By Naiʻa Ulumaimalu Lewis
The first time I crossed the threshold into the Kūpuna Islands was the summer of 2008. I had started working for Papahānaumokuākea the year before and was supporting the education and outreach team on a Pacific educators’ cruise aboard the NOAA ship Hiʻialakai for the International Year of the Reef.
Over a two-week expedition, we studied coral at its source and shared the work we’d been doing for years to bring back to our communities and classrooms. Most days were on the ocean, but we walked Nihoa, snorkeled in the waters around Mokumanamana – privileged to deliver Dr. Kekuewa Kikiloi, a UH professor, and Anan Raymond of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, for several days on Mokumanamana.
What I came to learn the moment I slipped into the waters around one of our most sacred geographies, is that the ocean around an atoll has a way of clarifying you. The line that passes near Mokumanamana is Ke Alanui Polohiwa a Kāne, the Black Shining Road of Kāne, the Tropic of Cancer.
North of this line is Pō, the realm of ancestors and akua. South of this line is Ao, where Kānaka live. Sliding into the depths of the Moananui, I crossed the membrane. My experience returned me anew, newly clear about my place, my purpose, and the core of who I had always been.
This was reaffirmed by the transformation in Kekuewa and Anan when we returned for them.
In 2010, I was given a second chance to access the Papahānaumokuākea. Getting one chance is a privilege. Going twice is magic. Kūpuna intervention. Ironically, the U.S. federal government supported my access to some of the most sacred places to my Native Hawaiian community.
I am not saying this as a thank-you but as a reminder: there are many ways to leverage the present political situation toward pono, even when it takes longer than we’d like, and it does not feel as if we are moving the needle.
My second access was by plane. We landed on Kuaihelani (Midway). There, I put my feet on ʻāina that had witnessed nearly 28 million years of evolution and only recent human visitation.
Surrounded by thousands of nesting mōlī (albatross), I was once again given the ability to see myself at scale – very small in the vast natural world. Aboard the ship, the ocean was everything. On Kuaihelani, my feet were able to build a relationship with the sands of our collective birth across days.
As our ancestors would have it, our visit fell during the summer solstice. On the day we did protocol, we learned that at the same hour, colleagues aboard Hiʻialakai (the ship I’d sailed in 2008) were doing similar protocol near Mokumanamana. The veil went thin again. The 530 miles between us was real, but we transcended it.
What Mokumanamana clarified for me, Kuaihelani gave me the spine to act on. The distance between Ao and Pō is not a barrier. I came home with the courage for the hard decisions about my own path – decisions some people would prefer I not make, but I made them.
The Kūpuna Islands do not ask us to move there. They ask us to move with intent, here.
Naiʻa Lewis worked for NOAA Papahānaumokuākea between 2007–2016 and continues to act as the executive director for Big Ocean and is the lead author of “Large-Scale Marine Protected Areas: Guidelines for Design and Management” (IUCN Protected Planet series). She is the founder of Salted Logic and Studio Wā. Her current work centers on temporal sovereignty.
