**Preface to "Biocultural Restoration in Hawai'i"**

The period of Euro-American colonization across the globe, commencing some three centuries prior to the industrial revolution, devastated Indigenous countries, societies, and cultures. This period ushered in an era of population collapses and extinctions across the whole social-ecological spectrum that was not limited to biodiversity, but included a loss of cultures, languages, knowledge and practices, and this trend of co-extinction continues to this day. Of paramount importance is the accompanying loss of the social-ecological systems that Indigenous societies developed and managed, along with the biodiversity within them. Functionally, the process of colonization severed relationships between Indigenous People and their ancestors, their ancestral places, their resources, and the biodiversity that shaped their cultural identity. The historic record and most scholarship indicate that few Indigenous cultures avoided the most devastating impacts of colonization. None were left untouched. In the later part of the 20th century, conversations about 'decolonization' began to emerge, fueled by the ideas of philosophers such as Ngug˜ ˜ı wa Thiong'o, poets such as John Trudell, and other dynamic thinkers around the world. These conversations identified the negative impacts of imposing foreign world views and languages on Indigenous Peoples, and they called for shedding those in order to pave the way for a reawakening and revival of Indigenous ontologies, epistemologies, and languages. Such conversations created an opportunity to highlight another path, one that illuminates the many positive outcomes of the place-based approaches of Indigenous cultures.

The focus of this book on 'biocultural restoration,' could be viewed as a restorative stage of the decolonization process. Biocultural restoration endeavors to reconnect the relationships of Indigenous people and their environment with the goal of restoring health and function to both People and Place. The restoration of Indigenous ontologies, epistemologies, and languages is an inherent part of the process. These ways of knowing, often embedded in Indigenous environmental stories and oral histories, perpetuate ancestral memory in knowledge systems that convey virtues, morals ideals, and philosophies. Biocultural restoration, therefore, entails a revival of Indigenous practices at various scales from the individual, to the family, to the community; and when carried out on a landscape scale, such efforts have broader impacts across the social-ecological system.

More than four decades into an Indigenous cultural renaissance, Hawai'i has emerged as a globally recognized model for biocultural restoration. This societal movement is a major reason why Hawai'i was chosen as the host of the World Conservation Congress in 2016. The event brought nearly 10,000 international scholars and policy makers who desired tangible examples of the effectiveness of biocultural restoration. A paucity of publications in Hawai'i and elsewhere served as an impetus for a 2019 Special Issue in Sustainability focusing on this topic. The collection of manuscripts reflect conversations among various grassroots sharing networks. The topics range from philosophical to theoretical to empirical, and collectively reflect the current dynamics of Hawaiian social-ecological systems within the context of temporal ecology. Every contribution to this volume involved Kanaka ¯ 'Oiwi (Indigenous Hawaiians), which is cumulatively the largest collection of scientific publications ¯ by Kanaka ' ¯ Oiwi. Moreover, more than half the authors are women, and two of the manuscripts ¯ had a 100% women authorship. Perhaps it is not a coincidence that a collection of work regarding caring for and restoring our mother earth is created by Indigenous peoples and women in particular. As Indigenous scholars endeavor to translate ancestral wisdom for a contemporary global audience, science is increasingly becoming one of the more effective ways of doing so. This volume is a tangible example of such efforts.
