I went to the Mauna Kea gathering today and stood off by myself, the eternal outsider. I think when you decide to share yourself with others, on the page, canvas or carved in stone, you step outside yourself, otherwise how can you see who you are or where you are? I know as a really young boy, I felt apart from everyone around me and I was a seriously popular kid. I guess we could all make that claim to one degree or another, but it has been a very powerful force throughout my life.

The observer is a kind of outside and I always remember looking at what was going on around me and never getting lost in it. Later in my life, writing seemed to be the outlet I had been searching for, but never settling into it.

I went to the march to be part of the body count, which I can’t say is a helluva contribution. Decades ago, the first telescope went up on the mountain and that was the time for the stand. I think the word, sacred, is an absolute, kind of like pregnant. No, I don’t know the history or how it lurched to this kind of impasse. The authorities, whoever the hell they are, totally blew it. Native communities are fractured all over the world and to get one to come together, galvanized in their resolve, takes some seriously stupid thinking.

Standing there, I thought about my time in Santa Fe, NM. I left the urban life of NYC in 1987 and drove west in my little roller skate of a car, a Dodge Colt. I had a handful of cassettes of my favorite music, traveling through a head set and filling my mind with a soundtrack to accompany the thousands of thoughts I had. I was starting a life all by myself, in a place I had visited for less than week, precipitously purchasing a tiny adobe home on that trip.

In my forty plus years in The City, I had never seen a Native American before. I think there are around a dozen Pueblo Indian tribes in and around that part of New Mexico. I don’t know if they are still there, but the downtown plaza featured Indians displaying their jewelry, pottery and other arts. I visited many of the pueblos in my time there and befriended a number of wonderful, wonderful, Native people. No matter how close I got, I knew I was an outsider, a familiar feeling for me anyway.

I had a fabulous life out there in the high desert country. I had one adventure after another. I was even a volunteer fireman, slapping a flashing red light on the roof of my pickup truck, another first for a city boy. Although, they are all written down somewhere, I have never bothered to count all the things I did to make a living, but if I did, you would likely think I was full of shit.

It didn’t take a genius to understand that the Native Americans had lost the war and they were an excruciatingly pained group of people, no matter their tribe or geography. Here is a familiar story for all Hawaiians. Tribes were placed on land with borders. Their children were taken from their homes and made to dress and act white and to believe in Jesus. Their language was forbidden. The reservations were forced to create political systems that mimicked those of the dominant society. They were rationed the most unhealthy food imaginable and forced to be reliant on the government. Things like unemployment, diabetes and suicide became and still are epidemic.

My feelings of being an outsider were compounded by the reality that I was truly outside their world and admission was a non-starter. I wracked my brain over this, wondering what the hell victory could look like for these imprisoned people.

The biggest fear dominant societies have over their indigenous prisoners is their culture, their individuality. No, I didn’t write a doctoral thesis or anything like that, but I found the only answer that made sense to me. They had to preserve their culture, their language and their pride and it was a matter of life and death to teach their children. No, I didn’t run around sharing my private revelation, because that’s not the outsider. Somewhere in the Art of War has got be the idea that the only fights worth fighting are the ones you can win. In the countless professional lives I’ve had, I loved finding solutions to problems and believe they’re always ways to make the impossible possible.

So, there I was, standing under the shade of a huge tree leafed canopy and looking at all the people, who had come together to protest the telescope on Mauna Kea. I thought about my unpublished, unwritten and imagined, doctoral thesis. From what I can see, from the outside, the native Hawaiian culture ain’t going nowhere and there are so many people devoted to its preservation and proliferation. I am huge fan of the heart and the Hawaiian’s beats strong.

That very first spyglass on the mountain was one too many and I think there is a path not yet realized that needs to be taken going forward. Honor and respect are huge in all indigenous cultures and to ignore that as an outsider is a very, very costly mistake. Living in a world of absolutes is a wall between us all.