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COMMUNITY CASE STUDY article
Front. Sustain.
Sec. Resilience
Volume 5 - 2024 |
doi: 10.3389/frsus.2024.1461787
This article is part of the Research Topic UN International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples: Indigenous Peoples and Climate Resilience View all 3 articles
Kīpuka Kuleana: Restoring Relationships to Place and Strengthening Climate Adaptation Through a Community-Based Land Trust
Provisionally accepted- 1 Kīpuka Kuleana, Princeville, United States
- 2 University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, Hawaii, United States
- 3 School of Hawaiian Knowledge, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, Hawaii, United States
- 4 William S. Richardson School of Law, University of Hawaii at Manoa, Honolulu, Hawaii, United States
- 5 Huliauapaʻa, Kailua, Honolulu County, Hawaii, United States
- 6 Livelihoods Knowledge Exchange Network, Santa Barbara, United States
This community case study explores how Kīpuka Kuleana, a Native Hawaiian women-led community-based land trust, revitalizes relationships between people and ʻāina (lands and waters) to perpetuate cultural practices that build climate resilience in Kauaʻi, Hawaiʻi. We demonstrate that ancestral land protection is foundational to climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts on Kauaʻi, an isolated rural island in the Pacific Ocean increasingly vulnerable to flooding and landslides, sea level rise, and other climate-related impacts. Kīpuka Kuleana strives to keep kupa ʻāina ʻohana (long-time families) -the anchors of community who care for, teach from, and maintain balance in their fragile environments -rooted to their homes amidst increasing gentrification, land dispossession, and climate-related disasters. Through our interwoven programs, we return lands to communities and communities to lands, a reciprocal process known as ʻāina hoʻi, to restore access to ʻāina for collective caretaking, place-based education, and spiritual rejuvenation. Our land trust partners with Indigenous and allied groups in Hawaiʻi, Louisiana, California and Borikén (Puerto Rico) to share learnings tied to land protection, disaster resilience, adaptation, and rematriation, or the restoration of relationships between Indigenous people and ancestral lands. We offer some of those lessons to illustrate how Indigenous-led community-based land trusts and stewardship efforts forge new possibilities for adapting in place and cultivating more connected, resilient ecosystems stewarded under Indigenous leadership, in alignment with the "Land Back" movement.
Keywords: Native Hawaiian, Community land trust, Indigenous resilience, Climate Change, adaptation
Received: 09 Jul 2024; Accepted: 30 Aug 2024.
Copyright: © 2024 Barger, Vaughan, Aiu, Akutagawa, Beall, Luck, Cordy and Maldonado. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Sarah Barger, Kīpuka Kuleana, Princeville, United States
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