna Kea Stewardship and Oversight Authority, an eleven-member body in which Native Hawaiian cultural expertise holds voting power rather than advisory standing, to take over governance of the mountain from the University of Hawaiʻi over a transition completed by 2028 — a structural answer to the charge that those who held the summit sacred had never controlled its use. What the standoff made plain, and what the new authority institutionalizes, is that two true accounts of one piece of ground — the finest window on the universe, and the navel-cord of the firstborn mountain — were both being spoken in earnest, and that the older claim, long overruled, had recovered the standing to be heard.

The whiteness that named the mountain still comes each winter, and the snow still belongs to Poliʻahu. Beneath it the telescopes turn on the ancestral cones, and the cords of children rest in the water of Waiau, and the elders go up to pray. The mountain remains what the genealogy says it is: the eldest of the family, older than the people who contend over it, indifferent to neither.

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