Many months ago, I promised a friend a tweetstorm on my senior thesis, so here it is, long overdue -

Settler Colonialism and the Making of the Lick Observatory, 1846-1919: a

Many non-Indigenous astronomers still think the relationship between settler colonialism and astronomy starts and ends with Kitt Peak and Mauna Kea. Nope!

Also, a large % of the scholarship on science and structures of oppression - particularly around colonialism and land - focuses on biomedical sciences, engineering, agriculture, etc. But physics and physical sciences have these histories too!

And finally, most narratives about the origins of colonial American astronomy focus on natural philosophy & co and its New England/European inheritance. The 19th + early 20th centuries and the American West tell a different story about the development of scientific institutions.

So where do all of these historical threads come together? My answer is the Lick Observatory, the first permanently occupied mountaintop observatory in the world.

I argue that that the Lick Observatory is fundamentally entangled in its settler-colonial context in four main ways: the conditions for its establishment, land acquisition, colonial capitalist motivations, and settler-colonial assumptions about land and resource use.

The Lick Observatory was built on a mountain near San Jose in 1888 and funded by James Lick, a prominent California philanthropist whose own convoluted history I won't get into.

This mountain has seen many layers of colonial violence. The name itself - Mount Hamilton - is emblematic of that; geologic surveyors named it in 1861, but it had long since been called La Sierra de Santa Isabel by Spanish settlers, who had brought their own forms of colonialism.

The 16th to 19th-century Spanish missions in the bay area - the ancestral homeland of many Ohlone groups, some of whom are now fighting for federal re-recognition - have their own complicated and violent history that you can read lots about.

When the Mexican secularization act dismantled the missions in 1833, half of the extensive land holdings were supposed to be returned to Indigenous Californian families. They weren't, and this codified the place of these lands in the colonial capitalist market.

After the Mexican-American War, itself rooted in Manifest Destiny, the United States took control of California in the midst of growing tensions around chattel slavery. California was admitted as a "free state," but-

despite the well-documented and ongoing resistance of Indigenous Californians to systems of marginalization, colonial violence, and oppression, white settlers instituted a racially stratified system of unfree labor.

Around 1850, the California Genocide began - exacerbated by the Gold Rush - and over the next decade, settlers murdered thousands of Indigenous Californians. When surveyors "explored" Mount Hamilton in 1861, it was not terra nullius, it was hallowed ground.

Meanwhile, James Lick had just arrived in California and was busy building wealth by buying up land. The same land that had been turned into ranchos after secularization? I don't know. But colonized land nonetheless.

If I keep tweeting in as much detail as I have been, this thread will be half the length of my thesis, so let it suffice to say that James Lick probably wanted to establish a legacy through scientific philanthropy because of a combination of-

colonial obsessions with classifying and predicting the natural world, particularly in the American West, and growing tensions around wealth inequality (concerns shared by Rockefeller, Carnegie, and co).

Fast forward to how they actually got the land. The tl;dr is that the L.O. benefited from the same systems of dispossession that have enabled a lot of other settler colonial "development."

Tangent to talk about the Morrill Land-Grant College Act of 1862! This act empowered states to sell "public" land in order to fund universities. But how is land made "public"? Through unratified treaties with tribal nations, direct seizure, or other methods of dispossession.

These transactions were predicated on colonial notions about how to properly "use" land, i.e. make it productive for capitalism. They were also evident in correspondence about purchases that the Lick Observatory made of neighboring ranches in the years after its initial-

land acquisitions, which were, surprise surprise, tracts of land grant land. One tract, for example, had become “public” through an unratified 1851 treaty the US used to seize >2.5 million acres from Apangasse, Awallache, Aplache, Coconoon, Potoyanti, and Siyante tribes.

(I will put sources at the end too but please go look at https://landgrabu.org . And yeah @MIT, that's us too.)

Finally: remember when I said the L.O. was the first permanently occupied observatory? The weirdest, and in some ways most insidious, part of this story might be that the observatory became a microcosm of some of the problems with settler colonialism's relationship to "nature."

The "small colony on the mountain" that consisted of support staff and their families were plagued by water shortages for years. The observatory director kept ordering new tanks, pipes, and pumps, only to be met with more shortages the next season.

If it weren't for the tragedy of settler colonial attempts to destroy - and simply failures to recognize - Indigenous land management practices, I would be amused by the folly of these technological interventions. But the irony is that the water shortages were probably-

exacerbated (or caused?) by exploitative technologies of pumping and mining that developed during the Gold Rush. Along with corporate organization (capital investment, wage labor, etc.), the Gold Rush brought industrial mining, which had disastrous effects on the environment and-

agriculture, including lowering the water table and filling streams with sediment. These same techniques produced the industries that sold pipes, motors, and pumps to the Lick Observatory half a century later to manage its water supply.

The L.O. also dealt with the problem of hunters, and eventually leveraged the legal system of game preserves and the idea of the observatory as a "reservation" to make it a game refuge.

This thread needs to end, but these two examples in greater detail demonstrate how seemingly incongruous ideas about the observatory's identity as a heroically flourishing colony and as a pure, protected refuge-

are two sides of the same coin. Settler colonial land management caused the ecological degradation of California, which in turn necessitated reactionary environmental management systems.

Settler colonial epistemes of "civilization" and "wilderness," and attempts to control the physical environment through competing practices of exploitation and conservation, are laid bare in the observatory's life as a colony.

None of these ideas are original or mine. But I think they all come together in the history Lick Observatory to illustrate one of the *many* ways "modern" astronomy has always been entangled in and shaped by its settler-colonial origins.

Things I did not research that I would love to learn more about:
- Labor: who actually built the observatory?
- Relationships between telescopes and their affiliated universities
- Prestige, power, and the astronomers
- "Public science" in the 19th and early 20th century

Sources start on page 46 of my typo-ridden thesis here: https://charlotteminsky.com/thesis.pdf , and I also owe any coherence this had to my unparalleled thesis committee: Chris Capozzola, Craig Steven Wilder, and Kenda Mutongi.

This got some unexpected attention overnight so I want to highlight in-thread a few of the many people that have been influential in my thinking about this: Joseph Salazar, Leandra Swanner, Mark Spence, @lrieppel, @IBJIYONGI, and the http://landgrabu.org  project

And clarify that the point is not that the L.O. is unique or Bad (TM), it’s to tease out one more instance of a point that MANY INDIGINEOUS SCHOLARS AND OTHERS HAVE MADE FOR A LONG TIME, which is that *all of* American science and higher ed is part of the history of colonization.

https://twitter.com/extrasolarchar/status/1277350550703669248?s=21 https://twitter.com/extrasolarchar/status/1277350550703669248

https://twitter.com/indigenousxca/status/1282831290815803393?s=21 https://twitter.com/IndigenousXca/status/1282831290815803393

Anyway drop your $$ in the settlersaturday hashtag if you’re not Indigenous (not tagging so as to not put this tweet in the hashtag but it’s easy to search) and https://www.lakotalaw.org/our-campaigns