The living was easy in the ponds, and the herbivorous species attracted to them, such as striped mullet, milkfish, Pacific threadfin, and surgeonfish, would linger there until they grew too big to leave. Fishpond caretakers monitored and deterred any predatory fish or people that entered their domain. A pond is like a pasture, says Ritte. “You don’t raise lions in a pasture. You raise cows.” When the fish were old enough to spawn, they would gather at the gates with each rising tide, ready to return to the ocean. The caretakers would then harvest some of them by net or by hand.

The island of Molokai is one of the places where people are working to recover lost knowledge and searching for solutions to these new problems. Perhaps best known to outsiders for its historical leper colony at Kalaupapa, Molokai receives less than 1 percent of Hawaii’s tourists. More than half its population of 8,000 is Native Hawaiian, and locals want to preserve the “real Hawaii” here. To a large degree they have: There are two tiny towns, no chain stores or restaurants, no stoplights. In fact, “no” is a word you see often on Molokai, on hand-painted signs along the main road: “no cruise ships,” “no short-term rental housing.” What people here do support is local food independence and native rights, the latter often marked by the Kanaka Maoli—a red, yellow, and green striped flag with crossed canoe paddles framing the Hawaiian royal standard—rippling on the trade winds in front of many houses. And on the island, any talk of these two intertwined movements soon evokes the name Walter Ritte.

I met Ritte one day last November at Paddlers, an open-air bar and restaurant that is a center of social life in Kaunakakai, Molokai’s largest town. Ritte is physically slight but well-muscled, with a full gray beard and dark head of hair, and so soft-spoken that I had to lean in to hear his deep, raspy voice, inflected with a Hawaiian lilt. Ritte is a living legend in Hawaii’s native rights movement, known across Molokai and beyond as “Uncle Walter.” He radiates an iron core of intensity and conviction that initially intimidates—until he flashes a sudden, crinkly smile so genuine that it brings the sun. He wears a t-shirt that says “aloha ‘āina”—love and respect that which feeds you: the land, rivers, and ocean.

For 40 years, Ritte has been on the front lines of the fight for Hawaiian sovereignty, a grassroots campaign for Native Hawaiian independence and self-determination. Ritte first became involved in the movement in the 1970s, after he visited the U.S. Navy bombing range on the tiny island of Kahoolawe. “I saw somebody killing an entire island,” he says. In 1976, he and other activists occupied Kahoolawe, hiding out on the island for 35 days. “We are a part of the land,” he says. “What you do to the land, you do to us; what you do to the land, you do to future generations.” The activists then filed a federal lawsuit against the Navy, touching off years of protests that ultimately succeeded in stopping the bombing and protecting the island for Native Hawaiian cultural, spiritual, and subsistence practices.

Toward the end of the 1970s, Ritte moved his family to Molokai’s Pelakulu Valley, to try to live off the land as his ancestors had. Much of the area that Hawaiians had once used for hunting and fishing, however, was now owned by corporations and therefore off limits. But “the deer didn’t read any of the ‘no trespassing’ signs,” Ritte says, and he fought for the right to hunt as his ancestors had. In 1978, Ritte and fellow activists won an amendment to the state constitution that acknowledged Native Hawaiians’ rights to access forests and shorelines for subsistence and religious purposes.

In 1989, the Hawaiian sovereignty movement turned its attention to using those newfound coastal access rights to reclaim and restore the fishponds. Ritte and his fishpond group, Hui o Kuapā, began cleaning up and restoring ponds on Molokai. But it wasn’t moving volcanic rocks into place or tearing out invasives that presented the biggest challenge. It was bureaucracy. “We went to fix the walls,” says Ritte, “and we ran into the government.”

It was death by a thousand documents: Army Corps of Engineers permits for altering “wetlands” (abandoned taro gardens) and “navigable” water in the ponds; water quality permits from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Hawaii Department of Health. The state Department of Land and Natural Resources, which had labeled the fishponds historical sites, required that Ritte’s group hire archeologists and soil corers to document and date the ancient walls. “They were trying to protect historic sites. We were trying to use historic sites,” says Ritte. “In their eyes, the Hawaiians are supposed to be dead and gone. So we’re all historic.”

It was taking up to 10 years and hundreds of thousands of dollars to win permission to restore and use a fishpond, says local attorney Kehau Watson. Then in 2012, her legal firm, Honua (Earth) Consulting stepped in to develop a process for streamlining the federal and state permitting processes, condensing 17 authorizations from 12 agencies into a single five-page, 30-day process. After years of delay, 17 new fishpond projects moved forward across six islands.

It has been a slow, meandering path, says Ritte, but one that he hopes will ultimately lead toward reclaiming Hawaiian rights and culture. “The river doesn’t flow straight. Only the Army Corps of Engineers believes that rivers flow straight,” he says, laughing. Fighting the government and corporations to protect their land and values takes constant energy and effort, he says—and a certain mindset. “I make use of anything and turn it into a positive.” Describing how he passed the time during his many stints in jail, he says, “you talk [to cellmates] about aloha ‘āina and you talk about Hawaiian sovereignty.”

With the fishpond bureaucracy tamed, Ritte’s group and other fishpond organizations are now focusing on learning how to operate these complex systems, partnering with scientists to monitor pond variables and study various husbandry techniques. In addition to the pua stocked at the Keawanui pond on Molokai, Oceanic Institute on Oahu has delivered fingerlings to two other ponds, one on the big island of Hawaii, the other on Oahu.

The Heʻeia fishpond, on the windward side of Oahu, is one of the oldest and largest in the islands, built about 800 years ago and enclosing more than 88 acres of water. Its relative proximity to Honolulu’s universities and nonprofits allows easy access for research. In recent years, Glazer, from the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and his team have installed low-cost wireless sensors that measure meteorological data, tides, water temperature, light, salinity, dissolved oxygen, pH, chlorophyll, and turbidity, to help them understand the range of conditions in which a fishpond remains healthy.

All these solutions require a level of attention that is hard to find in industrial aquaculture operations. Each pond is a unique system, says Kotubetey. You can’t rubber-stamp production. A critical aspect of Hawaiian fishpond management is kilo, the practice of paying close attention to nuances of the environment. “There’s no manual, no how-to book, no YouTube video,” says Kotubetey. “We just gotta do it. We are trying to increase our observational skills, and watch, learn, and respond to the environment.”

Ritte connected with kilo when living largely by subsistence in the Pelakulu Valley, a period he remembers as the best time of his life. “If you’re going to work every day on the freeway, you don’t have a clue what’s happening outside your rolled-up window of your air-conditioned car.” By contrast, in the valley, “I knew all the cloud movements, I knew the temperatures, I knew the ocean—all of those things became part of me. I could tell when it was going to rain and for how long. Nature talks to you. But nobody is listening.”

Listening to nature will be crucial to success as fishponders envision it; so will keeping it community-based. The goal is not to create an intensive, profit-driven system but, rather, to feed local people. “We’re trying to revive the relationship-based economy,” says Kotubetey, “an economy of shared values, aloha [love] for each other, aloha for this land.”

It’s an approach that is compatible with international best practices, as defined by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, which issued a report a decade ago, “Ecosystem Approach to Aquaculture,” calling for traditional ecological practices and principles in aquaculture design, engineering, and management. “There are examples all over the world of industrial systems that are changing,” says University of New England’s Pierce, who served on the FAO advisory team, “where people are applying nontoxic, lower stocking densities.” In Vietnam, for instance, locals are beginning to grow shrimp among mangrove roots rather than tearing out the trees to build shrimp farms. Because mangroves provide natural habitat for the shrimp, the shrimp can forage in the wild, eliminating the need for additional feed or antibiotics.

So, too, Hawaii’s fishponds can offer lessons for local aquaculture around the Pacific basin. “Part of our grand vision is to get it right in Hawaii first and then allow the Hawaiian fishpond restoration story to serve as a model,” says Glazer. People from New Zealand, Bangladesh, and Thailand have already visited He‘eia fishpond to gain an understanding of how to restore their coastal food resources. “We’re connecting with more indigenous networks as time goes on,” says Kotubetey.