- We are born into a world where we already have meaning.
We have meaning because we are born with a particular kinship.
We're born with a name.
We're born with a spirit being that will return to the land
when we die.
We know that.
I think the West hasn't quite understood the need
to have a spirituality that links to the land
upon which they live.
- Around the world, indigenous people
fight for their islands of sanctuary,
where restoration of the environment and culture
go hand in hand.
- We can live on the land like nobody does.
How come we live this long, and the Australian government
is still running around trying to kill us off?
In Northern Australia, aboriginal clans
confront a mining boom and fight to establish
Indigenous Protected Areas.
And native Hawaiians restore an island regained
after 50 years of bombing.
- We had to challenge US control over this land
with continued occupation in the face of the military.
- If we can fight the most powerful armed force
the world has ever known and win,
the possibilities are endless for other indigenous peoples
throughout the world.
- Australia's Northern Territory is
marked by conflicts over aboriginal lands,
a mine on the McArthur River, the birthplace of the Land
Rights Movement on the Gove Peninsula, and in Arnhem Land,
reclaimed country now under indigenous management.
Unseen by Western eyes, songlines
have guided aboriginal cultures since the era
of creation, the Dream Time.
- The land tracts around the Gove region
are based on what we called songlines, or gudyega.
And that gudyega tells the story like a map.
It's the singing of the map of the country.
So when a person would walk across country,
they would sing that country, and they would name that tree,
and they would name that river, and that would name that rock.
That way, there was a sense of knowing, well,
this is where I am.
I'm not lost.
I can see that sacred site over there.
- European humans have been on the Australian continent
only for about 200 years.
There's absolutely clear archaeological evidence
that Aboriginal people have been here for 50,000 years.
It's the longest continuous existing culture
we know about on planet.
And if you look around the world where nature is still
in plenty, everywhere in those lands,
there are traditional people.
- The natural ecosystem still exists here,
and that's why it's healthy, and the people are healthy.
Countries are healthy.
- The Arnhem Land Plateau is part
of the biggest, oldest, and most diverse
tropical savanna in the world.
In the last century, the plateau was abandoned
by an essential species.
People left Arnhem Land, lured by missions and white towns
and the promise of protection from vigilantes.
After a half century of exile, Gunwinggu people
have come back.
Wamud Namok was the visionary artist who led his people back
to Arnhem Land, where he lived as a child, sheltered
under rock snow covered in his own paintings
and those thousands of years old.
- It's a spiritual country when we look at the whole landscape.
People may think, it's an ordinary hill,
an ordinary rock.
It's an object that is sacred to our understanding.
- His last wish start trying to bring people back and work
in their own country.
It's been done from thousands of years.
- In the hunter-gatherer tradition,
aboriginal stewards of the land find food everywhere and teach
younger generations how to care for species like the sugar bag,
a bee that makes hives in trees.
- For 50,000 years, every plant and animal species
that we see around us today coexisted
with aboriginal people.
So for a start, they must have been doing something right.
- Wamud Namok lived long enough to see
his homeland officially recognized as an Indigenous
Protected Area.
Land management decisions are once again
made by clan elders who have reintroduced traditional ways
of taking care of country.
Early-season controlled burns thin
undergrowth without damaging big trees
and prevent catastrophic wildfires later in the season.
- The great accomplishment of Aboriginal people was to learn
how to tame this fire-prone continent by the intelligent
use of fire.
And when the British came, what they found
were park-like expanses of lightly wooded pastures,
and they thought that they'd found Eden.
And they thought it was natural.
But it wasn't natural.
It was a human-made landscape.
And in 1770, Captain Cook declared the East Coast
of Australia British possession.
And thereafter, according to British law,
Aboriginal people were no longer the owners of their land.
The Anglican chaplain to the colony
declared that Aboriginal people did not have souls.
And this view justified the various attempts
to eliminate local populations.
- The English saw Australia as Terra nullius, No Man's Land,
belonging to no one.
The newcomers were blind to thousands
of sacred natural sites revered by Aboriginal people
as the dwelling places of spirit beings from an ancient past.
Aboriginal defenders of their country
were massacred or imprisoned.
- European powers declared ownership
over other people's lands and enslaved peoples
around the world or destroyed them.
Modern Australia is the result of that history.
- Stolen generations of children were
given to mission schools or white families.
Until the mid-1960s, Aboriginal people
were governed under wildlife laws.
- They simply couldn't believe that these primitives, as they
called us, had a religion, and that the religion was
based on attachment to places imbued with ancestral beings.
- The Western mind is linked to this private property notion.
It's an absolutely diabolical concept
to think that our relationship to that land
is extinguished because some Western law says.
That is madness, but our country has done that.
- No mining on sacred sights!
- The Land Rights movement in Australia
was triggered by mining on sacred sites.
It began in the 1960s with a petition demanding respect
for Aboriginal law painted on tree bark.
Lawsuits and a prolonged occupation
of the capital at Canberra followed.
In 1976, Australia's Northern Territory
made history by enacting the world's first law
to protect indigenous rights to sacred ground,
but conflicts persist.
The McArthur River is an important wildlife
and conservation area, from the dry country to the estuary.
In the last decade, the islands at the mouth of the river
were returned to Aboriginal clans once again.
The family of Steve Johnston still
lives on Saltwater Tucker, food from the sea.
But mining threatens the marine habitat.
60 miles upstream, the McArthur River Mine
extracts zinc from one of the world's largest deposits
and sells most of it to China for rust-proofing steel
and products from cars and bridges
to office towers and warships.
For 20 years, locals have worried
about the environmental impacts of extracting
lead and zinc in the floodplain of a tropical river.
- In 2001, there was a big flood in the river.
We had a good wet that year, and the tiling dams
at the mine site burst their walls and came down the river.
There were thousands of dead fish out in the bay here.
- What do you think's killing the mangrove?
- Well, I think it must be the poison from the mine.
- Two years after the big flood, global mining giant Xstrata
acquired the McArthur River Mine,
and a plan was announced to convert underground tunnels
into an open pit, a less expensive way
to unearth the minerals.
But the zinc deposit is directly under the McArthur River.
Xstrata's solution-- move the river, an ancient pathway
created by the rainbow serpent.
- In the dreaming, the rainbow serpent
journeyed north, conjuring big storms
and carving a broad and winding river in the raw Earth.
Sing to the river.
Sing to country.
Country will hear.
But beware.
The one who enforces the law is always watching.
The spirit of the rainbow serpent
still lives in the water.
- It has been the river of life, a source of water and food
and enjoyment for thousands and thousands of years.
But it's also got an even more significant role in Aboriginal
culture, and that is the sense of spirituality and association
with the river through the gudyega of the rainbow serpent
because it's the rainbow serpent that
weaves its way across the country
and creates the country.
It is powerful, and it needs to be treated with much respect.
Malarndirri McCarthy represented the McArthur River area
in the Northern Territory parliament.
With other officials, she came to Borroloola
to hear local concerns about the mining plan.
- That is the tail of the rainbow snake,
and they're going to cut off that tail.
Why don't you dig up at Aboriginal sites?
That's why we're losing our culture.
- There are no sacred sites affected by this mine,
and that's the report we've got, and we have to listen to that.
- One of the first things we did when we started off
for the proposal for the open pit at McArthur River
was to identify all the cultural sites around the area.
The Gundanji people came up and went
through their sites of significance,
and we've obtained the Aboriginal area protection
certificates for the works that we want to do.
And there's no sacred sites affected, as far as they're
concerned.
- I think the mine can be the economic generator
of the region.
We've never had anything like that before.
Mining is one of those industries
that can link in with a rural tradition like ours.
At the moment, it's television, grog, drugs,
that is capturing a lot of our people.
The mine can give the Aboriginal people here a normal life,
as is possible out here.
- For the first 15 years of operation,
the mine paid no royalties and received millions
in government subsidies.
Most employees were flown in.
Recently, Xstrata has hired some local workers
and has started contributing to a community fund.
Contaminants released by earlier floods
weren't documented by the mine or the government,
but independent monitoring of water quality is now required.
- I was born across the river there.
So we have a stake in what comes downstream from the mine,
and it's been stated that the water is poisoned here.
And that's totally wrong.
- They say we can't eat the mussels.
We can't eat the oysters.
So that's coming from doctors.
They reckon there's too much heavy metals in them.
- Human health depends on the health of the land and water.
But aboriginal culture also depends on respect for the land
as the dwelling place of the sacred.
And now, this line here is the rainbow serpent coming down
the McArthur.
There is drilling tracks right up
to the headwaters of the McArthur,
all the way from Borroloola to McArthur Mine itself.
- Aboriginal people who follow the old traditions believe
that the most important sites are
the places where the ancestral beings remain in their place.
That's where they live, and they live there forever.
There's always a set of rules about how one approaches
rainbow serpent places.
So for instance, one must go with
a senior traditional owner.
- Block your sacred site, or you'll be sick.
- Senior traditional owner Harry Lansen
was not one of Xstrata's paid consultants.
- They new you were the right person to see,
but they were working around him,
working around him every time.
They had no right to tell us what to do.
It's our country.
It's our land right in there.
- When Gundanji families tried to visit their sacred sites
near the McArthur River Mine, they
were blocked by company personnel
and their aboriginal consultants and threatened
with arrest for trespassing.
- We couldn't get back in there today.
That really hurt.
They came in with two vehicles to stop us and a chopper.
- Xstrata's request to move the McArthur River was denied,
but mining company bulldozers broke ground
on the river diversion anyway.
So aboriginal custodians sued, and the court
ruled in their favor.
- It was a win for the Aboriginal people in the Gove
region.
And on that day when the judge made the announcement,
all work on the expansion plan had
to stop because it was illegal.
- They were beaten in the court, but then they
just turned around and legislated the day after
and made new rules.
- Today, government has decided to legislate
to ensure the continued operation of the open cut
section of the McArthur River Mine.
There's hundreds of jobs there, and Cabinet made a decision
based on a lot of facts that we had before us,
and this is the most efficient way to move.
- What are you going to say to the traditional owners
about the river?
When are you going to tell the traditional owners, Claire?
- We're all together.
We must fight this thing.
This ground here, look.
It belongs to our country.
Over here, they will damage our country the wrong way.
They're frightened to show us.
We will start as one, and we will finish as one.
- With bulldozers at work rechanneling the sacred river,
a delegation of elders traveled 17 hours to Darwin
to protest government collusion with industry.
- They crushed our sacred site.
They never listened to aboriginal people, elders,
senior elders.
They've been stomped on.
So it's time for them to stand up and say, hey, you're not
doing this to me anymore.
- Our people had taken a government and a company
to court and had won and felt vindicated by the win
and then felt absolutely demoralized
when goalposts were being moved again.
- We're up here to say no to the people that
are trying to destroy our way of life boy cutting up the river,
diverting it, digging the holes.
And they don't realize what they are doing to us.
It's the river that keeps us going, keep fighting.
- Mining is alive and well in the territories.
- So is our commitment as a territory to our environment.
- If you cut the McArthur River, you
are cutting the rainbow serpent, and there is a great sense
of fear that comes from that.
It is a relationship with the river
that indigenous people want so much for non-aboriginal people
to understand and respect and that no amount of money
can take the place of something that has been within the family
for thousands and thousands of years.
- The McArthur River now runs in a diversion channel.
Xstrata plans to expand again, this time doubling
the size of the mine.
- We have to live in a framework, constantly trying
to defend land and sacred place that governments and developers
want to extinguish.
And so when we come to the country, it's important for us
to wake it up and remind that we haven't neglected it.
We haven't forgotten.
That we are still part of that, and we need
the country to look after us.
- Called by the sound of the didgeridoo, or yaducky,
clans unite at the Garma festival, an annual celebration
at the site where the ancient instrument was first
brought into being.
The festival inspires cultural dialogue
and brings economic benefits from ecotourism.
- This is the last frontier of Aboriginal people still hanging
on to the culture and law and languages and sacred sites.
We are people of the land.
We love our land.
We sit down, and we don't play politics.
Our law is here to stay.
- Galarrwuy Yunupingu has defended sacred sites
from mining for 50 years since he helped his father write
the first bark petition.
His clan territory on the Gove peninsula
is the birthplace of the Land Rights movement
and is now an Indigenous Protected Area.
Under the dance ground lies bauxite,
coveted by the mining industry.
- When white man sees the land, they also a dollar sign.
I will never give away my land for dollars.
That's my practice, to be able to pass it on to my little ones
so that the song cycle must continue.
Whether it is in a dance, whether it is in a song,
it's all related back to the things
you find on and in the land.
- One of the great sorrows, if you like, of modern life
is the extent to which modern urban humans
are so dissociated from the natural world.
So when I talk to aboriginal people about their relationship
to an animal, they can in the same sentence
talk about how tasty it is to eat.
- It's really good for your body.
- And the responsibilities that they have to it.
And I think this is where we have
to get if we want to have a rich natural world
to leave to future generations.
- And I think if we can get the Western people to understand
that they're born inside this world not as astronauts that
have landed from some other alien place,
then I think there'll be a lot more harmony in how
we look after the globe.
- This was Mahatma Gandhi's idea.
We belong to the land.
We are not the owners of the land.
We are the friends of the land, like friends of the Earth.
- In this recovery of our humanity as indigenous peoples
where we rid ourselves of the cloaks of Christianity
or the cloaks of consumerism and remember
who we were supposed to be, it is important to be reverent.
- When you have a sacred place, it's not exactly like a church,
and it's not like a national park.
It's a place that raises the level of awareness
about the mystery and power and possibility and joy
that is present in life.
You know who you are because you are in contact with this place.
- So if there is something that we have to relearn,
it's the idea of sharing and being responsible.
And to learn, you have to have teachers,
and who's your teacher?
The teacher is nature.
- The Hawaiians honored the life forces of nature
and these various energy forms as deities.
Christianity had severed that relationship of our soul
to the land, which is really the heart of our culture
here in Hawaii.
- Most of us grew up loving the land.
We hunt, and we fish, and we gather.
Different places where we know that the ancestors are from--
we worship.
That is all part of being Hawaiian.
Take care of land.
Land takes care of you.
- Guided by stars, early Hawaiians sail double-hulled
canoes across the Pacific, headed for the smallest
of eight Hawaiian Islands.
Kauna Loa Kaho Olawe, in the center of the island chain,
was a place to teach navigation.
Off limits for 50 years of weapons testing,
Kaho Olawe has once again become a place of learning
and a refuge considered sacred from its highest peaks
to the depths of the ocean around it.
- I'm always asking myself the question,
is Kaho Olawe really a sacred place?
It's been always on my mind.
What is sacred?
How does sacred fit into an island?
- For a lot of Hawaiians, if you come here,
you get some direction.
But it also helps you to navigate not only on the ocean,
but in your life.
- Kauna Loa is the ancient men of the island.
It's one of the four major Polynesian gods,
and it's the god of the ocean and everything in the ocean.
This is his realm.
- Kaho Olawe gave us the spiritual connection
to our ancestors and to our spiritual beliefs,
and we were able to call back our gods.
- When Christianity came to Hawaii,
a new god was welcomed into the pantheon worshipped
by Hawaiians, but missionaries said the old gods must die,
and merchants replaced communal sharing with a profit system.
Native Hawaiians who had been rich in land and culture
became the poorest people in the islands.
In 1893, three businessmen overthrew the government
and imprisoned the queen with the help of the US military.
Hawaiian lands were seized, and the language was banned.
American Naval power found a permanent home in the Pacific
and eventually set sights on the island of Kaho Olawe.
- The character of the island is still alive,
and yet this island is being bombarded.
We all experienced the loud noises and vibrations
of the bombs.
We could see the dust coming up every so often
during a military exercise.
Wiped off, wipe out.
A disregard for nature.
- The day after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, the United States
declared war.
It also declared martial law over all Hawaii.
- And the island of Kaho Olawe was taken over
under military law.
It was a weapons test range.
Every major amphibious battle in the Pacific
was first practiced on Kaho Olawe.
- And all of this, what the people of Hawaii
supported because we were so fearful of Japan invading
Hawaii.
- This island is off limits, so you can't go there.
People accepted that for a long period of time.
It wasn't until that era of the late '60s, early '70s
that people started questioning, why can't I go there?
My ancestors used to go there.
How come I can't go there today?
- It was the era of the protests against the war in Vietnam.
It was the era of Wounded Knee, Alcatraz.
It was the era of a lot of unrest.
- Hawaiians were not all happy natives playing music, dancing
the hula, being Beach Boys, and it was time
that we began to do something to challenge
US control over Hawaii.
- The real spiritual and inspirational leader
at the time was George Helm.
He had the vision of Kaho Olawe becoming a place
to get back to our roots as Hawaiians.
- The culture exists only if the life of the land
is perpetuated in righteousness.
- George Helm and the new activist group
Protect Kaho Olawe Ohana, or family,
launched a grassroots campaign to stop the bombing.
- This organization see that Kaho Olawe is protected.
With that, we'll fight the military, politicians,
different ways of thinking.
- It was taking on the power structure, the largest
naval force in the world, and the only thing
that we knew to end the bombing was occupy the island.
- People showed up from all the islands,
got on boats to occupy it, to demand justice
for native Hawaiians.
- And Coast Guard was there to intercept and confiscate
whatever boats were to land.
- So all the boats turned around at that point,
except one boat made it through.
- Those who landed were arrested,
except for Walter Ritte and Emmett
Aluli, who managed to go into the back lands
and begin to explore the island.
- As you walked up to the summit,
you saw more and more dumping of ordnance.
Whether they exploded or not, they were all over the place.
I mean, it was just an ugly scene,
but yet there was beauty in the land.
Kaho Olawe was talking to us.
The voices-- we now called the voice of Kauna Loa.
- And so Walter and Emmett were there
on the island for two nights before they were picked up
by the military and arrested.
- And we worried.
I mean, I worried.
For me personally, it was a felony.
I would not be able to practice medicine.
- Emmett Aluli and George Helm fought back
by suing the US Navy for violating environmental laws.
- This is the seed today of a new revolution.
The kind of revolution we're talking about
is one of consciousness, awareness, facts, figures.
- I mean this is all occurring intensely
and gets more intense when George Helm and Kimo
Mitchell disappear.
- They went to Kaho Olawe, and there was a big storm.
Gale-force winds and huge swells.
- The story that George and chemo
disappeared on a broken surfboard trying
to leave Kaho Olawe.
- People didn't really honestly believe
that they would have done that.
- But did they drown?
Did the sharks take them?
- There's other thoughts that it was
in the interests of many powers to do away with George,
and that they found the opportune moment.
- Their bones, their bodies, their clothes were never found.
We still don't know why, but it's the feeling
from within that they were assassinated because it
was the most powerful movement that Hawaii has ever
seen in 100 years.
- I look at George and Kimo and all of the Kahuna
who have given so much for this island
and have passed on as guides for us now.
They have laid the path down.
They have laid their life down.
A certain time, we needed a fighter.
Now, we need healers.
- The Protect Kaho Olawe Ohana was granted regular access
to the island in 1980, though it took another decade of lawsuits
before a presidential order and congressional action
ended the bombing.
Over three decades, thousands of volunteers
have come ashore with the native Hawaiian activists.
- We need to remind everybody that we
have a kuliana, responsibility to come back and heal
the island, and that's what we do through restoration,
through planting, through making sure that the sacred sites are
protected.
Just coming here giving our blood,
sweat, and tears to the island.
- It's the least we can do to basically continue
on the legacy of our family and friends who back then
in the '70s risked so much of their time and for some,
even their lives.
- There's thousands of other Hawaiians
out there that we want to remind them, hey,
we are a proud nation.
We are a proud people.
We're not the lazy ones.
We're not the ones that should be the highest
rate in the prisons.
We're not the ones that should be the highest
rate of teen pregnancy.
We're in all of those bad categories now,
and we've got to move out of that.
And part of that is, you have to understand where we come from.
Who are our ancestors?
- We purposely bring groups from different generations,
from different vocations to live as a family, as an Ohana.
Life is coming.
This island was never dead.
It was abused.
There was misused.
- As people come to Kaho Olawe, we watch them, check them out,
laugh with them, look at their talents, and they surface.
- Ohana is an extended family, not a nuclear family,
and it's multigenerational, made up of grandparents, parents,
and children and inclusive of those who've passed on
and those yet to come.
- Our commitment in the Protect Kaho Olawe Ohana
is not so much to each other as to the island.
We become an Ohana to each other because we are all
connected to this island.
- We believe that we can call up on the spirits to help us.
We can regain those ancestral memories if we observe
and if we do the ceremonies and if we sweat on the land
to repair it.
- They are the people of the island.
They are the culture practitioners.
They are the people who are doing
these traditional Hawaiian practices.
They are the ones who are doing the spiritual worship.
They're the ones who are creating this way of life
on Kaho Olawe.
- So what is UXO?
It's on unexploded ordnance.
Again, Kaho Olawe was bombed for almost 50 years.
We'll find a lot of stuff on our roads, trails, footpaths,
and riverbeds.
If you guys see metal objects, shiny stuff,
if you don't know what that is, don't touch it.
- 50-caliber casing.
We quite literally find UXO every time we
come out to the island.
We just have to have that one that's in the trail
to do you some harm.
The reason why there's so many unexploded ordnance left
is because back in the day, they were
figuring on a 30% dud ratio.
So for every 100 bombs that you dropped, 30 of those
weren't going to go off.
- I don't think people think about the remnants of war
and what it means after you leave a war zone.
What do you leave behind?
- The navy's cleanup lasted 10 years
and cost taxpayers $400 million.
It wasn't enough.
Live ordnance still hides under the surface.
A quarter of the island was not cleared at all.
- If you guys see this, you've got
to tell Mommy or Daddy or aunties or uncles.
- No visitors have been injured, but the risk remains.
- There are still bombs out there.
The cleanup was as much as they could do
and as much as Congress could afford.
- This crater was formed by a massive explosion which
fractured the island's aquifer, complicating the effort
to restore native plants.
- We have no water.
There's no running water on the island,
so we have to be creative in how to capture water
that comes from the heavens.
- The plants that live here are really hardy, tough plants
because of the environment, just like the people who come here.
We're going off of aloha aina and the love for this place.
That's what we're running on.
That's our fuel.
But are you completing that exchange
by doing something so the land is able to love you back?
That's what you want, right?
- Ecological restoration here requires extra caution
because of unexploded ordnance.
Respect for the land's spiritual values is also essential.
Volunteers are recreating a pilgrimage trail
to circle the island.
- The auna loa means the long trail.
Our ancestors-- they would start this path for us to follow,
and it's our turn now to keep on going with this.
We paved this path, so for our family, our children where
we get kids, they can have something
that they can actually look at and follow.
- Kaho Olawe has always been a training ground.
For the generation today, they're
learning now about their cultural past,
about their ancestors, and who they are.
But also, at the same time, they're
learning about technology, science,
but to keep their foot grounded in the past.
- In the autumn, the sun moves from the shining road of Kaune
into Kaho Olawe's depths.
At the equinox, when day and night are perfectly balanced,
the two gods share the sun.
That is a time to observe and chant,
to entice the wet season to begin.
- So this shrine, Uncle Harry said it was the kaune Kauna Loa
rocks.
So one represented kaune and one Kauna Loa,
and he said it was used to observe the rising of the sun.
The site has its own protective mana
that it wasn't destroyed during the military period.
- We had the opportunity to come here
like no other island in Hawaii and begin repairing the place
and during the ceremonies.
We'll learn together on how to make sure that this survives
the test of erosion and time.
- Regaining the island sparked a Hawaiian Renaissance
that also revived the language.
- One of the most meaningful things
that we do when we're on island is at the end of the day,
we come together and kuu kau kuu kau, or we talk story.
- We need to hear the meaning of sacredness,
why you come to Kaho Olawe.
- I'll take a step forward and say the planet is sacred.
Every single piece of land, whether it's
in Africa or Siberia or America, whatever you want to say.
There it is, sacred.
But it's just at another level.
Kaho Olawe is at a pretty high level.
Waikiki is pretty low.
- I feel challenged to figure out
how to convince the general public that we
need to commit resources to keep Kaho Olawe sacred.
- Kaho Olawe is the first land regained by Hawaiians
since the US overthrow in 1893.
The state of Hawaii now holds the island
in trust for a future sovereign entity.
By statute, Kaho Olawe is protected from commercialism.
But without revenue from commerce or taxes,
continued restoration is in jeopardy,
as federal cleanup funding runs out.
- There is a price tag to the entire restoration
of Kaho Olawe.
How do we pay for that price tag but at the same time
keeping the sanctity of the island intact?
- The question comes about, do we
need to open up commercialism?
For me, I say no.
In the beginning, the people who said, no commercialism.
I think that was a very good decision.
If you were coming here, if it wasn't for money.
- This island belongs to the people of Hawaii,
and it's a Hawaiian cultural reserve.
And that doesn't mean that it's reserved just for Hawaiians,
but it means it is the place for the practice
of Hawaiian culture.
- And we want it not only just protected as a natural area
reserve, but we want the indigenous relationship
of the land protected.
Our uniqueness is that the people of Hawaii
had made that commitment.
- This little seed is going to make a big plant like this.
This place still needs people to take care
of war aina, this sacred land.
It's not just restoration.
It's so much more than that.
It's restoring a place, and it's restoring a people.
- Another way we try to malama Kaho Olawe
is we have the rain ceremony where we call the rains.
We're doing what our ancestors did to remind the rain,
to remind the wind that you have to come to Kaho Olawe.
Please come to Kaho Olawe and bring those rains from mowe.
- Just the thought aloha aina is simple.
Aloha aina.
Love the land.
Everybody who comes here is on that same sense
of purpose and sacredness.
I see magic happen here.
- They take the lessons of Kaho Olawe.
They take the lessons that they learn from each other back
to their homes on different islands, back to the continent,
back to different parts of the world,
and they can remember what Aloha aina is
and what that means to love the place, to love their land,
to listen for the messages, to share, to be kind,
to remember those very simple truths and very simple values
that we as human beings, in our guts, know we should be doing.
- Kaho Olawe is a catalyst.
- Kaho Olawe is going to be the testing ground for us.
- We've got much going for us as Hawaiians.
From almost losing everything, we've
been able to reclaim some land.
We now have an island that can teach to generations ongoing
without interference.
- For indigenous people, the most important thing
is relationship.
We value relationship way beyond anything else.
Relationship to be close, to be next to the tree,
to be next to the water, to be next to the Earth.
- Most of the time, when you ask people,
what is the opposite of love?
They will say hate.
But the opposite of love is indifference.
People are indifferent to the Earth.
What we have in front of us is an enterprise
to repair indifference on a vast scale
and turn it into a loving relationship.
- In this worldwide effort, isolated cultures
show the way for all humanity to meet our obligation to protect
the life of the land.
- We have to have a reverence for the Earth.
God is not out of this world in the sky controlling the world.
Nature is my god.
Earth is my goddess.
These holy, sacred mountains and rivers--
they become my temples.
They become my prayer.
- Sacred places are like spiritual recharge areas,
where we are always not only careful, but prayerful.
No other creatures have free will like we do.
We have the responsibility to be righteous.
Bare feet in the sand, we each arrive
as pilgrims on the islands of our ancestors,
and we listen for the voice of the land.
I hear the voice now.
The prayer is free.
It is lifted it has flown.