Across Hawai’i’s sprawling islands of towering tree ferns in the wet mountains to the night-blooming maiapilo flower on the coasts, down to the vibrant lionfish in the seas, an Indigenous stewardship and conservation system, known as ahupua’a, is being revived. The traditional system divides the islands into long wedges running from the mountaintops down into the ocean and are the subject of a new report written by leaders from three communities that have successfully restored the Indigenous practice.
“They [ahupuaʻa] are relics of our ancient past, but they’re encoded in our land use and recordation system even until today,” says Hannah Kihalani Springer, one of the authors of the report and an ʻŌiwi (Indigenous Hawaiian) kūpuna (elder). She lives in the ahupua’a of Kaʻūpūlehu on the island of Hawaiʻi, within a 5-mile radius of where her ancestors have for hundreds of years.
Local communities still recognize and live within these Indigenous ancestral territories today. But the state and U.S. government don’t divide land the same way. Instead, they grant private land ownership and manage habitats in isolation from one another with different agencies looking over various aquatic and terrestrial areas. This limits Indigenous people’s ability to live and care for the land in their traditional ways, ecologist Kawika Winter of the Hawai’i Institute of Marine Biology and lead author of the paper tells Mongabay.
Now, after decades of working together to restore their diverse Indigenous land and resource stewardship systems, some communities are seeing their persistence pay off. Their recent report published in Ecology and Society outlines the pathways of three Hawaiian communities, Hāʻena on the island of Kauaʻi, Heʻeia on the island of Oʻahu and Kaʻūpūlehu on the island of Hawaiʻi, who have seen success in navigating American bureaucracy and restoring Indigenous stewardship on a mountain-to-sea scale.
For example, in 2015, the community in Hāʻena established the first fully functional community-based subsistence fishing area in the world as an Indigenous and community conserved area (ICCA). A 2021 five-year study of Hawai’i’s aquatic resources and coral showed improvements since 2015. The report indicated that the richness and abundance of native fishes important to the Hāʻena community for food, like nenue, or chub (of several Kyphosus species), and kala, or Bluespine unicornfish (Naso unicornis), had increased inside the protected area.
“Taking care of the ocean,” rather than “taking from the ocean” is another key principle grounded in harvesting with care for the ecosystem that has led to restrictions on explicitly extractive gear like lay nets and spear guns, catch limits on key species like lobster and limpets and Kaʻūpūlehu’s temporary halt on harvesting marine resources altogether.