‘Like A Mighty Wave ‘ is a quite powerful 15 minute short subject documentary by filmmaker Michael Inouye and team.
It documents the passionate protests of Native Hawaiian activists standing together to stop the development of a thirty-meter telescope on the mountain of Mauna Kea, the summit of which is considered to be the most sacred spot on all the Hawaiian islands.
Mauna Kea is a very unique geographical location because it’s a quite tall mountain in the middle of the big island of Hawaii and thus in the middle of the Pacific ocean. This means it’s a very rare spot of high altitude with very little surrounding light pollution so it’s the prime location in the United States for large telescope observation of the starry sky. The hard chafe to the native Hawaiian’s is that it’s their sacred mountain, and although there’s actually very little up on top of it, they keep building these large ass observatories up there, each time tilling the natives “this will be the last one.” So after many decades of these things now being peppered on top of the mountain, in 2019 the natives said no more, resulting in mass arrests of their elders.
The story here is that big science can be just as much a detriment to native spirituality as big oil, as most indigenous protests in the US have typically been against the construction of oil pipelines. So this one is slightly different but reveals all industrialization no matter from what angle is a modern continuing of colonization.
On ultra slow paying Vimeo - http://vimeo.com/378192084
On censor happy YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4J3ZCzHMMPQ