It's an interesting topic. I find I side with the telescope. The objections are phrased on religious grounds, but they boil down to a claim of ownership. There's no particular practice or ritual that this particular telescope would disturb, it's purely symbolic. They are claiming the entire mountain.
Yeah, we had a similar problem with some of the extremists in our local indigenous population. There exists in New Zealand a small core group of Maori (a small minority within Maori it self) who are nothing more than opportunists. They want special privileges and special consideration, calling themselves "native" to New Zealand, even though in fact they are no more native to these Islands than the Europeans who came here 400 years after they did. They make all kinds of outrageous claims, for example
► they claim exclusive ownership of the coastal waters of New Zealand, and all the fish and resources in the sea.
► they claim ownership of radio waves and the radio frequency spectrum, despite the fact that radio wasn't even invented for a hundred years after European colonization,
► they claim ownership of the airspace and the space above New Zealand. Some of them even tried to send NASA a bill for satellites that pass over New Zealand!
► they claim to own the wind as well, now that there is money to be made from wind power generation.
Finally, they claim ownership of all the water in our rivers and lakes, and all the water that falls out of the sky. At one point we had some Maori "kaumatua" (a sort of tribal chief/elder statesman) claiming that all the water in New Zealand belonged to Maori, that they alone were responsible for its management, and that the white people should pay Maori for every drop they used for anything; drinking, irrigation, manufacturing, even the local car wash.
Well, I for one, would be quite happy to accept their claim to ownership of the rivers, lakes, the water that falls from the sky, and the wind, provided that they are prepared to underwrite and pay all the costs of the damage done when their winds causes storm damage, when their rain causes flooding and causes rivers to burst their banks and flood millions of acres of farmland, and When that was pointed out to them, they dropped their claim to be responsible for its management, but they still said the water was theirs and they wanted the money.
In this case of the Hawaii telescope, I am very, very suspicious when these kinds of claims suddenly appear out of nowhere. Where were these claims back in the early-1960s when Gerard Kuiper first looked at Mauna Kea as a possible observatory site, or in 1967 when construction started?
