Aloha mai kākou,
This month’s Ka Wai Ola centers wai – not only as ocean, but as the continuum of water that shapes life across our pae ʻāina and beyond.
At a recent Kauaʻi island meeting, a beneficiary spoke to the centrality of wai in everything. She raised concerns about Hawaiian-focused charter school haumāna learning on sites where water safety is uncertain. Her manaʻo carried an undeniable truth: without clean water, there is no learning, no health, no future. Her reflections resonated and pointed toward the foundational role of wai in every OHA priority, from education to land stewardship to community wellbeing.
A beloved family member once shared the story of his son’s birth, marked by a rush of water that signaled life arriving into the world. In that awe-filled moment, he named him Kawaiola – lifegiving water. The child grew up drawn to the ocean, finding in it both joy and refuge. Even during the false missile alert years ago, when fear moved across our islands, it was the ocean that held him in calm, safety, and peaceful contentment.
For many of us, wai is both origin and return.
In graduate school at UH Mānoa, I encountered the writings of Epeli Hauʻofa, whose vision of Oceania reshaped how I understood our place in the world: not as small, isolated islands adrift in distant seas, but as peoples connected across vast waterways through movement, memory, and ancestral pathways.
That understanding expanded how I thought about scale, belonging, and power. It challenged notions of wealth rooted only in land or extraction, and instead centered on water – its connectivity, abundance, and capacity to carry people, literally and figuratively.
That shift in perspective shaped my early legal work in East Maui where generations of commercial stream diversions starved once- thriving waterways and communities of the ola that sustained them. Alongside communities fighting to restore streamflow, water was not simply resource, but relationship, responsibility, and inheritance. That hana ultimately set me on my path to OHA.
Wai is also law. Kanawai finds its roots in the governance of water systems; waiwai measures wealth through life-sustaining abundance. Water is never inert – it is movement, exchange, and renewal.
Our origin stories reflect this truth as well. Kalo grows in wai. Streams nourish loʻi. Freshwater flows outward to the muliwai, where river and ocean meet. Currents intermingle, and life begins again. Ka wai ola – life giving water – is not metaphor. It is memory, practice, and future.
This month’s Ka Wai Ola – from marine debris to deep sea mining, from Hōkūleʻa’s voyaging legacy to the stewardship of our ocean spaces – reminds that every story is, in some way, a story of wai.
From the waters that first carried us into life, to the island homes and oceans that sustain us still, to the ancestral pathways and future voyages that remain our inheritance, ka wai ola is not only this publication’s name. It is who we are.
