Issues surrounding religious groups often boil down to a few key ideas: authority, authenticity, representation, legitimacy. These all feed into one another. A group gains authenticity through representation, and with authenticity they have authority over what is or isn’t legitimate. Authority allows a group, or a few select people, to control the narrative of what is authentic and how different people are represented. One arena where these ideas are clearly at play is among indigenous peoples and the contested lands that they hold sacred.
For years in Australia, the Anangu people have worked to regain authority and control over Uluru, a large red rock in the heart of Australia that is central to many Anangu creation stories.[1] They consider the rock their home, a sacred space meant to be private to outsiders. For years, however, the rock has been a national symbol of Australia, attracting thousands of tourists to climb its face, an activity that was emotionally and spiritually harmful to the Anangu. It was not until 2019 that the Anangu were able to gain enough voice and authority to ban the climbing of Uluru.
Since 1985, when they were granted ownership of the land encompassing Uluru, the Anangu people had to work to prove that Uluru was authentically sacred and that outsiders climbing the rock was culturally harmful. This rock is a home to them, to their culture, and to the spirits of their ancestral beings. Thus, for people to climb on that home and treat it like an amusement park was deeply hurtful. So, the Anangu worked to shift the narrative around tourism to the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, encouraging visitors to learn about and appreciate the Anangu people. They developed cultural tours to showcase their art, traditions, and beliefs, and encouraged visitors to sign a book at the cultural center, “attesting that they shunned the climb”, rather than log their names at the summit of Uluru.[2] The Anangu worked to reinforce their claim that the rock is sacred to them, changing how they and their beliefs are represented to the Australian people.
There are still those who contest the authority of the Anangu over the land. One man who campaigned against the climb’s closing claimed that, “everyone has a right to experience this place on their own terms without being bothered by petty bureaucracy and the religious views of others.”[3] Clearly, this man and many others doubt the authenticity of the Anangu claims that the climb is culturally harmful. However, the Anangu have proven their authenticity to enough of the Australian population to assert authority over Uluru and its visitors.
While the Anangu people have achieved a victory in asserting their authority and the authenticity of their beliefs, other groups are on the reverse side of that struggle. Kanaka Maoli, the native Polynesian people of the Hawaiian Islands, are actively protesting the construction of the Thirty-Meter Telescope (TMT) on Mauna Kea. Mauna Kea, also referred to as Mauna a Wakea, is sacred to Kanaka Maoli, and is central to their religion’s creation story.[4] However, about a dozen observatories have already been built upon its summit because the authorities with control over the mountain deem claims of the mountain’s scientific value more authentic than the Kanaka Maoli claims of Mauna Kea’s sacredness. Now, as a new and massive observatory is being constructed, further desecrating Mauna Kea, Kanaka Maoli are fighting to prove that Mauna Kea is genuinely sacred to them.
One of the ways that people supporting the TMT have justified the project is by denying “that Mauna a Wakea is sacred and questioned the authenticity of ceremonies on and for the mountain on the basis that the Hawaiian religion is defunct.”[5] These claims clearly come from outsiders, which makes you ask, what authority do they have to make this claim? The assumption that Hawaiian religion is a thing of the past, and that there is no reason that science should not take precedence, is wrapped up in issues of settler colonialism and U.S. occupation of Hawaii. A variety of American authorities, including the government, scientific organizations, and universities, have imbued themselves with authority over the people, culture, and resources of the Hawaiian islands.
The assumption of American authority over Hawaii has had a variety of consequences. The overthrowing of the Hawaiian kingdom – recognized by the US as illegal in a 1993 Apology Resolution – firmly established this notion of American authority, taking control of the land away from Kanaka Maoli. The US has since utilized the islands for a range of uses, including the appropriation of sacred sites for science and tourism. Kanaka Maoli and their culture were painted as a thing of the past, reenacted for the sake of foreign tourists, viewed more as a theme than a living culture.
Since the 1970s, however, there has been a movement often referred to as the Hawaiian Renaissance. This has involved a reclaiming of language, religion, and land – essentially, a reclaiming of identity, authenticity, and authority. In the case of the TMT protests, Kanaka Maoli have used ceremonies, chants, offerings, and other religious traditions, showing that the religion is still active.[6] By asserting their culture as a living entity, they are removing it from its status as simply a tourist amusement. Others have taken an academic approach, writing to prove the continued existence of Hawaiian religion. Scholars like Marie Alohalani Brown, Assistant Professor of Religion at the University of Hawaii, have written treatises on the evolution of Hawaiian religion, utilizing her authority as a recognized scholar at an American university to argue that her people’s religion had not become defunct, but is still alive and worthy of spiritual and legal protection.
Not only have protestors been arguing the authenticity of their religion, but they are also pointing out how groups in positions of authority or with more representation have more control over what counts as authentic. Marie Alohalani Brown points out in her treatise on Hawaiian religion that major world religions, with their greater representations, do not have to justify the authenticity and validity of their beliefs and traditions in the same way that Kanaka Maoli have had to do.[7] She also acknowledges that, in the case of Mauna Kea, “the people in power have determined that science trumps perceptions of the sacred.”[8] Thus, she acknowledges how authority feeds into ideas of what is authentic or legitimate. Since the Hawaiian religion lacks representation and authority, their claims of sacredness are deemed inauthentic.
Both Uluru and Mauna Kea are sites of contention between the religious and secular worlds’ claims to authority and authenticity. This type of contest is found all over the world, whether the disagreement is over the use of a location, women’s rights, or the validity of gender and sexual identities. Sometimes it is a fight between for authority between religion and science, or religion and the government. Sometimes it is even a fight between or within religious groups, such as the highly contested Temple Mount in Jerusalem, which has at least 3 different religions claiming authority over this site, arguing that their claim to the site is more authentic than any other. Regardless of what is being fought over, it boils down to the cyclical notions of authority and authenticity, with the achievement of one typically ensuring that the other will follow.
[1] Jaime Tarabay, “A Climbing Ban at Uluru Ends a Chapter. But There’s More to This Australian Story,” NYTimes, published October 24, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/24/world/australia/uluru-climbing-ban.html?searchResultPosition=13
[2] Tarabay.
[3] Marc Hendrickx, quoted in “A Climbing Ban at Uluru Ends a Chapter.”
[4] Michelle Broder Van Dyke, “’A new Hawaiian Renaissance’: how a telescope protest became a movement,” The Guardian, published August 17, 2019. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/aug/16/hawaii-telescope-protest-mauna-kea
[5] Marie Alohalani Brown, “Mauna Kea: Ho’omana Hawai’i and Protecting the Sacred,” Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture 10, no. 2 (2016): 152.
[6] Van Dyke.
[7] Brown, 165.
[8] Brown, 165.
