Precarious Performances: The Thirty Meter Telescope and Settler State Policing of Kānaka Maoli

by David Uahikeaikaleiʻohu Maile[1]

Settler states criminalize protectors of Indigenous life, land, and water by labeling them ‘threats of violence.’ But, Indigenous protectors are exposing policing to be a precarious performance of settler sovereignty.

[Feature photo above by author]

“The state reinforces a system that produces criminals out of those it has dispossessed.” –Macarena Gómez-Barris[2]

The State of Hawaiʻi was founded on land stolen from Kānaka ‘Ōiwi.[3] To be clear, it is a U.S. settler state. It formed initially in the wake of the illegal U.S. overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893.[4] As the Republic of Hawaiʻi, it granted the unlawful annexation of the Hawaiian islands and transferal of the Hawaiian Kingdom’s national lands to the U.S. federal government in 1898.[5] After being the Territory of Hawaiʻi, the U.S. federal government manufactured the “State of Hawai‘i” in 1959 and institutionalized it as the so-called fiftieth state, without consent from Kānaka Maoli.[6] The legal, economic, political, and social processes for settlement of Hawaiʻi are ongoing to this very day. One pivotal way that settlement has continued is through the criminalization of Kānaka ‘Ōiwi. Particularly, the U.S. settler state in Hawai‘i turns Kānaka ‘Ōiwi into criminals to be detained, incarcerated, maimed, removed, murdered, and disappeared. The criminalization of Indigenous people—from Hawai‘i to the Americas, Palestine, and elsewhere—is an eliminatory technique for colonial dispossession. As Kānaka Maoli have been labeled threats of violence to be criminalized for defending our sacred mountain Mauna a Wākea from the Thirty Meter Telescope, water protectors of Mnisose, the Missouri River, have been also as a way to build the Dakota Access Pipeline. Accusations of violence were used to unleash dog attacks, strip search women, bag heads in hoods, rip flesh from bone with water cannons. The assault on Indigenous life, land, and water at Standing Rock clarifies how, as Chickasaw scholar Jodi A. Byrd laments, “in the United States, the Indian is the original enemy combatant.”[7] For legal historian Lisa Ford, the criminalization of Indigenous populations, across Oceania and America, is an original feature of settler sovereignty. She writes, “The exercise of jurisdiction over indigenous crime performs the myth of settler sovereignty over and over.”[8] What Ford refers to as legal myth literary critic Mark Rifkin calls the empty sign of settler sovereignty,[9] which, performed obsessively over and over again, reveals a hollowness in settler state power to be targeted and antagonized.

But how does the state materially reinforce a system that produces criminals out of those it has dispossessed? In this essay, I suggest it is through the management of threats of violence. To support this argument, I explore settler state policing from the vantage of Kanaka Maoli opposition to the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), a development project for the astronomy industry at our sacred mountain Mauna a Wākea on Hawai‘i island. Analyzing three material objects—an emergency rule, bullet hole, and knee—I track how symbolic threats of violence are manufactured to obscure and exact concrete violences. But, what can an administrative law, image of a hole in a door, and body part of a police officer tell us about threats of violence? Indeed, these legal, visual, and fleshy objects are quite revealing. Interrogating discourses mingling through and amongst them, I argue ‘threats of violence’ is a discursive formation produced by the settler state and dispersed through its institutions of media and police. Weaving together scholarship from Critical Police, Hawaiian, and Indigenous Studies, I demonstrate ‘threats of violence’ maintains a dual function. First, suggesting that Kānaka Maoli who defend Mauna a Wākea from the TMT threaten acts of violence, and are violent threats themselves, rationalizes police intervention by the U.S. settler state. In other words, figurative threats of alleged violence from kia‘i, the guardians and protectors of our mountain, condone material violence against them by police. Second, ‘threats of violence’ defers and tries to erase not only the colonial violence animating the U.S. settler state in Hawai‘i, and its deployment of police and their militarized interventions, but also the diversity of violence that TMT does. In what follows, I mine three material objects, offer two interventions, and conclude with one mo‘olelo—a story that lays bare how settler state policing of Kānaka Maoli is a performance of precarity.

The Thirty Meter Telescope

The TMT is attempting to be constructed by the Thirty Meter Telescope International Observatory, which is a non-profit corporation based in Pasadena, California. TMT would be a wide-field, alt-az Ritchey-Chrétien telescope with a 30-meter diameter segmented primary mirror housed in an observatory complex that would be 18-stories tall, extend 20-feet down into the ground, and sprawl across 5-acres. Traversing temporalities, the project purports to explore dark ages of the universe and unlock new frontiers for mankind. As ʻŌiwi scholar Iokepa Casumbal-Salazar has written, TMT seeks to develop more land at the northern plateau of Mauna a Wākea, which already has twenty-one telescopes and thirteen observatories, in order for deserving subjects—white settler men—to progress toward modernity.[10] This mission is backed by approximately $1.5 billion pledged by national astronomy organizations from China, Japan, and India and also the Canadian Crown, University of California, and California Institute of Technology. North American settler colonialisms fuse under the weight of global capital, and the international funding of TMT demonstrates the neoliberalization of Mauna a Wākea, a worldwide financialization of the desecration and destruction of our sacred mountain. In such spirit, TMT promises economic benefits—jobs, expenditures, tourism—and educational opportunities like scholarships for students in science, technology, engineering, and math fields.

Aroused by vows of technological advancement, scientific progress, economic benefits, and educational opportunities, the State of Hawai‘i has deep desires to build TMT and a vested interest in astronomy industry development. When it sanctions the TMT, it does not just flag how the state entity has been constituted on lands stolen and seized from our lāhui Hawaiʻi, the people and nation of Hawaiʻi. But, it also puts on display how state support of astronomy industry development proliferates settler colonial power so as to secure its institutionalization in the formation of Hawai‘i as a U.S. settler state. Calculated yet unstable, this juridical order demands to be secured from Kānaka ʻŌiwi resisting TMT, or, as astrophysicist Sandra Faber described in a leaked email, “a horde of native Hawaiians who are lying about the impact of the project on the mountain and who are threatening the safety of TMT personnel.”[11]

Emergency Rule

Source: Office of Hawaiian Affairs

An emergency rule was approved by the Board of Land and Natural Resources (BLNR) in 2015 to criminalize the kia‘i who were re-occupying Mauna a Wākea to protect it against TMT. This administrative law created a few rules: the mountain’s access road and 1-mile on either side of it are “restricted areas”; “transiting” means traveling-through in a vehicle at reasonable speeds with regard to hazards; possession of “sleeping bags, tents, camping stoves, and propane burners” in restricted areas is prohibited; and entering or remaining in restricted areas from 10:00 PM to 4:00 AM is banned, unless transiting through the access road or entering, within, and exiting an observatory or University of Hawai‘i facility. On one hand, these rules regulated kia‘i as criminals to police by disciplining them as trespassing campers. On the other hand, the rule declared a state of emergency to swiftly make blockading TMT construction unlawful. With short notice, the BLNR met on July 10, 2015 and sought public testimony on the emergency rule. Douglas Chin, the Attorney General of Hawai‘i at that time, gave testimony. Targeting kia‘i, he claimed there was “[an] imminent peril to public health, safety, and morality” for four reasons: rocks and stone structures have been placed on the access road; presence of people there has increased; those people have disregarded authorities; and they have harassed and made violent threats to workers of the visitor center, observatories, and construction crews.[12] For example, a surveillance log filed by rangers of the Office of Maunakea Management alleged there was a bomb threat—that one kia‘i threatened a suicide bombing. Of course, this was unsubstantiated but nevertheless the story the settler state told itself. Urging the BLNR, Chin exclaimed the rule should be adopted to “mitigate these threats.”[13] BLNR member Stanley Roehrig agreed this was a “clear and present danger,” and subsequently recommended rangers be given police powers.[14] After over eight hours of testimony, the emergency rule was passed by the BLNR in a 5-2 vote. Four days later, Governor David Ige signed the emergency rule into law, codifying it as Hawai‘i Administrative Rule 13-123-21.2. An advocate for deploying the National Guard to quell protests,[15] Ige noted, “We cannot let some people put others at risk of harm or property damage.”[16] Put another way, the executive branch cannot let kia‘i and Kānaka Maoli harm state workers or damage private property. The settler state will do what is necessary to protect capital’s bottom line of property, profit, and dispossession.

Source: Department of Land and Natural Resources

In the early morning on July 31, 2015 during Lā Hoʻihoʻi Ea, a national holiday celebrating the Hawaiian Kingdom’s sovereign independence,[17] police forces slithered up the mountain to detain and remove kia‘i. With executive authority from the emergency rule, officers from the Division of Conservation and Resource Enforcement cited six and arrested seven kia‘i, whom were found in violation of prohibited activities like camping in the restricted area. Exercising executive powers of the Land Board, attorney general, governor, and police, the settler state has marked Kānaka ʻŌiwi, guarding our mountain from desecration and destruction, as threatening acts of violence. It defends TMT as a project of settler colonial capitalism that works to dispossess territory in Hawai‘i, alienate relations with Mauna a Wākea to eliminate Kānaka Maoli by eradicating our kinship to ‘āina (land, that which feeds) and wahi kapu (sacred places), and thus replace us to develop the astronomy industry for techno-scientific progress. Put simply by David Correia and Tyler Wall, “Ain’t no colonialism and ain’t no capitalism without cops.”[18] Later in September, eight more kia‘i were arrested. Grossly ironic, the Department of Land and Natural Resources commented that the second set of arrests under the emergency rule aided in “establish[ing] safe conditions on the mountain for protestors.”[19] Since 2015, there have been 59 different arrests of kia‘i. Accusing kia‘i of violent acts thereby operationalizes the criminalization of Kānaka, a racialized colonial violence, and functions concomitantly to conceal the violence of TMT.

However, in October of 2015, an Environmental Court invalidated the rule, pursuant to Hawai‘i Revised Statute 91-7, because the State of Hawai‘i improperly implemented an emergency rule that sidestepped requirements for public notice to enact new administrative rules with the explicit purpose of stopping protests. This Third Circuit Court decision suggested the emergency rule created an unlawful exception, which declared new administrative law by suspending existing procedural regulations—what philosopher and political theorist Giorgio Agamben might call “a state of exception” but what I suggest is a settler state of exception as Mark Rifkin has theorized.[20] E. Kalani Flores, who brought the suit against the BLNR, remarked delightedly, “The State can no longer arrest innocent people who are on Mauna Kea at night for cultural or spiritual reasons.”[21] It was an important tactical victory. But, ‘threats of violence’ as a discursive formation is not just constructed in law; it’s also normalized and dispersed with regularity from imagery circulated in media.

Bullet Hole

Source: Hawai‘i Police Department

One month before the emergency rule was put into law, media reports alleged that a bullet hole was found on a door of the Subaru Observatory, one of the existing telescope complexes on Mauna a Wākea. When workers of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan operating the Subaru Telescope discovered the hole in the door, they quickly called police. Patrol sergeant Paul Kim stated, “When officers responded to the scene, the employees had found something appearing to be a bullet hole in one of the doors.”[22] Local media pounced fast. In the following days, news articles surfaced containing titles from “Police investigating possible bullet hole in Mauna Kea observatory”[23] to “Bullet Hole Found In Door of Mauna Kea Observatory.”[24] Speculation transformed into fact. Kia‘i were immediately blamed—not just for puncturing the door but also possessing and using guns. Kia‘i Kaho‘okahi Kanuha replied to allegations, “We do not condone that kind of action by anybody for any reason at any time, especially on Mauna a Wakea, the place that we know is sacred.”[25] Without any evidence except images circulating in media, kia‘i re-occupying the mountain haunted observatories, their employees, and the settler state. Forged into spectral ghosts, apparitions of astronomy industry development, their presence on Mauna a Wākea was reason enough to conjure blame, as if the threat of such violence—a loaded gun fired at an observatory—was always already present in kia‘i and Kānaka ʻŌiwi. “Declaring something or someone a threat,” Correia and Wall suggest, “is one of the most normalized of all powers internal to the police function.”[26]

Source: Honolulu Star-Advertiser

But in a statement made by the director of the Subaru Observatory, the damage to the door was confirmed to not be from gunfire. There was a “confirmed match between this hole and an intake manifold cover on the [adjacent] wall.”[27] Police concluded that the damage had been there for approximately six months.[28] The damage was only uncovered and investigated when blockades against TMT ramped up. This was a cunning sleight of hand. In a proceeding news article, “Kaho‘okahi Kanuha said he was glad to see the matter resolved but also was disappointed that protesters, a few of whom remain camped on the mountain, were being accused on social media of being responsible.”[29] Although dispelled, the circulating imagery of a “bullet hole” naturalized the bodies of those protecting Mauna a Wākea as persistent threats of violence.

Police Knee

Source: Department of Land and Natural Resources

Examining a final object, I contend the discursive formation ‘threats of violence’ has become incapacitating. It is not simply embodied, as in mapped onto the bodies of kia‘i and Kānaka ʻŌiwi. It’s also debilitating, a rationale for crushing force—produced by settler state law, circulated in media imagery, and meted out by the knee of a police officer. In 2017, more than a hundred kia‘i blockaded crews transporting a 3-ton mirror to complete assembly of the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope on Haleakalā, a different sacred mountain on Maui island. Applying new techniques for detainment and removal, adapted from lessons learned on Mauna a Wākea, police arrested six kia‘i. Indeed, settler state policing of Kānaka Maoli is not unique to the case of TMT. Astronomy development in Hawaiʻi is an industry, not one telescope. In fact, on July 30, 2015—the night before emergency rule arrests on Mauna a Wākea—heavily militarized police arrested twenty kia‘i demonstrating against the Solar Telescope on Haleakalā. Kai Prais was arrested then. Subsequently on August 2, 2017, he was arrested again, but in a spectacular display of violence. Prais was viciously detained and lost consciousness when a police officer pressed his knee into Prais’ skull. He shrieked in pain for help but the cop “continued to keep his knee on his head.”[30] The knee jammed into his skull “was overkill,” says Kaukaohu Wahilani who was next to Prais during the blockade.[31] Kāko‘o Haleakalā, a coalition organizing the blockade, commented that they called an ambulance while police “just stood there and did not assist.”[32] The coalition and kia‘i claim police used excessive force, whereas police suggest Prais “resisted arrest” and “officers did what they’re trained to do.”[33] Labeling kia‘i as ‘threatening acts of violence’ and ‘violent threats’ rationalizes and defers this visceral violence. From Mauna a Wākea to Haleakalā, the discursive formation that I’ve tracked in this essay justifies police violence to secure settler capital for astronomy industry development in Hawai‘i. Conversely, settler capital bolsters the policing of Kānaka Maoli. This is especially true in a moment wherein Douglas Chin recently compared kia‘i to the fascist, alt-right white supremacists that marched on Charlottesville, Virginia for the “Unite the Right” rally in order to request $2.5 million from the State of Hawai‘i’s legislature for “respond[ing] to potential mass violence or civil disobedience, possibly atop Mauna a Wākea.”[34]

Precarious Performances

Weaponized in these ways, however, the imperfections and limits of U.S. settler sovereignty unravel. My analysis here offers new insights for Critical Hawaiian Studies on the relationship between policing and sovereignty by illustrating how policing Kānaka ʻŌiwi is a precarious performance of U.S. settler sovereignty in Hawai‘i—a spectacle attempting to piece together jurisdictional authority and territorial control. Never legally whole as the emergency rule elucidated, far from material truth in the case of the “bullet hole,” and brutally insecure as signified by the police officer’s knee. Nevertheless, while criminalizing Indigenous people has historically been a legal domain for anxiously asserting settler sovereignty, other populations of Black, migrant, refugee, queer, and trans subjects are differently marked ‘threats of violence’ for the U.S. settler state to police. After all, this discursive formation is not exceptional to Indigenous people. I hope that my analysis might encourage Critical Indigenous Studies to build coalitional bridges on the relationalities produced across imagined ‘threats of violence’ for intersectional alliances against the corporeal violence exacted by settler states.

In this essay, I’ve humbly mapped the discursive formation ‘threats of violence’ and, in doing so, pointed out how policing Kānaka Maoli is a performance of precarity. Namely, settler state policing operates from an uncertain foundation, lacks control, and is perilous. Although I’ve shown this by analyzing three material objects, I want to end with one final mo‘olelo. This mo‘olelo is a story that lucidly explicates the precariousness of policing.

Source: Bryan Berkowitz

On January 24, 2018, Kaleikoa Kā‘eo reported to trial in Maui District Court and was issued a warrant for speaking ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i, the Hawaiian language. Charged with three petty misdemeanors from blockading the Solar Telescope at Haleakalā in 2017, Kā‘eo identified himself to judge Blaine Kobayashi: “Eia nō wau ke kū nei ma mua ou.”[35] This meant: I am here indeed, standing in front of you. Kobayashi replied: “I don’t know what that means, Mr. Kaeo.”[36] Kā‘eo responded again in Hawaiian, as he’s done in previous trials for blockading the Solar Telescope as well as TMT. Kobayashi then issued a bench warrant on the basis that “the court is unable to get a definitive determination for the record that the defendant seated in court is Mr. Kaeo.”[37] Not only had Kobayashi presided over former cases with Kā‘eo, making it reasonable to assume he recognized “the defendant seated in court,” but Kobayashi literally refers to Kaleikoa by name saying, “I don’t know what that means, Mr. Kā‘eo.” Moreover, ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i is recognized as a language co-equal to English according to Article 15 Section 4 of the State of Hawai‘i’s constitution. But Kobayashi had granted a motion filed by the prosecution that claimed compelling the court to hire an interpreter would be an impractical and unnecessary expense.[38] The precedent was dangerous. Judicial review of policing Kānaka Maoli could further police ʻŌiwi language and life. Hawaiian language could be disregarded in court and Kānaka Maoli speaking it would vanish from the record. This would be a three-fold technique for elimination. Outlaw speaking ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i in courts, disappear the presence of Kānaka Maoli facing charges, and decimate Kānaka Maoli with bench warrants for being “absent” at trials. This, at the same time, would institute new mechanisms for dispossessing ‘āina sacred to Kānaka Maoli, for the development of the astronomy industry, by increasing criminalization to boost removal of Kānaka Maoli on-the-ground protecting wahi kapu like Mauna a Wākea and Haleakalā.

Source: Maui Now

The State of Hawai‘i’s judiciary sensed the shaky rationale, and it pressured Kobayashi to recall Kā‘eo’s bench warrant. It then amended policy to provide and permit interpreters, in general, and also to allow defendants to operate as their own interpreter.[39] This was a procedural change that judicial agents of the settler state admit resulted from lacking control over the situation. What is clear in this story is recalling the bench warrant and amending procedural policy demonstrate that issuing the warrant created a perilous precedent with an uncertain legal foundation. The tricks have been revealed. Most importantly, this all was instantiated by Kā‘eo, who has done what is necessary to challenge astronomy industry development and launched legal defense in ‘ōlelo Hawai‘i. Like the emergency rule, “bullet hole,” and knee, the bench warrant was yet another performance of precarity antagonized by Kānaka Maoli on the ‘āina and in our ‘ōlelo makuahine, our own mother tongue. The precarious performances of policing must continue to be irritated and interrupted in order to overturn the façade, the myth, and the emptiness of U.S. settler sovereignty in Hawai‘i, and elsewhere.

About the Author: David Uahikeaikalei‘ohu Maile is a Kanaka ‘Ōiwi scholar, activist, and practitioner from Maunawili, O‘ahu. He is a PhD candidate and instructor in American Studies at the University of New Mexico and an organizer with The Red Nation in Albuquerque.

Endnotes:

[1] This essay is based on presentations given at the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association and Red Nation Native Liberation conferences in 2018. Another version of this essay is being published in Standing With Standing Rock: Voices From The #NoDAPL Movement edited by Nick Estes and Jaskiran Dhillon with the University of Minnesota Press. Mahalo nui to Nick Estes for his close review and thoughtful feedback on this blog. Mahalo nui also to Eli Meyerhoff and the entire Abolition Collective for their labors to publish this.

[2] Macarena Gómez-Barris, The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 87.

[3] I use Kanaka ʻŌiwi and Kanaka Maoli as interchangable terms to describe the Indigenous people of Hawaiʻi. Whereas Kanaka ʻŌiwi and Kanaka Maoli can be translated from Hawaiian to English as “Indigenous [Hawaiian] person,” when using Kānaka ʻŌiwi and Kānaka Maoli, with the kahakō also known as a macron, I am referring to “Indigenous [Hawaiian] persons” in the plural sense. This delineates the descriptive, individual, and enumerated qualities of these particular terms.

[4] David Keanu Sai, “American Occupation of the Hawaiian State: A Century Unchecked,” Hawaiian Journal of Law & Politics 1, no. 1 (2004): 46-81.

[5] Williamson Chang, “Darkness Over Hawaii: The Annexation Myth Is the Greatest Obstacle to Progress,” Asian-Pacific Law & Policy Journal 16, no. 2 (2015): 70-115.

[6] Julian Aguon, “The Commerce of Recognition (Buy One Ethos, Get One Free): Toward Curing the Harm of the United States’ International Wrongful Acts in the Hawaiian Islands” ‘Ohia: A Periodic Publication of Ka Huli Ao Center for Excellence in Native Hawaiian Law (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, 2012.

[7] Jodi A. Byrd, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press), xviii.

[8] Lisa Ford, Settler Sovereignty: Jurisdiction and Indigenous People in America and Australia, 1788-1836 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 208.

[9] Mark Rifkin, “Indigenizing Agamben: Rethinking Sovereignty in Light of the ‘Peculiar’ Status of Native Peoples,” Cultural Critique 1, no. 73 (2009): 115.

[10] Iokepa Casumbal-Salazar, “A Fictive Kinship: Making ‘Modernity,’ ‘Ancient Hawaiians,’ and the Telescopes on Mauna Kea,” Journal of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association 4, no. 2 (2017): 1-30.

[11] Molly Solomon, “How The Debate Over TMT Prompted a Problematic Email,” Hawai‘i Public Radio, May 15, 2015, http://www.hpr2.org/post/thirty-meter-telescope-hawaii-series.

[12] See “BLNR Meeting – July 10, 2015 – Testimonies,” ‘Ōiwi TV, July 15, 2015, http://oiwi.tv/maunakea/blnr-meeting-july-10-2015-testimonies.

[13] Ibid.

[14] See “VIDEO: BLNR Approves Restrictions of Mauna Kea,” Big Island Video News, July 11, 2015, http://www.bigislandvideonews.com/2015/07/11/video-blnr-approves-emergency-restrictions-on-mauna-kea.

[15] “No connection between National Guard training, TMT protests,” Hawaii Tribune-Herald, July 16, 2015, http://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2015/07/16/hawaii-news/no-connection-between-national-guard-training-tmt-protests.

[16] Mileka Lincoln, “Ige signs emergency rule restricting Mauna Kea access,” Hawaii News Now, July 14, 2015, http://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/story/29549333/ige-signs-emergency-rule-restricting-mauna-kea-access.

[17] David Uahikeaikalei‘ohu Maile, “Lā Hoʻihoʻi Ea: Politics of Restoration and Hawaiian Sovereignty,” The Red Nation, August 3, 2015, http://therednation.org/2015/08/03/la-hoihoi-ea-politics-of-restoration-and-hawaiian-sovereignty.

[18] David Correia and Tyler Wall, Police: A Field Guide (Brooklyn, NY: Verso), 6.

[19] See “SECOND ROUND OF ARRESTS ON MAUNA KEA UNDER EMERGENCY RULE,” Department of Land and Natural Resources, September 9, 2015, http://dlnr.hawaii.gov/blog/2015/09/09/nr15-132.

[20] Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); Rifkin, “Indigenizing Agamben,” 88-124.

[21] Ben Gutierrez, “Court throws out emergency restrictions for Mauna Kea,” Hawaii News Now, October 9, 2015, http://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/story/30229910/circuit-court-grants-partial-motion-invalidating-mauna-kea-emergency-rule.

[22] Ben Gutierrez and Chelsea Davis, “Police investigating possible bullet hole in Mauna Kea observatory,” Hawaii News Now, June 7, 2015, http://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/story/29259956/police-investigating-bullet-hole-discovered-in-door-of-mauna-kea-observatory.

[23] Ibid.

[24] “Bullet Hole Found In Door Of Mauna Kea Observatory,” Big Island Video News, June 7, 2015, http://www.bigislandvideonews.com/2015/06/07/bullet-hole-found-in-door-of-mauna-kea-observatory.

[25] Gutierrez and Davis, “Police investigating possible bullet hole in Mauna Kea observatory.”

[26] Correia and Wall, Police, 232, emphasis mine.

[27] “Hole in door at Mauna Kea telescope not from bullet,” Hawaii News Now, June 8, 2015, http://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/story/29269829/hole-in-door-at-mauna-kea-telescope-not-from-bullet.

[28] Jamilia Epping, “Hole at the Subaru Telescope Not from Bullet,” Big Island Now, June 8, 2015, http://bigislandnow.com/2015/06/08/hole-at-the-subaru-telescope-not-from-bullet.

[29] “Hole in door not caused by bullet, Subaru says,” Hawaii Tribune-Herald, June 9, 2015, http://www.hawaiitribune-herald.com/2015/06/09/hawaii-news/hole-in-door-not-caused-by-bullet-subaru-says.

[30] Wendy Osher, “Kāko’o Haleakalā Protest: Police Force Questioned During Injury to Demonstrator,” Maui Now, August 1, 2017, http://mauinow.com/2017/08/01/kakoo-haleakala-demonstration-staged-at-convoy-crossing-site.

[31] Mileka Lincoln, “Maui police deny claims officers used excessive force during Haleakala protest,” Hawaii News Now, August 3, 2017, http://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/story/36045224/protesters-claim-police-brutality-after-haleakala-confrontation.

[32] Osher, “Kāko’o Haleakalā Protest.”

[33] Lincoln, “Maui police deny claims officers used excessive force during Haleakala protest.”

[34] Nanea Kalani, “Attorney general seeks $2.5 million for security,” Honolulu Star-Advertiser, January 11, 2018, http://www.staradvertiser.com/2018/01/11/hawaii-news/attorney-general-seeks-2-5-million-for-security.

[35] Kekailoa Perry, “Interpreter Incident Illustrates Invisibility Of Native Hawaiians,” Civil Beat, February 1, 2018, http://www.civilbeat.org/2018/02/interpreter-incident-illustrates-invisibility-of-native-hawaiians.

[36] Ibid.

[37] Ibid.

[38] Ku‘uwehi Hiraishi, “Maui Telescope Protestor Battles Over Hawaiian Language Use in Court,” Hawai‘i Public Radio, January 24, 2018, http://www.hawaiipublicradio.org/post/maui-telescope-protestor-battles-over-hawaiian-language-use-court.

[39] Andrew Blake, “Hawaiian activist arrested for refusing to speak English in court spurs policy change,” The Washington Times, January 27, 2018, http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/jan/27/hawaiian-ordered-arrested-refusing-speak-english-c.