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The Piʻo Summit was established to highlight ancestral innovation while uplifting courageous leadership needed to solve the complex problems of our time. It was founded in 2022 and has been conducted as an annual summit. Our summit is inspired by the water cycle, each summit begins with recognition of wai and ends with our Muliwai Mixer event.
The Piʻo Summit engages individuals from both Hawaiʻi and abroad dedicated to advancing aloha ʻāina practices while also calling attention to the ecological and social justice issues that often accompany this work. The summit hosts critical discussion on how our indigenous knowledge, practices, and values can guide us through addressing climate crises, economic reform, and collective resilience toward a better future.
Themes of previous Piʻo Summits include:
● ʻĀinahoʻi: Land, Law and Justice: Āinahoʻi brings together aloha ʻāina, community organizers and land stewards to explore the intersections of land, law and justice in Hawaiʻi. This theme amplifies the collective movement for land back across the pae ʻāina, showcasing the innovative ways communities are both navigating and challenging existing systems through legal frameworks, nonprofit land trusts, and grassroots actions. The summit features a range of models and pathways towards land back, highlighting the many ways ʻāina is being reclaimed, protected and ensured for long-term stewardship of future generations.
Featured Keynote Speaker: Honourable Justice Joe Williams made history as New Zealand’s first Māori Supreme Court judge. An accomplished expert inIndigenous law, he has served in various judicial roles: first, on New Zealand’s specialized Indigenous courts (the Māori Land Court and Waitangi Tribunal), then the High Court, and Court of Appeal. He is of Ngati Pūkenga, Waitaha and Tapuika nation.
● Hulihia: Fire and Rain, Community Leadership Through Crisis: “Hulihia” refers to an overturning or complete change - a word that aptly describes the transformative power of community leadership in times of crisis. This theme brings together community organizers, scholars, activists, and climate-related disaster survivors in conversations on how communities rise up in the wake of devastating events to demonstrate extraordinary resilience, care, and leadership.
Featured Keynote Speaker: Dr. Lyla June Johnston (aka Lyla June), poet, singer-songwriter, hip-hop artist, human ecologist, public speaker and community organizer of Diné (Navajo), Tsétsêhéstâhese (Cheyenne) and European lineages. Lyla’s multi genre presentation style has engaged audiences across the globe towards personal, collective and ecological healing. Her messages focus on Indigenous issues and solutions, supporting youth, inter-cultural healing, historical trauma, and traditional land stewardship practices.
● Advancing a Circular Economy in Hawaiʻi: In ancestral Hawaiʻi, a “give, take, regenerate” circular system led to the development of balanced structures of resource management. Combining contemporary Circular Economy solutions with ancestral knowledge creates integrated approaches to sustainability that are both environmentally regenerative and socially just. This theme calls for the advancement of contemporary applications of ancestral innovation and resource management sciences to help develop sustainable and just solutions for healthy communities in Hawai‘i and around the world.
Featured Keynote Speaker: Kate Raworth, renowned economist whose research focuses on the unique social and ecological challenges of the twenty-first century. She teaches at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute, where she is a Senior Visiting Research Associate, and she is a Senior Associate of the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership. Over the last two decades Kate has worked as Senior Researcher at Oxfam, as a co-author of the UN’s Human Development Report at the United Nations Development Programme, and as a Fellow of the Overseas Development Institute in the villages of Zanzibar.
● Wai Sovereignty and Justice: Called attention and action to the current state of our wai, and the threats for Hawaiʻi’s water resources. This theme underscored the importance of modern day application of ancestral water resource management practices, as well as circular and regenerative systems of wai governance.
Featured Keynote Speaker: Dr. Cornel West, affectionately known to many as Brother West, is the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Chair at Union Theological Seminary. Dr.West teaches on the works of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, as well as courses in Philosophy of Religion, African American Critical Thought, and a wide range of subjects -- including but by no means limited to, the classics, philosophy, politics, cultural theory, literature, and music. He has a passion to communicate to a vast variety of publics in order to keep alive the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. – a legacy of telling the truth and bearing witness to love and justice. Dr. West is the former Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy at Harvard University and Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. Cornel West graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard in three years and obtained his M.A. and Ph.D. in Philosophy at Princeton.
Muliwai Mixer: A pau hana style networking event for connection and reflection on the individual and collective work of our community advocates, practitioners, and changemakers.
