Space exploration reflects settler logics of justified conquest

But we cannot forget the concept of terra nullius and how our exploration of the stars has real effects on Indigenous landscapes here on Earth. We also cannot forget about forms of space exploration that may not be explicitly tied to military means. Doing so deprives us of another lens through which to view the tensions between settler and Indigenous views of space and to which end is useful. Indeed, even reinscribing of Indigenous space towards ‘peaceful’ settler space exploration have very real consequences for Indigenous sovereignty and Indigenous spaces. Perhaps the most prominent example of the fractures between settler space exploration and Indigenous peoples is the on-going controversy surrounding the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea, on the island of Hawaii. While an extremely detailed description of the processes of construction on the TMT and the opposition presented to it by Native Hawai’ians and their allies is beyond the scope of this essay, and in fact is already expertly done by a number of scholars[ii], the controversy surrounding TMT is a prime example of the logics presented towards ‘space’ in both Earth-bound and beyond-Earth contexts by the settler colonial state as well as the violence that these logics place upon Indigenous spaces, such as Mauna Kea, which in particular already plays host to a number of telescopes and observatories (Witze, 2020). In particular, astronomers such as Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, Lucianne Walkowicz, and others have taken decisive action to push back against the idea that settler scientific advancement via space exploration should take precedence over Indigenous sovereignty in Earth-space. Prescod-Weinstein and Walkowicz, alongside Sarah Tuttle, Brian Nord and Hilding Neilson (2020) make clear that settler scientific pursuits such as building the TMT are simply new footnotes in a long history of colonial disrespect of Indigenous people and Indigenous spaces in the name of science, and that astronomy is not innocent of this disrespect. In fact, Native Hawai’ian scholars such as Iokepa Casumbal-Salazar strike at the heart of the professed neutrality of sciences like astronomy: One scientist told me that astronomy is a “benign science” because it is based on observation, and that it is universally beneficial because it offers “basic human knowledge” that everyone should know “like human anatomy.” Such a statement underscores the cultural bias within conventional notions of what constitutes the “human” and “knowledge.” In the absence of a critical self-reflection on this inherent ethnocentrism, the tacit claim to universal truth reproduces the cultural supremacy of Western science as self-evident. Here, the needs of astronomers for tall peaks in remote locations supplant the needs of Indigenous communities on whose ancestral territories these observatories are built (2017: 8). As Casumbal-Salazar and other scholars who have written about the TMT and the violence that has been done to Native Hawai’ians (such as police actions designed to dislodge blockades that prevented construction) as well as the potential violence to come such as the construction of the telescope have skillfully said, when it comes to the infringement upon Indigenous space by settler scientific endeavors tied to space exploration, there is no neutrality to be had—dispossession and violence are dispossession and violence, no matter the potential ‘good for humanity’ that might come about through these things. Such contestations over outer space and ethical engagement with previously unknown spaces will continue to happen. Outer space is not the first ‘final frontier’ (apologies to Gene Roddenberry) that has been discussed in settler logics and academic spaces. In terms of settler colonialism, scholars have written about how Antarctica was initially thought of as the ‘perfect’ settler colony—land that could be had without the messy business of pushing Indigenous people off of it (see Howkins 2010). Of course, we know now that engagement with Antarctica should be constrained by ecological concern—who is to say that these concerns will be heeded in ‘unpopulated’ space? What can be done to push back against these settler logics?