**3.** *Ho' ¯ ¯ınana***—To Come to Life**

### *3.1. What Does Ancestral Ritual Look Like?*

In Halau ' ¯ Ohi'a, ritual begins with two practices—the first involves formally requesting ¯ permission to physically and spiritually enter into a sacred space that for our process is the *halau ¯* . When we have been welcomed into this space that is the *halau ¯* , our ritual continues with the building of *kuahu* (altar as portal to the sacred) that is the act of physically and spiritually entering into a sacred space shared by all participants. These are foundational practices that achieve several things. The first

practice reminds us of our humble status as stewards: at the level of individual entering into a shared space with other students; at the level of a student collective entering into sacred dialogue with each other and our broadly defined communities, including as professionals in places we steward; and at the largest level as a fleeting presence on earth defined by *aloha* for all members in our genealogy, including honoring and expressing gratitude for that which precedes us, stewarding and expressing gratitude for that which sustains us today, and cultivating and expressing gratitude for that which will sustain our genealogy into the future.

The second practice guides us to leave behind mundane distractions (work schedules, shopping lists, household tasks) and focus on fundamental and sacred aspects of being a human in community to more fully engage what it means to be in community, to love and be loved, to care for and be cared for, to sustain and be sustained. Entering into the practice of *kuahu* demands that we fully engage what it means to embrace our genealogical connections to place and process (who broadly defined is sacred to us and why), and through embracing, how can we contribute to a collective exploration and deepening of relationship with and *aloha* for our genealogy (how do we make good on sacred devotion; what is the quality and motivation for this devotion; what are the physical, psychological, emotional, and spiritual trajectories for our relationships). By humbly asking for permission to enter into a space and then literally creating a physically, psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually safe space for sacred dialogue and connection, we open the portal for ritual practice to manifest for each participant's connection, growth, learning, and ultimately, personal and collective transformation.

#### *3.2. Remembering Genealogical Relationships through Ritual*

In this section, we share how our genealogical connections can be elucidated and literally manifested through the vehicle of ritual expression. We also share the multiple layers of transformation that have occurred during our time with Halau ' ¯ Ohi'a, with the hope that you will as part of this ¯ paper-as-ritual process identify how to engage and cultivate a sacred space with your colleagues to identify, discuss, and reflect upon the substantial topics discussed here. From the perspective of genealogy, ritual helps us to understand, honor, and enhance our relationships to the places and processes that we steward. Through much of our formal disciplinary training (e.g., sustainability science, natural resource management, conservation biology), many of us were taught explicitly with learning reinforced implicitly that we, as people, are separate from the natural world, that we have dominion over this world, and so it is within our rights and responsibilities to manage and control the resources of this world in ways that maximize the goods, services, and benefits provided to a society. Relationships have only recently become part of academic considerations of the management calculus [22], but when discussed in broader contemporary contexts, relationships are still portrayed as being ancillary to achieving management success.

For example, the practitioner is often asked to distill down the how, when, and where of resource management to simple economic metrics of success, with metrics of success fully occupying the decision-sphere. Within this framework, sacred relationships can be viewed as hindrances: when formed or held by professionals, these relationships may obscure objective evaluation of metrics of success and so complicate assessments of management; when formed or held by biocultural practitioners and communities who are connected to place and process, these sacred relationships may interfere with centralized decision making about place and process; when formed or held by professionals, practitioners, and communities, these sacred relationships may drive outright conflict that prevents implementation of agency-driven decisions. Conversely, by not embracing sacred relationship in sustainability science, resource management, and ecological conservation, professionals limit their capacity to communicate with biocultural practitioners and communities, and engage practitioners and communities in reciprocal stewardship—with each other and with the places and processes of interest.

An important feature of this conflict is in our training as resource and conservation professionals. Specifically, we are trained in universities, and this training is reinforced in the work place in a way that engrains the notion that in order to protect the plants, animals, resources, and places that we care about, we need to support the designation of these places as protected areas, pay professionals to exclude threats (including people) from these areas, federally list species as being of concern, all with the goal of preserving these areas in an isolated and as close to human-free condition as possible. These approaches identify the natural world as commodity (acres treated, numbers of individuals of a listed species saved) to be isolated and locked away. While resource management approaches or conservation practices are often reasonable and important for perpetuating species of concern, the ritual practiced in Halau ' ¯ Ohi'a has shifted assumptions about our role, specifically the role of ¯ kincentric connections, in the care of these places and the sustenance we give to but equally important receive from these places.

Ritual is helping each of us, individually and collectively, to connect to our shared and personal landscapes and seascapes, to the organisms and processes that bring life to these places, and to each other and ourselves as genealogical members of these places. At the foundation of this connection is knowing our places geographically, connecting to our processes that sustain us hydrologically, ecologically, and biogeochemically, and engaging our organisms evolutionarily and taxonomically. However, to attain this depth of understanding, ritual asks us to pause, think, notice, consider, and engage with a readiness to listen, receive, and to express gratitude for that which is living and nonliving in a place. In short, as we might bring many ways of knowing to our relationships with friends and family, so ritual asks us to bring many ways of knowing—intimate, artistic, fun, committed, patient, and sacred ways of knowing—to our places.

Returning to the ritual of presenting yourself to a forest, coastal ecosystem, classroom, or gathering space by first setting your intentions and asking permission to enter (the Hawai'i ritual of the *mele komo* and the act of *kahea ¯* ), this practice establishes a tone of humility and respect that helps us to open our minds and hearts so that we can learn from that place on multiple levels. We are driven to know more intimately and patiently and with greater commitment the human, plant, and animal-people of that place. We use art to express this *aloha* for these places and the beings that make these places home. We express gratitude to these places and beings because we know that they literally sustain us, as a parent who provides for us physically, psychological, emotionally, and spiritually. We know that without these places, we are left impoverished, much as a life without friendship or deep family ties is lesser existence.

Finally, it is through the ritual that we physically offer our voice, our sweat, and our intentions as part of a reciprocal exchange with those places that we are genealogically connected to, and this exchange promotes well-being. The fields of psychology, animal (including human) cognition, and epigenetics, among others, all provide conclusive evidence that the quality of our relationships shape our health, our joy, our capacity for thriving—in short, our well-being. Experiments with non-human primates and more contemporary lessons from understaffed orphanages have reminded us of the simplicity, universality, and ancestral nature of this truth. And while early philosophical writings about our relationships to nature are rich with notions of well-being, contemporary agency-based approaches to conservation and resource management uncomfortably cling to a strictly biophysical model of stewardship that in our view disempowers the steward and the stewarded.

*Ki'i Akea ¯* —Why is it important for humans to recognize our genealogical connections to place? The need to belong and form attachments is a universal *ki'i* among humans. Biophysically, we know that all life on this planet and all forms in this universe come from a single cosmic event—the big bang. The atoms that make up our human bodies, the bodies of our plants, animals, the ocean body, the atmosphere, every form on this planet and beyond, all originate and share an ancestry with stars and the most ancestral of cosmic events. Beyond being physically made up of the same building blocks as our stellar and earth landscapes, environments across the planet all physically nurture us. Our mountains give us life through driving our weather patterns, by being the foundation of our

forests, which in turn cover the watersheds that form our water sources, and by providing the alluvial substrates for our farmlands where cherished members of our human community cultivate the food we eat while sustaining enormously complex ecosystems. This water and food from our mountains, plains, and seas physically sustains us, providing the building blocks for our cells—our skin, brain, intestines, hair, and muscles—in short, our beings. Research demonstrates that when our connections to these places, from childhood [23] to adults [3], includes acknowledging this genealogical connection to our place—our mountain, our stream, our ocean, the socio-ecological landscape, its fabric and features—we recognize that we are as connected and reliant upon them as we are on our life-giving parents and grandparents. With this relationship of connection and reliance come the same responsibilities to care for these mountains and streams that we have to care for our elder family members. One does not need to be Indigenous to a particular place to take responsibility for one's relationship with the places that give us life and sustain us.

*Ki'i Honua*—Yet, we can learn from Indigenous cultures, which often codify kincentric relationships between people and the elements of a regional landscape through legends or tales, poetic texts, dances, or other sources. In Halau ' ¯ Ohi'a, the first ¯ *mele* (chant) and accompanying *hei* (string art) learned by students is "'O Wakea Noho i ¯ a Papah ¯ anaumoku," which details the genealogy ¯ of Hawai'i—all of its islands and its people. It begins with the male entity Wakea (the expansive sky) ¯ joining the female entities Papahanaumoku (she who births islands) and Ho'oh ¯ ok¯ ukalani (she who ¯ affirms the stars in the heavens) to give birth to the Hawaiian archipelago. As part of this genealogical chant or *ko'ihonua*, the union of Wakea and Ho'oh ¯ ok¯ ukalani resulted in the birth of a stillborn child, ¯ who is buried in the earth. From his body grows the first *kalo* or taro plant (*Colocasia esculenta* (L.) Schott, Araceae), Haloanakalaukapalili (H ¯ aloa, literally great breath of the quivering leaf), which becomes the ¯ most important staple crop in Hawai'i. Through this union, a second child is born, also named Haloa, ¯ but this child lives to become the first man and original ancestor of all Hawaiian people [24].

*Ki'i 'Iaka*—The *kalo* plant is foundational to Pacific island communities because for millennia, it was the main focus of one of the most remarkable traditional Indigenous breeding programs known to science as well as being a source of sustenance for Pacific peoples including settlers of Hawai'i. Today, *kalo* continues to be culturally vital despite massive social, agricultural, and ecological changes to Hawai'i's food system [25,26]. In understanding the shared genealogy of the Hawaiian people, the *kalo* plant, the islands, the earth, the sky, the stars, through this chant, we are charged with cultivating, caring for, and protecting those plant, land, ocean, and element siblings and ancestors as if they were family. At a personal level, when we plant, maintain, harvest, and prepare the next generation of *kalo*, we do so with the utmost thought and love. We make sure to never step near the roots of the plant, we diligently weed the patch, we learn the names of the dozens of varieties, and when it is time to harvest, we spend hours cleaning its corms and cuttings, always with an eye to replant and where ever possible share the *huli* (pruned stalk) and the *'oha¯* (intact stalk with leaf and some corm), from which forms the next generation of planting material (Figure 1). This is done so that Haloa is ¯ sustained into the future, and in turn, we as people of Hawai'i are sustained for generations to come. Manu Meyer [4] (p. 15) quotes a legendary *kalo* farmer from Waipi'o Valley, who describes the literal and metaphorical importance of planting the elder sibling *kalo* with integrity and sacred devotion because to do otherwise would hamper the growth and integrity of the harvest and genealogical perpetuation of this foundational agricultural resource. More metaphorically, our relationship with the physical crop is a reflection of how we speak, cultivate, and harvest the fruits of our ideas and actions. Do "we speak powerfully, truthfully, and with purpose or do we think ill, speak ill, and act ill" [4]?

Another example of kinship manifested in action can be found in our marine realm. As a descendent of all of the lifeforms starting from the sky, earth, and stars, we are kin to the *'opelu* fish (*Decapterus macarellus* Cuvier; mackerel scad), a staple of the Ka'u region of Hawai'i Island and coastal ¯ communities across the archipelago. For some of us, when we are harvesting *'opelu*, we look at the fish eye to eye, and we tell it, "I'm going to take your life to sustain me and my family;" we recognize the physical and spiritual reciprocity between us as people and the *'opelu* as an ancestor. After we

have eaten him, we return its body to the ocean. Akin to the relationship between Hawaiians and *kalo*, we honor the *'opelu* for sustaining and nourishing us now and into the future through the entire process from recognition, harvest, ingestion, and returning the ancestor who has fed us back to the source. We, in return, work to sustain the *'opelu* through proper care and management of its surroundings—the coral, the algae, the reef and pelagic fish community, the shellfish—basically, all the features of the *'opelu*'s genealogy that are required to support this species. These features have been gleaned over countless generations of keenly observing trial and error responses of this fish to natural variation in the environment and to traditional management.

**Figure 1.** Halau ' ¯ Ohi'a (inclusive of our children) carefully planting ¯ *kalo* in Pu'ueo, Waipi'o, Hawai'i Island.
