Kua’aina Ulu Auamo

Kuaʻāina Ulu ʻAuamo (KUA) means “grassroots growing through shared responsibility.” Our acronym means “backbone.” KUA was created in 2011 by a statewide network of grassroots rural local and Native Hawaiian community based natural resource management groups called E Alu Pū (“move forward together”). KUA facilitates network movements to empower communities in the care of their biocultural heritage to achieve ‘āina momona— an abundant, productive ecological system that supports community well-being. Today we support three statewide networks: E Alu Pū; a Hawaiian fishpond network called the Hui Mālama Loko Iʻa; and the Limu Hui, a group of Limu (native seaweed) practitioners.

Here's the Issue:

Subsistence fishers, farmers, gatherers, families and culture-bearers are key environmental stewards in our communities. Community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) is an ancestral practice based on generations of intimate traditional ecological knowledge and stewardship; practices that local and Native Hawaiian communities pass on to this day. Degradation and loss of resources and traditional knowledge that supported these practices due to development, land/habitat loss, generational trauma, climate change and the extremely high cost of living presents unique challenges and opportunities. At the local level, the under-capacitated state agencies that govern natural resources in our fishing grounds, streams, forests, & kula (open pastures) are rife with extraction, misuse or neglect. Increased local, national and global policy dialogue, research and literature on effective community-based natural resource management (CBNRM) point to indigenous and local community capacity as key to successful conservation outcomes and addressing climate change as a planet.

Our Solution:

KUA was created by local and Native Hawaiian movement networks to support and empower a collective voice and actions for CBNRM in Hawaiʻi. KUA works to transform environmental stewardship in Hawaiʻi in small but pivotal ways to impact the governance and mindsets around education, job creation, food systems, enforcement, citizen stewardship and collective care. Support for this proposal will help KUA communities be seen, heard, empowered and united through three goals in 2021-2022:

Uplift lawaiʻa (Native fisher) voices to revive an ethic of Lawaiʻa Pono – to ʻfish virtuouslyʻ; to fish in a Hawaiian way – through advocacy for community fishery management goals;

Support increased knowledge and capacity for loko iʻa (indigenous aquaculture) practitioners through the research, planning and development of restorative hatcheries in tandem with their restoration work; and

Help a community of seaweed gatherers and partners promote and pass on knowledge to future generations of limu’s (native seaweed) significance.

We're the right people to do the work because:

KUA was created by and for local and Native Hawaiian CBNRM initiatives. Our three networks touch on 70+ different regions across 6 of the 8 main Hawaiian islands.

KUA facilitates statewide CBNRM networks to help communities leverage a collective role and tradition of CBNRM and an empowered voice for indigenous and local knowledge and environmental governance. KUA’s board members are community-based practitioners or local an Native Hawaiian academic, cultural or institutional leaders.

KUA is a team of ten (8 FTE, 2 PTE). We employ a core community‐driven approach that supports our three statewide networks in large annual convenings. Gatherings, our core mechanism, develop network governance and generative focus groups, capacity workshops, knowledge, community exchange and advocacy initiatives etc..

KUA’s has helped communities establish new policies, programs and jobs. KUA also connects their story with a global movement of indigenous people and local communities.

Manisha G. Bewtra, AICP

Planning, Mobility, and Development Advisor to Tucson Mayor Regina Romero

Manisha Bewtra, AICP (she/her) is Mayor Romero’s Planning, Mobility, and Development Advisor. In this role, she leverages her passion for planning for thriving, healthy, and inclusive communities with her love for policy-making and politics as the Mayor’s liaison on transportation and land use issues. Manisha is an experienced public process facilitator and project manager and works collaboratively with the Mayor’s team and city departments to apply an equity lens to all city initiatives.
Manisha has built her career on bringing divergent perspectives together, facilitating conversations around change, and generating data-informed solutions that move communities forward. She is driven by public service and champions equitable policies and inclusive community engagement.
Prior to her current role, she worked at the Metropolitan Area Planning Council in Boston as a senior regional planner and the manager of the analytics team, at the Massachusetts Housing Partnership where she was a statewide technical assistance provider, as an adjunct city planning instructor for Master’s degree program courses at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and at Arizona State University, and in municipal government and nonprofit community development organizations in Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., Baltimore, and Chandler, Arizona.
Manisha has served on various equity-focused organizations and committees and is a graduate of Emerge Massachusetts, the Initiative for Diversity in Civic Leadership, and the Massachusetts Commonwealth Seminar, three organizations dedicated to training underrepresented groups to influence public policy and to run for office. She has a Master of City Planning degree from the University of Pennsylvania, a BA in Economics and Art from The University of Iowa, and is a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners. She currently serves as a member at large for the American Planning Association Arizona Southern Section and is a member of the executive team for the Asian American and Political Islander Caucus for the Arizona Democratic Party.
Before moving to Tucson in the summer of 2020, she lived in the Boston area for twelve years. During her years in Melrose, Massachusetts, she served as a Human Rights Commissioner and subsequently as a City Councilor. When elected to the Melrose City Council, she became the first person of color ever to serve in elected office in Melrose. She grew up in Iowa and identifies as Desi/Indian-American. She, her husband, and her son felt welcomed and right at home in Tucson when they moved here – even in spite of a pandemic and searing summer heat.

Arnie Saiki

research, writer, program director

Broadly focusing on regional economic and geopolitical themes in the Asia and Pacific regions, Arnie Saiki is currently leading a working group on data, statistics and valuation in the Pacific. His book “Economic and Ecological Accounting: Towards Intemerate Values,” was published last year by the Pacific Conference of Churches, the Pacific Theological College and the University of the South Pacific.

Since the publication, this campaign has been introduced to the Ecological and Economic Justice program at the World Council of Churches and he is participating in a G8 Interfaith forum for the inclusion of Wellbeing indicators into our economic accounts.

While national statistics and ecological accounting normally fall under the purview of government, academic or international institutions, Arnie has been campaigning in democratizing our ecological data, seeking support for a proof-of-concept accounting program that would enable poor, impacted, and indigenous peoples to actively participate in how we account for our socio and economic biodiversity. Intemerate Accounting is an equation that helps to correct accounting disparities that have, to a large extent, excluded the Global South. Revising our accounting system can provide access and opportunities that cross wide campaign sectors, bringing hope, action and efficacy to reverse climate change, restore our ecological biodiversity, and redistribute global wealth more equitably.

Arnie has been actively promoting and working on global justice campaigns since 2007 when he received a “We the People” grant from the Hawai’i Council of the Humanities for his work on Hawai’i Statehood. He has organized conferences with Hawaiian national independence groups, managed the Save Rapanui campaign after the Chilean military forced a lockdown of Easter Islanders. Arnie spoke at the World Bank representing the Pacific Island Forum, and participated in discussions around regionalism in the Pacific. He was recently appointed the US-Pacific Diplomacy and Solidarity Mission for the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP), and is on the management team of the Deep Seabed Mining Campaign.

In 2011, Arnie received the blessing from Dr. Kekuni Blaisdell to organize a counter-conference in Honolulu while APEC was there and coordinated the Moana Nui conferences, an international partnership between the International Forum on Globalization and Pua Mohala I Ka Po. For the last ten years he has been campaigning on issues around trade, development, ecological resources, indigenous issues and militarization in the Pacific.

His essays, “TPP at the End of the Line: a briefing on economic cooperation and capacity building” was published in American Quarterly by John Hopkins University Press, and “Manifesting the Liquid Continent,” was published by Yunnan National University, as part of the 1st International conference on Asia and Pacific Ethnology and Anthropology.