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Walter Ritte is standing in rain and fog, he can see the Hawaiian flags flying and thousands of people gathered in the lava fields surrounding Mauna Kea, Hawaii’s most sacred volcano.

“I was arrested, I returned the same day and I will be here as long as it takes,” he told Postmedia News in a phone interview Monday.

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The 70-year-old Indigenous activist was one of 35 elders protesting the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) on Mauna Kea, a mountain considered sacred to Hawaii’s native people, on the island of Hawaii.

On Friday, the University of B.C. released a statement calling for the astronomy community to place a 60-day moratorium on construction of the telescope to ensure the rights of Indigenous peoples are respected. The statement came in response to a letter signed by dozens of UBC faculty members advocating for protection of the mountain.

On July 25, several dozen UBC faculty members wrote an open letter to the school’s president, Santa Ono, urging the university, which is involved with TMT through its membership in the Association of Canadian Universities for Research in Astronomy (ACURA), to suspend its involvement with the project.