Perhaps that headline is a bit too strong. Perhaps not meant as fake news, but clearly this photo is an example of a very creative, fictional recreation of a past event. The photo is real. The story is not.

This photo surfaced on Facebook yesterday in a post apparently aimed at “protectors” of Mauna Kea.

The caption tells a tale.

PROTECTORS FROM 1974 NEAR MAUNA KEA ROAD GOING UP WAIKI’I ROAD – one of the first stand off’s regarding the telescopes.

Uncle Sonny Kaniho, Uncle Andrew Akau along with almost all the Parker Ranch workers & there families, this is one of my first memories of my daddy standing to stop the trucks from bringing up the stuff for build the telescopes.

It does seem to have struck a chord. By early this morning, it had drawn 100 comments and had been shared over 1,000 times.

It is indeed a photo of Sonny Kaniho and Andrew Akau in 1974. No offense meant, but the caption is fiction. The photo has absolutely nothing to do with any telescopes, or stopping trucks from going up the road. That’s definitely a false narrative.

How do I know that it’s a fake story? It’s my photo. It contains my digital watermark. I took the photo back in 1974, during a protest high up on the Big Island’s Parker Ranch.

Kaniho was protesting policies of the Hawaiian Homes Commission and Department of Hawaiian Home Lands that resulted in land being leased to private interests while thousands of Hawaiians sat on waiting lists for years, even decades, for homestead leases on some of the same lands.

Kaniho’s protest involved removing a gate to a Parker Ranch pasture which was held under a lease from DHHL, entering the area, and symbolically claiming it for himself and other Hawaiians who were waiting endlessly for land.

I was among a group of supporters who accompanied Kaniho and were cited for trespassing.

The case was heard later in 1974 at the courthouse in Waimea. During the trial, it was disclosed that the lease on that parcel had expired and that it technically was now public land, not Parker Ranch land. Trespass charges were dismissed.

A small but important event in the history of Hawaiian activism. But it had nothing at all to do with telescopes or protecting Mauna Kea. That story was a work of creative fiction, or perhaps just memory being recreated for modern times.

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