Reflecting upon the role and place of advocacy in relationship to scholar-- ship in the context of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) dispute on Mauna Kea (Hawai'i), I chart shifts in my career regarding activism and advocacy with reference to moving away from the 'purity' demands on scholarship common in religious studies and toward an ethics of engagement more common in Indigenous studies. This framing is in the service of address-- ing questions about the entailments of public engagement, including its demands, rewards, and costs. My primary argument is that in some con-- texts engaged scholarship is the condition of possibility for ethical and theoretically generative scholarship. I distil three basic lessons from my experiences on and around Mauna Kea: (1) the importance of fore- grounding community relationships, (2) the formative role of community led decision-making for charting research and advocacy efforts, and (3) a willingness to recalibrate expectations around academic timelines and outcomes.
