Ikaika Ramones

Abstract The following dialogue—with Indigenous filmmakers and anthropologists Dr. Angelo Baca (Diné/Hopi), Teresa Martinez-Chavez (Zapotec), Dr. Teresa Montoya (Diné), and Dr. Ikaika Ramones (Kanaka ʻŌiwi)—charts the ethical protocols and decisions undertaken in the production of documentary films with and within Indigenous communities. These films underscore the significance of prioritizing culturally specific protocols about knowledge production and its attendant impacts on media circulation.

Abstract Anthropological discussions of difference entail the question of how alterity persists—how counterhegemonic projects are sustained. This article examines Native Hawaiian media practices that subvert hegemonic imaginaries of Hawaiʻi as paradise, critiquing the political cosmology of liberalist settler colonialism, while also maintaining Indigenous alternatives of being in the world.

In the fall of 2014, the Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea seemed inevitable. The large, cutting-edge observatory had gone through an environmental impact study, and been approved by the state Board of Land and Natural Resources in 2011. It would be the latest and largest in a string of telescopes that had been built near the summit since the University of Hawai‘i leased the land in 1968.