The Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement on Tuesday kicked off its 22nd annual Native Hawaiian Convention at the Maui Arts &Cultural Center in Kahului. As the conference began, the speakers focused on themes of rediscovering traditions and working to renew the land amid drought and new challenges brought on by climate change.

Originally set to take place on Oahu after holding a previous convention in Las Vegas, CNHA decided that in the aftermath of the deadly August fires that ravaged Maui and destroyed the historic town of Lahaina, the convention should move to the Valley Isle.

“We were in the community and already had some assets on the ground,” said CNHA CEO Kuhio Lewis. “So as we were assessing what was going on out here, it was clear that outside forces were dominating the conversations. And so having this convention here raises the voice of the people who are not only impacted, but will have to live with what decisions are made.”

Archie Kalepa, a legendary waterman from Lahaina who has emerged as a leader in the community after setting up an aid station after the fire, told attendees in an opening keynote, “We as a people have been voyaging for thousands of years. We understand voyaging, we understand storms. … We have been sailing in a storm for the last 150 years. We just came gnarliest storm and this canoe is broken. This canoe is Lahaina. We have to fix this canoe.”

“The storm we’ve been in the last 150 years is the storm of westernization, industrialism and colonialism,” said Kalepa. “We’ve been using (as) the compass the magnetic north. We need to use the Hawaiian star compass, a compass that is based around values of nature. … We know how to sail through a storm; this is living proof. What we forgot is how sail around a storm.”

The August fire in Lahaina currently has a death toll of at least 100, making it the deadliest U.S. wildfire in a century. Lewis said that for many Maui residents and property owners who were affected by the fire, it’s been challenging to navigate resources as they try to bounce back.

“You have to apply for (Federal Emergency Management Agency) and then (Small Business Administration), and sometimes you’re denied, then you got to reapply,” Lewis said. “And at the same time you have Red Cross in the mix, and you got all these nonprofits. … It’s super cumbersome to try and navigate it. So we’re going to try and break it down for them at this convention so that it’s much easier for them to apply.”

All those agencies have booths at the convention to help walk people through the recovery process. Many of them are also looking for local workers and companies to participate in response efforts.

“We know that there’s a new industry coming to Hawaii, and that’s the cleanup, that’s the rebuild,” said Lewis. “Equipping (Maui residents) with the certifications that they need. Providing access to the employers, in the simplest way, in light of all the complications that they gotta go through, is important.”

Panel discussions on the opening day of the conference looked at what people want to see with that rebuild. Among major themes were a focus on revitalizing the land with reseeding native plants, the health of the soil and managing water.

Kaleo Manuel, deputy director on the state Commission on Water Resource Management, said it was important to look back on how Native Hawaiians once cultivated the land.

“They thrived and figured out solutions to their problems, and they created a system that worked within the natural order,” Manuel said. “I think that’s the issue that we’re dealing with today. It turns out, we design living systems that are beyond our means. We live beyond our means … and so now’s the time for us to really change our collective behavior.”

Manuel was briefly reassigned in the aftermath of the deadly Lahaina blaze after a letter was sent to him and other state officials — including Gov. Josh Green — from Glenn Tremble of the West Maui Land Co., who claimed his request to fill the company’s reservoirs with stream water on the day of the fire was delayed by Manuel by about five hours, which was too late to contribute to the firefight.

Critics argued since then that any action to fill reservoirs on that day likely wouldn’t have helped much as none of the streams are connected to fire hydrants, and winds of 60 mph or more were too strong for helicopters to make water drops that day. Manuel was reinstated in October.

Speakers emphasized that before Lahaina was reshaped by sugar plantations and the introduction of invasive species, it was a lush, vibrant area known for its wetlands and native agriculture. It then became the dry tinderbox that ignited in August.

Alika Atay of the Maui Bioremediation Group, which formed in the aftermath of the fires and is working to use native fungi, microbes and other organisms to reinvigorate soil around Lahaina to grow food and native plants, told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser after a panel by the group that “bioremediation is important because you get people still going through the burn zone and trying to find stuff, and all the heavy metals actually was going through. … We could probably help to curb some of those toxicities.”

Kalepa said the fires and issues around water shortages, changes to the land and climate change have “really come to the surface — all of these hard issues — through the ash of Lahaina.”

Lahaina was the first capital of the Hawaiian kingdom, and in later years became a diverse mix of cultures as the whaling industry and plantations brought people from across the globe to Maui’s shores. It was a town that ultimately came to represent many things to many people.

“If we rebuild Lahaina only for Lahaina, we will fail,” Kalepa said. “We have to rebuild Lahaina for all of Hawaii, so that Lahaina can be the example of how we need to move forward for Hawaii. The values of (the) Hawaiian people need to be the starting point for Lahaina.”

Kalepa said that he wanted to see a better way of managing the land and of welcoming people to it.

“No longer do I want to call it ‘tourist industry’; it needs to be called an industry of culture,” he said. “That culture is why people come here. Once they come, what do they fall in love (with)? How do we honor and protect that in a way that community and place comes from?”

Kalepa said that he wants to see tour groups hire educators to give visitors a better sense of Hawaii’s history and culture.

But he also stressed that though he wants it to honor Hawaiian ancestry, his vision of the future is inclusive and “allows people to be connected no matter what race, no matter what where you come from … but you begin to have respect when you get off of that catamaran. It’s not about feeling entitled because you’ve been served a mai tai. It’s about falling in love and having respect for place because you’ve learned something about that place.”

But the road to recovery is long. As people across Maui continue to wrestle with the loss of Lahaina, it fits into a larger struggle that residents across Hawaii have been facing as they try to stay in the islands amid rising costs and dwindling housing options.

“We have to find a solution to the housing situation, to support Maui, but Hawaii as a whole,” Lewis said. “I mean, we’ve lost so many of our families to the continent already, because of the high cost of living. But it all stems from housing. We have to address housing.”