Abstract
It can take decades for a single drop of water to filter through the earth to get to an aquifer. The water in aquifers, or underground collections of water, is therefore aged. Understanding this, Indigenous peoples in the Pacific have long been active in safeguarding these deep waters, knowing that our futures are determined by what is beneath us. This is demonstrated in various Pacific and Indigenous-led movements to protect water, including the movement to protect Mauna Kea, a mountain in Hawaiʻi and the proposed site of the controversial Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT). This article will explore the movement to prevent the construction of the TMT, as well as other connected movements in the Pacific, as acts of futurity. While many analyses of this and other movements focus on what happens on land, this article will focus on the aquifers beneath us, arguing that the efforts to prevent construction, destruction, and devastation represent the ways Hawaiian, Pacific, and other Indigenous peoples not only dream of better futures but create them in the present, maintaining an ancestral sense of radical hope in the deep waters that have fed, and will continue to feed, generations.
Introduction
E ui aku ana au iā ʻoe, Aia i hea ka wai a Kāne? Aia i lalo, i ka honua, i ka wai hū, I ka wai kau a Kāne me Kanaloa— He waipuna, he wai e inu, He wai e mana, he wai e ola, E ola nō, ea!
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“. . .we, as humans, can live in good relationship with water, following its example of creation, adaptability, and long memory. . .”
I start this paper with an introduction. I come from water, red water. The place that raised me is named Waimea, “wai”, meaning water, and “mea,” meaning reddish. To know me, then, is to know that place nestled into the uplands of Hawaiʻi. It is to know the way it sings in the morning fog, the way it dances in the evening rain, the way it rolls and curves and moves but always seems to settle when it needs to. Whenever I return to it, something in me settles, calms, and finds relief and comfort in the flowing water made red by soil, red by hāpuʻu, and red by ancestry. When my nephew was born, we named him after our home, Kahāʻoluokanuʻuanuowaimea, the cool breath of the uplands of Waimea. Today, he is as much that place as that place is him. There is no disconnection. That intimate, unbreakable bond reminds me that to know us is to know Waimea and to know Waimea is to know who, what, and why we are. It is to see fog-covered hillsides when you see me, to hear red waters flowing when you hear me and to feel that slightly sharp but gentle sting of rain when you feel my words biting softly.
This paper will bring some of those words to you, words shaped by red waters flowing freely, if not literally anymore, then flowing freely in my dreams. They are the words of generations caught like water in the pores of rocks stored for future whispers, future chants, future ripples and waves of protest and change. They are words that will ask us to remember water, both water made red naturally and water turned red by violence, by contamination, by the dismissal of those charged to protect it and by a denial of the earth as sacred, as an ancestor, and as some of my people say, as “that which feeds.” Water, as McDougall (2022: 132) states in the epigraph above, has a “long memory”. It remembers what it does and what it must do. It remembers its pathways and purposes. It even remembers us as we remember it. These words, therefore, will call on us to engage in active remembering and to consider the ways we can enable water to continue to do the same.
Structured to resemble the flow of those red waters, this paper will share stories of wai, and more particularly, of the radical hope that motivates our actions to protect it for today and for the future. In doing so, it will invite you to go on a journey with me to not only trace some of the pathways of water, but to also engage in what the editors of this special issue, Hayden and el-Ojeili (2025, this issue), call “the strenuous task of political imagination” to envision beyond the present. These stories will take us beyond the surface where waters flow and sing, to the underground, to the layers and levels of the earth we can’t see, can’t hear, can’t touch, but are connected to. As seen in the section of chant cited above, these words and stories prompt us to consider, “Aia i hea ka wai a Kāne?” Where are the waters of Kāne, the waters of our diety of life, creation and ancient freshness held in sacred droplets fallen, caught, absorbed, and fed? As the section of chant responds: “Aia i lalo, i ka honua.” They are below us, in the earth. It is from there that we will begin this journey to recover an ancient but constantly refreshed way of looking at the future, the future beneath us.
In a special issue focusing on reanimating critical utopian hope, and even questioning the role and possibility of hope in a time of intersecting global chaos and crisis, it is important to start with the sources of knowledge and wisdom we sometimes forget, those running beneath our feet. To do so, this paper will reflect on what we have to learn from underground collections of ancient freshness, or aquifers, and will look to these contested spaces beneath the surface that sometimes escape our attention but that often come back into consciousness through controversy. In doing so, it will consider water both literally and metaphorically as an entity that not only connects us across oceans, but that also takes us deep into the depths of our worlds where we can consider pathways to and for the future. As this paper contemplates these spaces, it will argue that Pacific and Indigenous movements to protect aquifers and underground sources of water are acts of Indigenous futurities that are deeply grounded in our ways of knowing, being and persisting in a world that has tried, time and time again, to extinguish us. To take us on this journey, this paper will begin with the premise that hope in the future is not only possible, it is imperative. It will begin with the ancestral knowing that decolonial dreaming is a responsibility that animates our actions and movements in the now. Finally, it will begin with the Indigenous understanding that, as Kuwada (2015) once said, “The future is a realm we have inhabited for thousands of years.” It is not far off in an unimaginable time. It is already here.
Taking inspiration from the chant above, this paper will invite a call and response from you, the reader. Though perhaps different or new, its function is purposeful. The call and response will invite you to participate in creating the futures we want to maintain and see. At the end of each section, I will return to the final lines of the chant above: “He wai e inu, he wai e mana, he wai e ola,” bringing forth water to drink, water to give strength and power and water for life. When I do, I will then invite you to read and say aloud to yourself, “e ola nō.” Life indeed. Life is indeed in the waters. As Indigenous 2 peoples of the Pacific, we know this, we live this and we defend this as we defend our lives. To begin to embody the futures we want to live, say “e ola nō” and believe it. Life is found in the active acknowledgement of the flows beneath our feet and in our every movement to protect them.
He wai e inu, he wai e mana, he wai e ola. E ola nō!
I lalo, below us: Aquifers and futurities
Beneath layers of earth near my hometown of Waimea is an aquifer by the same name. Aquifers are underground reservoirs of water located within bodies of rock or sediment that are saturated with wai honua, water in the honua or water in the earth. When water falls and makes contact with the earth—whether through rainfall, dew or fog drips—it can either remain above ground or travel beneath it. Water that travels below the surface enters into a process called percolation, travelling through soil and rock to aquifers below. As Hawaiʻi’s Board of Water Supply explains, the percolation process is a slow one “with many twists and turns through the maze of underground rock structures” (Hawaii’s Water Cycle—Board of Water Supply, n.d.). In fact, it is so slow that it can take decades for a single raindrop to filter through the earth, drip-dropping through soil and rock to reach an aquifer. The water there is therefore “fresh” in the sense that it should be clean to drink, as it sits above brackish water and the saltwater below. However, it is not “fresh” in the sense that it’s aged. All water is aged. In fact, all water is ancient, cycling through generations: falling, flowing, filtering, feeding, and then doing it all over again. Given the length of the percolation process, the water that currently sits in aquifers reflects the world as it was decades ago when those raindrops or fog drips first made contact with the earth and then filtered through it.
The Waimea aquifer, named for the red waters that flow above it, the red waters that shaped me, has been brought into debates about the sacred, about environmental protection, sustainability and stewardship, and about so-called “progress” for over a decade because despite being underground, what lays above it, and what has been proposed to lay above it, threaten its existence. In 2010, the University of Hawaiʻi filed an application on behalf of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) Observatory Corporation for a Conservation District Use Permit (CDUP) to build an observatory on Mauna Kea, the tallest mountain in Hawaiʻi, and if measured from the sea floor, the tallest mountain in the world. Though there were already 13 observatories on the mountain, all of them contested and all of them controversial, the corporation wanted to build another one, claiming that it had the potential to “revolutionize our understanding of the universe and our place within it” (TMT International Observatory, n.d.). While it is not the goal of this paper to present a comprehensive overview of the movement to protect Mauna Kea from the construction of the TMT—as has been covered in a number of other sources 3 —it is important to know that central to the issue is the fact that the telescope, promoting the idea that “westernized science has supremacy over other considerations,” requires violence and destruction (Maile, 2015a). As summarised quite pointedly by Maile (2015b) in his analysis of the intersections of science, time and capitalist and colonialist violence on Mauna Kea: “The material fact is that the TMT is a scientific project. It is backed by scientific institutions. Its purpose is science. But in order for this scientific project to be constructed, Mauna Kea must be desecrated and destroyed.” In his sharp critique, Maile (2015a) explains how “discourses of science,” like those used in defence of the TMT, “should continue to be interrogated for how they hide (settler) colonialism, racism, militarization, empire building, and capitalism.” Discourses of protection, then, should be understood for how they both reveal what science seeks to conceal while also providing space for imagining and acting upon alternative futures.
The movement to protect Mauna Kea, though often situated and focused on the mountain, is also a movement to protect everything below it. On Mauna Kea is an 11,288-acre site known today by the occupying state of Hawaiʻi as the Mauna Kea Science Reserve, which is located above five aquifers: Onomea, Hakalau, Paʻauilo, Honokaʻa and Waimea. Within this reserve is the “Astronomy Precinct,” which is located entirely above the Waimea aquifer (Fujikane, 2021: 103). As aquifers rely upon what happens above the ground, where water first falls or drips to the surface of the earth, the movement to protect Mauna Kea must be seen not only as one that aims to protect the sacred from desecration and to protect the environment from devastation but also one that aims to protect the water that will sit in the aquifer decades from now.
If built, the TMT would not only be the largest structure on the mountain, it would also be the largest structure on the island of Hawaiʻi where Mauna Kea is located. It would be 18 stories tall, would cover more than five acres of sacred land, and would require digging into the earth to make space for two 5000-gallon tanks to hold hazardous waste and human waste. This poses a threat to Mauna Kea and the waters it captures and protects. Of primary concern to kiaʻi, or protectors, for Mauna Kea are the impacts the TMT will have to the environment, not only in a physical sense but in a deeply spiritual and ancestral one as well. Mauna Kea is a child of Wākea and Papahānaumoku, two of our oldest ancestors who are credited with birthing our worlds and creating the foundations upon which we stand, work, live, create and love. The mountain is, therefore, sacred, an ancestor we speak to, pray to and protect with everything we have. As Peralto (2014: 234) explains, because of our genealogical relationship to the mountain, “both the Mauna and Kanaka [we, as Hawaiians] are instilled, at birth, with a particular kuleana [responsibility] to each other”. This is a responsibility to aloha ʻāina, or to engage in an active and ever-present fierce and protective love for the mountain that is based on our recognition of the fact that, as Silva (2017: 4) explains, “we are an integral part of the ʻāina and the ʻāina is an integral part of us”. ʻĀina, often defined as “land” or “place,” is also commonly described as “that which feeds,” which honours the ways our places—including our landscapes and waterscapes, both on the surface and far below it—nourish us.
Recognising the importance of “that which feeds,” kiaʻi for Mauna Kea have long argued that anything that poses a threat to ʻāina and to wai, now and in the future, should be avoided. In response to the specific concerns about water, proponents of the TMT have stated that the telescope “doesn’t pose a risk to the aquifer or Hawaii island’s water supply” because the porous lava within the mountain will treat and filter any contaminated water as it travels downward (Hofschneider, 2019). In other words, if any spills of hazardous waste or human waste occur, the mountain will clean up the mess. As kiaʻi, we have maintained that we not only do not know enough about the aquifer to make that bold assertion but that there are examples where claims that contaminated water can be filtered have been proven false (Fujikane, 2021: 106). In her analyses of settler cartographies, Fujikane (2021) speaks to the ways the occupying state’s representations of impact (or a lack thereof) ignore Indigenous Hawaiian ways of knowing place, particularly when it comes to the sacred. When Fujikane (2021: 109) spoke with Hawaiian knowledge holders, one of them, Kuʻulei Kanahele, shared, “Our ancestors knew the importance of designating Maunakea as sacred and keeping the summit pristine to maintain the purity of our water”. Kanahele then further explained that we cannot take a “reactive approach,” addressing the problem after it occurs, or cleaning the spill, for instance, after it happens: “The lesson of ʻike kupuna [ancetral knowledge] is to protect ecosystems from harmful human activities so that they are not damaged in the first place”. For those of us who understand ourselves in relation to place, ancestrally and otherwise, the risk of contamination is not one we are willing to take, not for now and not for the future. Our stand to protect the mountain, halt construction and honour the sacred is, therefore, an act of Indigenous futurity.
Futurities, as explained by Goodyear-Kaʻōpua and Kuwada (2018: 50), “are ways that groups imagine and produce knowledge about futures; thus futurities shape horizons of possibility for specific futures”. Harjo (2019: 4–5) further clarifies that futurities are not “limited to a future temporality in which we have to wait to create and get to the place where we want to be”. Instead, they require “the act of living out the futures we wish for in a contemporary moment, and the creation of the conditions for the future” in the present. In short, futurities are about envisioning futures and then creating them in the now. Looking at the movement to protect Mauna Kea, I maintain that it is a movement for, and in service to, an Indigenous futurity, or to our ongoing survival far beyond our own life spans. To halt destruction, devastation and potential contamination in the present is to protect the water that will reach the aquifer decades from now. It is to ensure that the water that then feeds the next generations will continue to be both ancient and fresh, as those who came before us ensured for us. When we move through, and with, Indigenous futurities, Goodyear-Kaʻōpua (2019: 87) says, we are “living in intergenerational rhythms that we cannot always fully see because they extend beyond the horizons of our individual lifespans”. The waters drip dropping from summits to aquifers are our Indigenous futurities in motion, extending generations forward and back. Though the future may be beyond our physical sight, it is present. It is beneath us, already en route to the aquifers that will feed our children and grandchildren in a time we are preparing for now.
While kiaʻi enact Indigenous futurities, however, proponents of the TMT have their own visions of the future in mind. As Fujikane (2021: 89) writes, “Astronomers and the occupying state have argued for the need for the TMT based on a grand and sweeping vision of discovering the origins of life and lush inhabitable planets that lie waiting to be discovered”. This vision, she continues, comes from knowing the state of our planet: “If humans have destroyed this planet,” she explains, “the TMT project provides a fantasmatic vision of a planetary Garden of Eden out there that promises an escape from the creeping sands of the desert on earth,” a desert devoid of water (p. 89). Importantly, their visions—though concealed by claims that they are for all of humanity—promote a settler futurity. Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernandez (2013: 80) explain that settler futurity is always in service to a settler future, and as a result, always “means the continued and complete eradication of the original inhabitants of contested land”. In other words, in order to continue the work of settler colonialism, which is to eliminate the Indigenous people and to, as Wolfe (2006: 388) states, “destroy to replace,” settler structures, concerns, and even dreams and visions for the future must take precedence. Further, they must not only take precedence, but they must also be normalised as the most important. This is what proponents of the TMT have attempted since it was first proposed. In claiming that the telescope will lead to knowledge that will benefit all of humanity, the people whose lives depend on the land and waters that will be destroyed in the process have already been dismissed. As Indigenous peoples, in other words, our “elimination” can be seen, first, in the fact that we are not considered, and further, in the fact that our futures have already been deemed dead.
In previous work, I discussed the politics of dreaming and the fact that settler dreams for the future, if fulfilled, can render our Indigenous dreams for survival impossible. “This is the predicament of dreaming: we all have dreams, but the opportunity for those dreams to come true is often dependent on dominant colonial temporalities that always exist on uneven ground with others” (Case, 2021: 99). The reality, in other words, is that we live in “discrepant temporalities,” as Rifkin (2017: 3) argues, or different “presents” in which Indigenous peoples are differently understood. Building on the work of Kuwada (2015), Arvin (2019: 226) explains that because Indigenous peoples are often portrayed as backward or primitive, descriptors that lock us into a past temporality, we are seen “as ancient relics or exotic repositories of antiquated knowledge tragically unable to participate in the present or future”. Thinking about the future and the theme of this special issue, it is important to consider the politics of dreaming in relation to utopian hope. “Utopia,” as explained by Hardy (2012: 125), must be engaged with critically, particularly for the ways early articulations of the term, like those by Thomas More, sought to justify settler colonial desires. Connecting to Arvin’s work, through strategic dehumanisation, for instance, settlers can frame Indigenous peoples as having been, and continuing to be, incapable of creating a utopia, or an “ideal” and “improved” society. Unless critically engaged with, therefore, narratives of utopia can work against Indigenous futurities, pushing science, for instance, as a pathway to a better society, even if it is at the expense of Indigenous peoples and the places they stand to protect.
Colonial narratives of utopia and logics of elimination enable the dismissal of Indigenous peoples as being incompatible with a future that the settler has deemed as the only future worth having. Contrary to these narratives and logics, however, scholars like Kuwada (2015) remind us that our efforts to maintain connections to the sacred, to protect our shared environments and to embody the knowledge that kept our people safe for generations is not “living in the past” but progressing towards and in the future. Protecting the summit of a mountain, in other words, because it will ensure the protection of the futures beneath us, is an act of futurity that all people can learn and benefit from. In their examination of settler and Indigenous futurities, Tuck and Gaztambide-Fernandez (2013: 80) explain that “Indigenous futurity does not require the erasure of now-settlers in the ways that settler futurity requires of Indigenous peoples”. A commitment to Indigenous futurities, therefore, is not for Indigenous peoples alone but for creating a world where both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples can thrive and where a “critical utopian hope,” as the editors of this special issue call for, can transcend settler colonialism and the colonial roots of “utopia” to dream a better world for all. The waters beneath our mountain, after all, feed everyone.
He wai e inu, he wai e mana, he wai e ola. E ola nō!
I ka honua, in the earth: Underground waters turned red
To continue tracing the movements of water, we must acknowledge that the aquifers cradled by Mauna Kea are not the only waters being threatened, the only waters relying upon our movements to protect them. In November of 2021, families on the island of Oʻahu found their water—water welled from below the surface, from the deep nooks and crannies—smelling like gasoline. They had stomachaches and nosebleeds, nausea and headaches, cramps, rashes, itchiness and burning skin. The contamination of the drinking well feeding them, which draws water directly from what is known as the Pearl Harbor aquifer, came from the leaking of 19,000 gallons of petroleum from Red Hill, an underground fuel-storage facility at Kapūkakī built by the United States military in haste during World War II to fuel war operations. Situated just 100 feet above the aquifer, the fuel storage facility has always posed a threat to the island’s drinking water. Contamination in an aquifer, after all, could render it unusable for decades. In 2023, EcoWatch (Leonard, 2023) reported that the leak poisoned the water for over 93,000 people, leaving thousands of them sick. This came after years of protest and protective action, not only for the water feeding the residents of Oʻahu then, but for the ability of that aquifer and its drinking wells to feed far into the future. In 2024, a military report blamed “the fuel contamination of Pearl Harbor’s drinking water on Navy mismanagement at the Red Hill fuel depot and leaders’ failure to prepare for leaks” (Jedra, 2024).
The lack of preparation seen in the example of Red Hill represents a lack of concern for the future. It represents a misplaced faith and trust in systems and ideologies of destruction and violence, like militarism and the militarisation of our islands, that claim to work for “safety” and “security,” all the while putting some of us at risk. While some of the military families directly affected by the contamination questioned the military afterwards, and expressed feelings of “betrayal” and “distrust,” this is something many Hawaiians have felt since the United States started militarising our islands, beginning with the military-backing of the illegal overthrow of Hawaiʻi in 1893 and continuing with the positioning of Hawaiʻi as central to U.S. military strategy in the Asia-Pacific. As Kajihiro (2010) explains, today, “the central conflict between indigenous Hawaiians and the military is over the control of land.” Tied to this, of course, is the control of water and the control of what the future will be for our ʻāina, our wai, and us. As he further explains, “the military expropriated and occupied the richest and most strategic locations, including important religious sites, fishing, farming, hunting, and gathering areas. As a result, Hawaiʻi is one of the most densely militarized regions under U.S. control, with the military controlling 205,925 acres, or roughly 5% of the land. On Oʻahu the most densely populated island, the military controls 85,718 acres, or 22.4% of the land.” With that control comes the opportunity to contaminate, to destroy, and to drain and leave dry the intergenerational movements ensuring Indigenous futures. It is the opportunity to turn our waters red through violence.
As someone who has witnessed firsthand the destruction by the U.S. military, the ways our lands and waters have been abused by ideologies of violence in the name of “national security,” I know that militarism and settler colonialism—two structures that sustain and are sustained by one another—seek to eliminate the possibility of Indigenous futures. I, therefore, know that I have a responsibility to live the future I want to see by standing against militarisation, calling for the closure of Red Hill, holding the military accountable, and continuing to speak to the lands and waters that have too long been targets of violence. As McDougall (2014: 251–252) writes in her poem “The Second Gift,” this “violence” is often more than the physical force we equate it with: Violence is more than lodging bullets into our brown or black bodies, but also burning sacred valleys, stabbing tunnels into mountains, damming streams, dumping poisons into oceans, overdeveloping ʻāina, bombing and buying islands . . . Violence is what we’re used to . . . Violence is believing you are in the United States driving on a highway built over the sacred, carrying artillery to scorch the sacred so more sacred lands can become the United States through violence.
Violence, in other words, is committed in the normalisation of the military, in its hypervisibility, and in its insidious rhetoric meant to convince us that they are in Hawaiʻi for our benefit. Like the TMT, the military insists that it is in the islands for our safety and for our collective benefit while really working to maintain colonial control and the power to determine the future without us.
Growing up in Waimea, in my land of red waters, seeing tanks and choppers was normal. Having the military come to our school to tell us about their work and to recruit us into programmes was common. Being taught about the dangers of unexploded ordinance and the 3 Rs of explosives safety—recognise, retreat, report—was what I thought all young children were taught, not just those of us whose hometown was once used as a military training site (Case, 2020). Growing up in Waimea, I learned the pain of militarisation in the constant bombing of Pōhakuloa, a site located about 45 minutes away from my home, nestled in the high plateau between Mauna Kea and the neighbouring mountain, Mauna Loa, a site that has long been abused by the U.S. military. Growing up, I knew too well the feeling of bombs hitting Pōhakuloa, abusing Papahānaumoku, our mother who created our islands and created us. Growing up, I didn’t know that these experiences were conditioning me, conditioning us, to find our way through sorrow, to withstand all that seeks to destroy the lands and the waters that shaped us. I didn’t know that home was preparing us to endure the present, to fight through it and to dare to imagine, still, that a different future is, and will be, possible.
During World War II, 80,000 acres of Pōhakuloa were taken to be used for combat training by the U.S. military. In 1965, another 23,000 acres were leased from the occupying state of Hawaiʻi. Combined with other lands purchased from Parker Ranch—the cattle ranch that turned the once forested-hillsides of Waimea into the pastures I roamed as a little girl—the Pōhakuloa Training Area now operates on close to 133,000 acres of land, of ʻāina that still tries to nourish us, even through destruction. As Fujikane (2021: 112) writes, these lands—often characterised as being empty, barren, and desolate—sit on top of wai honua, water flowing through the earth. Through her examination of moʻolelo, or stories and histories, she writes, “across the plains of Pōhakuloa. . .springs extend” as there are “waters flowing through intricate underground waterways”. Kūpuna, or elders, she explains, have “studied the continuities of these flows” for generations and their ʻike, or knowledge, “continues to stream to us today” like waters drip dropping, falling through the earth for us.
When I think of these underground movements, from the high plateau of Pōhakuloa to the place caught in current headlines as “Red Hill,” and back to the summit of Mauna Kea, I recall the reality and metaphor of aquifers as entities that embody intergenerational wisdom and dreams. As Harjo (2019: 4) writes of her own communities, we “have sustained the spaces to dream, imagine, speculate, and activate the wishes of our ancestors, contemporary kin and future relatives—all in a present temporality, which is Indigenous futurity”. Perhaps that is our task, and what aquifers can teach us, remind us and encourage of us. Though the situation at Red Hill, and the U.S. military’s constant and consistent lack of concern, slow or nonexistent action and ongoing lies and denials are depressing and though many of us are sometimes so overwhelmed by the enormity of it all that we can lose track of the future, we have to remember the waters and that our duty is to make sure what we feed the earth today will filter down cleanly and clearly to feed the next generations. This includes our resistance, our persistence and our every-flowing radical and relational hope.
He wai e inu, he wai e mana, he wai e ola. E ola nō!
I ka wai hū, in the gushing waters: Collective futures
When standing on Mauna Kea, my cousin, Pua Case, a leader in the movement to protect the mountain, always reminds us that our efforts are not for that one place alone. As she states, “Our mountain speaks to mountains around the world; they are holding the energy lines, the grid work and the peoples of the mountains together. If you think Mauna Kea is far away from you, it’s really not. The mountains are the teachers and hold the communication system together” (Matata-Sipu, 2021: 94). In a similar vein, waters also hold us together, bring us together, and remind us that our futures are intertwined.
Because my life has been intimately shaped by the red waters that raised me, my connection to them has taught me that my duty to aloha ʻāina—to love place fiercely—must be extended to the rest of the region, to all of our wai honua, to all of the waters in our many soils, our many rocks and crevices, our many caves and our many earths. A few years ago, while I was giving a speech on the waters at Red Hill, Katerina Teaiwa reminded me of the waters of Banaba. While my waters may be threatened by ongoing military violence, neglect and settler colonial control, their lands and waters have been destroyed by mining. As Teaiwa (2015: 5) explains, the island “now in a state of relative obscurity,. . .was the intense focus of British imperial agricultural desires for most of the twentieth century”. Banaba, like other islands in the Pacific, including Nauru, was, as she describes it, “essentially eaten away by mining”. Extensive phosphate mining by the British Phosphate Commission, co-owned by Australia, New Zealand and the UK, resulted in around 90% of the island’s surface being stripped (McDonald, 2021).
Drastically altering, transforming and moving the land had great impacts on the water, damaging the underground systems relied upon for generations and forcing reliance on other, imported systems. In November 2020, the desalinisation plant used for all drinking water on the island broke down. This was devastating for the 300–400 people living there. Knowing that desalinisation plants are not a permanent solution, Banaban leaders sought a different one, one that would see them return to the ways their ancestors captured and collected waters in the past. To do this, elders want to rebuild and clean an underground network of sacred caves called te bangabanga (McDonald, 2021). These caves, like the island itself, were damaged through mining. In an article released by The Guardian in 2021, a Banaban elder, Pelenise Alofa, says “For many Banabans, te bangabanga now exists only in the stories and dances passed down through the generations” (McDonald, 2021). As the article explains, “historically, only women could enter the caves, which anchored women’s importance in the community.” To bring back the sacred caves and to restore their ability to catch, store, and supply water to Banabans, therefore, would be to also restore a particular role for women.
When speaking about Banaba in the same Guardian article, Teaiwa reminds us that we cannot look at the damage alone and cannot frame the island and her people as victims. “We can’t just keep telling the story of devastation and vulnerability over and over again,” she says, “Where does the crisis end, if not with justice?” (McDonald, 2021). Similar to calls to protect Mauna Kea, to shut down the fuel facility at Red Hill and end the military use of Pōhakuloa, these issues of water are about the structures that have enabled, or will allow for, their destruction and contamination. Restoring and protecting the flows beneath our feet, in lava rocks or in sacred caves, requires demilitarisation and deoccupation in one context and true compensation and justice from the countries who stripped lands and waters in the other. In Banaba, the caves cannot exist in dance and song alone. As Alofa says, those movements and natural flows must be restored, and the countries responsible for destroying them must be held to account and made responsible for repairing them. To repair them is to heal lands, waters and people at the same time.
As Teaiwa (2015: 7) explains, land and people are linked, just as they are in many other Pacific cultures. “Te aba” “means both land and the people simultaneously,” she writes. Therefore, “there is a critical ontological unity. When speaking of land, one does not say au aba, ‘my land,’ but abau, ‘me-land.’ Te aba is thus an integrated epistemological and ontological complex linking people in deep corporeal and psychic ways to each other, to their ancestors, to their history, and to their physical environment” (Teaiwa, 2015: 7–8). Restoring and reviving te bangabanga, therefore, is not just about the caves themselves, but about the people who are inextricably linked to them, whether they continue to live in Banaba or live in other parts of the world, dispersed and moving like the lands they come from. It is to heal the past, present and future and is to be in service to an Indigenous futurity in the now.
Of course, the natural underground movements of water are also being impacted in other parts of the region. Continuing to stretch out beyond the waters that raised me, out to other parts of the Pacific, any conversation of groundwater must engage in an examination of climate change and the impacts it is having on the waters that feed our peoples. As scientists have explored, in addition to the many threats to freshwater supplies, particularly on atolls, marine overwash can be one of the most devastating. As Bailey (2015: 4470–4471) explains in the context of Pacific low-lying atolls, extreme climate events like tsunamis, storms, rough waves and unusually high tides can result in “complete or partial island inundation by overwash,” which “destroys the fresh groundwater supply as seawater percolates through the coarse-sediment shallow solid profile and salinizes the freshwater lens”. As he further explains, “with rising global sea levels and ongoing shoreline erosion only increasing the threat of overwash occurrence” urgent action and recovery is necessary.
Though I will not pretend to understand the methods employed by scientists to study freshwater lens 4 recovery, I do know that more must be done, not only to prepare for that recovery, but to avoid the damage in the first place. More must be done by all of us, in other words, to move for climate action and for climate justice now. Though Teresia Teaiwa once famously said, “We cry and sweat salt water, so we know that the ocean is really in our blood,” the fact of the matter is that we cannot survive on water made salty by rising sea levels (Hauʻofa, 1998: 392). Though the ocean is in us, as Hauʻofa (1998) once wrote, we cannot drink it. Thus, we must protect the waters beneath our feet, or restore the waters in underground caves, so that we may safeguard the collections of ancient freshness held for us in pockets and crevices.
In her poem “Tell Them,” Jetnil-Kijiner (2017: 66–67) writes about the water, and further, about the connections between people and place that motivate and necessitate such active protection: . . .tell them about the water—how we have seen it rising flooding across our cemeteries gushing over our seawalls and crashing against our homes Tell them what it’s like to see the entire ocean___level___with the land Tell them we are afraid Tell them we don’t know of the politics or the science but we see what’s happening in our own backyard . . . But most importantly you tell them we don’t want to leave we’ve never wanted to leave and that we are nothing without our islands.
Though I’ve never been to her islands, I feel her words and know that intimate connection she speaks of. We are nothing without our islands, and we are nothing without the waters trickling, collecting and falling through them. Therefore, like Jetnil-Kijiner, we must continue to tell them, to tell ourselves, to write, sing, chant, and even whisper of our stories, our realities, our lived experiences of pain and resilience, of intimate and radical relationality, and of the need to protect movement.
As Aguon (2021) reminds us, we as Pacific peoples have much to offer the effort to save our planet, to save our waters: “We have insights born not only of living in close harmony with the Earth,” he says, “but also of having survived so much already—the ravages of extractive industry, the experiments of nuclear powers. We have information vital to the project of recovering the planet’s life-support system.” Though we, as Pacific peoples and those working in the climate change space, can easily succumb to defeat, especially with reports that things are only going to continue to get worse, it is important, he argues, that we remember what our region has to contribute: “. . .the climate-justice movement must listen more carefully to those most vulnerable to the ravages of climate change, such as Oceania’s frontline communities.” To do so, they need to listen to their, and our, stories “stories about the places we call home,” stories about the places we come from, about the places we live in, about the places we are. In his brilliant piece entitled, “To Hell with Drowning,” (2021) he tells stories, stories of resistance and resilience, of Pacific people’s persistence and ingenuity, of their refusal to “drown.” They/we are people working in and for “a future,” he says, “in which good people refuse to simply lie down and die, a future rooted in respect for possibility, a future with room for us all.”
While we live and work in that future, though, we have to acknowledge that Pacific peoples cannot do this work alone. While the world must listen to us, and must learn from our experiences of militarisation, of extraction and exploitation and of devastation caused by climate change, capitalism, and colonialism, they must act with us, feel with us, and move with us. The underground water systems, the aquifers and the wai honua, teach us about preparation, about living in the future, about saving what is beneath our feet so that those who come next will have places to live in, to connect to and to become one with. This is the responsibility: to ensure the waters and futures beneath us can always hū, gush forth with strength.
He wai e inu, he wai e mana, he wai e ola. E ola nō!
E ola nō, there is life: Radical hope in deep waters
Acting upon our responsibility to protect the future not only requires hope, but given the state of our planet and the pressures and obstacles we face, it requires radical hope. We all experience hope on some level, often in anticipation of something to come. As Lear (2006: 103) explains, though, radical hope is different in that “it is directed toward a future goodness that transcends the current ability to understand what it is”. In other words, it “is committed to the bare idea that something good will emerge,” even if everything in our world tries to convince us otherwise. To respond to the queries posed by the editors of this special issue, radical hope is the belief, however far-fetched it may seem, that better ways of being and living are always possible, even if we do not live to see them ourselves. My experiences on Mauna Kea, standing with kiaʻi, chanting and praying to and for the waters beneath it and fighting for deoccupation, decolonisation, and demilitarisation in the region have taught me this. Generational experiences of colonial pain have taught me this. And generational memories of radical hope, seen in the actions of my ancestors, have also taught me this. For Indigenous peoples, to give in to the idea that a future isn’t possible, or that some future good will not emerge, is to accept a fate that has been determined for us: death. We therefore can’t ask whether the future is possible but must instead put our energies into creating the possibility of the future.
Hope, and even radical hope, cannot exist in isolation. It requires work. In his exploration of pedagogies of hope, Freire (1992: 2–3) reminds us that “hope, as an ontological need, demands an anchoring in practice”. Without action and practice, hope, he explains further, can lead to hopelessness, and this kind of hopelessness can be stifling. Our task, therefore, is to always “unveil opportunities for hope, no matter what the obstacles may be”. The stories of wai shared in this paper unveil those opportunities. Though the TMT has threatened our mountain, our water and our place as Indigenous people, I find hope, radical hope, in the fact that it has not been built (and the unwavering belief that it never will be). I find hope in the thousands of people who showed up to stand on the mountain—Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike—in 2019. I find hope in the kiaʻi who stood and chanted, linked in arms, on the mountain in 2015, setting an expectation and a model for non-violent direct action in the spirit of kapu aloha, or a commitment to maintaining aloha, or love, in all spaces. I find hope in the kiaʻi who took immediate action to call the military to account at Red Hill, to pray to and for the waters there and to get the fuel facility shut down. I find hope in the recognition of ancestral ways of knowing and doing, like those motivating a return to practices aimed at restoring water in sacred caves in Banaba. And I find hope in the stories Pacific peoples share of their places, often pained but still breathtakingly beautiful. They are stories of resilience, stories of resistance and stories of refusal.
Refusal can be seen in our unwillingness to accept the impossibility of the future. Building on the work of other scholars, Arvin (2019: 130) discusses what she calls “regenerative refusals,” which are “actions that seek to restore balance and life to Indigenous communities that continue to live with structures of settler colonialism”. Though not all peoples in the Pacific have or continue to experience colonialism in the same way, Arvin’s articulation of “regenerative refusals” is appropriate for thinking about the actions Pacific peoples take to ensure their futures. These refusals, as she further explains, “are not just about voicing dissent but also about enabling a transformed and liberatory future” (Arvin, 2019: 228). The actions to recover and protect the waters that nourish us, and that will nourish people generations from now are refusals to give in to an assumed future of doom, an assumed future where all hope is lost. Such refusals “recognize violence and pain, but do not make that the center of Indigenous identity; rather these refusals highlight the importance of envisioning and enacting different futures that are suffused with more love, humor, connection, and freedom”.
As McDougall (2022) reminds us in the epigraph at the start of this paper, we can follow the example of water. We can continue to flow, and when obstructed, continue to trickle, continue to carve our spaces into the tight nooks and crannies of stones, into the pockets of soil where we can ready ourselves for the future. We can also, like water, honour our long, ancestral memories of place, people, and purpose that will feed our radical hopes for the futures we create now. We can be like the life-giving waters of Kāne, some of which are held deep in the earth where we may not always be seen or heard, but where our movements are always purposeful. That is my radical commitment, my radical hope in movement and action and my Indigenous futurity animated in, for, and through deep waters.
He wai e inu, he wai e mana, he wai e ola. E ola nō!
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
I’d like to offer my mahalo, my deep thanks and appreciation, to all of the kiaʻi who stand for the protection of our sacred spaces, for our lands, our waters and our futures. This is for all of us.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The author received funding from Te Wānanga o Waipapa’s Research Development Fund (RDF) to travel to Hawaiʻi to conduct research for this article.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.