Restoring People and Place: Building Biocultural Stewardship Through Grassroots Restoration

Abstract

Motivating people to take action on ecological and sociocultural issues within their communities is vital and often difficult. Initiatives that engage people to participate in restoration and other forms of volunteering have the potential for empowering people to act both on large-scales and individual-levels. The increase in biocultural restoration sites in Hawaiʻi contributes to the conservation and restoration of threatened ecosystems while also perpetuating Native Hawaiian practices and Indigenous resurgence. Welcoming people from various backgrounds to participate, these biocultural restoration programs expose people both well-versed in as well as ignorant of the environmental and sociocultural issues in Hawaiʻi to grassroots biocultural efforts, transforming participants’ values and behaviors in the process. Through semi-structured interviews among volunteers, interns, and site managers, participatory observation at volunteer and intern workdays, as well as volunteer surveys, I uncover various ways these experiences foster culturally-embedded ecological citizenship, or biocultural citizenship. Though settler-colonial and capitalistic legacies continue to constrain the progress of these organizations, participants showed signs of biocultural citizenship fostered from experiences that restored their pilina (relationship) to ʻāina and people and empowered them to commit to this mālama ʻāina (taking care of the land) movement. Mechanisms that fostered citizenship included: having embodied experiences with land and food; connecting to nature and culture from a biocultural perspective; building social relationships and community; witnessing their direct impact on the landscape; (re)learning mo’olelo that decolonize particular places; having affective experiences; and (re)articulating one’s identity within the overall movement.