The future beneath us: Radical hope in deep waters

It can take decades for a single drop of water to filter through the earth to get to an aquifer. The water in aquifers, or underground collections of water, is therefore aged. Understanding this, Indigenous peoples in the Pacific have long been active in safeguarding these deep waters, knowing that our futures are determined by what is beneath us. This is demonstrated in various Pacific and Indigenous-led movements to protect water, including the movement to protect Mauna Kea, a mountain in Hawaiʻi and the proposed site of the controversial Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT). This article will explore the movement to prevent the construction of the TMT, as well as other connected movements in the Pacific, as acts of futurity. While many analyses of this and other movements focus on what happens on land, this article will focus on the aquifers beneath us, arguing that the efforts to prevent construction, destruction, and devastation represent the ways Hawaiian, Pacific, and other Indigenous peoples not only dream of better futures but create them in the present, maintaining an ancestral sense of radical hope in the deep waters that have fed, and will continue to feed, generations.