Mauna Kea is claimed by two different kinds of institution for the same practical reason: both astronomers and Hawaiian tradition value it precisely because so little else interferes with what happens at its summit.
A genealogical mountain
In Hawaiian tradition, Mauna Kea is understood as a piko, a point of genealogical and spiritual connection linking the earth mother Papa and sky father Wakea, ancestral figures in Hawaiian cosmology, and the mountain's upper slopes hold shrines and, by tradition, burial sites, making the summit region sacred as ancestral and cosmological ground rather than only as scenic high terrain.
Why astronomers chose the same summit
Mauna Kea's extreme altitude, dry atmosphere and distance from artificial light pollution make it one of the best sites on Earth for optical and infrared astronomy, which is why more than a dozen telescopes representing multiple countries have been built there since the 1960s, each drawn by the same physical isolation that gives the summit its religious significance in Hawaiian tradition.
Two claims, not easily reconciled
Opposition to further telescope construction, most prominently the long-running dispute over the Thirty Meter Telescope, reflects a genuine conflict between ongoing scientific use and Native Hawaiian assertions that the summit's sacred status limits what further development is appropriate there, a disagreement this entry describes rather than resolves, since both the astronomical and the religious claims to the mountain are substantive rather than one being merely superstition dressed up against science.