In her keynote address at Sunday’s opening of the 17th biennial Ocean Sciences Meeting, National Geographic explorer Elizabeth Kapuuwailanui Lindsey shared a memory about her late mentor, Pius "Mau" Piai­lug, the esteemed Micronesian navigator whose work to preserve traditional way-finding practices influenced generations of modern Polynesian voyagers.

Piailug was accompanying a group of university scientists aboard a canoe, Lindsey recalled. At one point he laid his body down in the hull of the canoe.

"The scientists, not understanding, not having a frame of reference, and seeing only through their lens, perceived an old man going to rest," Lindsey recalled. "In fact, the hull of the canoe is the most sensitive part of the vessel. Mau was laying his body down as an instrument in order to feel the sequence and directional points of the waves. Mau was gathering empirical data."

To Lindsey such "indigenous science" offers invaluable perspective on the workings of the ocean and the societies that interact with it; it demonstrates an understanding, sometimes missing in the Western world, of the interconnectedness people share with their environment and with other cultures.

"The traditions of sea nomads and navigator priests demonstrate human capabilities for knowledge and communication far deeper than we will ever know," Lindsey said.

Lindsey’s impassioned speech at the Hawai‘i Convention Center served as the official kickoff of the five-day conference, which is billed as the largest international assembly of ocean scientists, engineers, students, educators, policymakers and other stakeholders.

Some 5,400 people are expected to attend the meetings, workshops and presentations.

The event — co-sponsored by the Association for the Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography, the Oceanic Society and the American Geophysical Union — is scheduled to address a wide swath of oceanography and interdisciplinary topics as well as new research on science education, outreach and public policy.

Lindsey’s address, which concluded to a standing ovation, firmly established a sense of place and history to the proceedings.

An award-winning filmmaker ("And Then There Were None") and former Miss Hawaii, Lindsey is the first National Geographic explorer of Polynesian ancestry and the first female National Geographic Society fellow.

In a forceful plea for the recognition and preservation of indigenous knowledge, Lindsey spoke of her childhood in Laie watching her female elders fish and farm in harmony with lunar cycles and in accordance with cultural protocols for prayer and thanksgiving. In enumerating the ways in which native peoples have been displaced as nations give sway to the interests of multinational corporations and tourism interests, she invoked the Moken people who live on the islands of the Anda­man Sea west of Thailand and whose traditional seafaring lifestyle could be lost to forced relocation.

Lindsey also related the findings of a 2008 National Geographic symposium in which she and other researchers identified environmental and cultural "hot spots" around the world.

"What we discovered was that where the environment is threatened, cultures are also under siege," she said. "We cannot separate the two."

Lindsey suggested that the correlation stems from the Western "I-it" mode of regarding other cultures as something separate and exploitable. The answer, she said, would be to take a cue from indigenous cultures and adopt an "I-thou" that recognizes interconnectedness and shared capacities for attaining knowledge.