Reverence for Water
A conversation with a friend about a watershed restoration project in Kula, Maui, led me to think more deeply about my reverence for water. She described the Native Hawaiian way of caring for land and water that is part of the restoration effort and introduced me to the word ahupuaʻa, the traditional Hawaiian land division extending from the mountains to the sea.
This moves me. I love how language reflects values of a culture. Ahupuaʻa expresses an understanding of forests, streams, agricultural lands, estuaries, reefs, and people as parts of one interconnected system. It reminds me of the different cultures around the world I have come in contact with or read about that hold reverence for water and land and see them as sacred.
Why do many view water primarily as a resource rather than as a gift worthy of reverence? What might change in Western culture if water were understood as a relative, an ancestor, a deity, a living being, and a sacred presence? And what can cultures that hold these relationships teach us about caring for our watersheds today?
In traditional Hawaiian culture (and many others), land and water are not considered resources to be owned. They are living relatives to be cared for. Place and water names often carry stories about winds, rains, and deities, so that speaking the name of a stream or valley is also speaking their character and relationships, not ownership. The land, ʻāina, is that which feeds, and fresh water, wai, is understood as the source of life, abundance, and health. Within this belief, every ridge, stream, wetland, and reef is part of a continuous system that is interconnected with humans. The traditional land divisions known as ahupuaʻa extend from the top of the mountains down to the sea, encompassing forests, agricultural lands, streams, estuaries, and coral reefs in one integrated system. Stewardship is central to identity, governance, and spirituality. Words like mālama ʻāina, which means to care for the land, and kuleana, which describes responsibility and a person’s place within a community, express the understanding that care for land and water is both a privilege and a duty.
Within an ahupuaʻa, sustainable practices are embedded in everyday life. Forests in the upper reaches are protected as sacred realms that safeguard fresh water and prevent erosion. Farmers cultivate kalo (taro) in loʻi, flooded terraces fed by stream water, in ways that reuse and clean the agricultural water as it flows through the system, turning agriculture into living green infrastructure. Kapu are sacred restrictions that guide when and how people harvest fish or other species. They function as cultural law and adaptive management. People understand mauka to makai, mountain to ocean, as a continuum. What happens in the uplands is carried downstream in sediment, nutrients, and pulses of freshwater, eventually shaping the health of estuaries and coral reefs.
Many other cultures around the world also show reverence for land and water in both their language and as a practice. Along the Ganges in India, the river is understood by many as Ganga Devi, a goddess and purifier. People speak of Mother Ganga and turn to her in daily ritual, puja, pilgrimage, and rites of passage. Millions bathe in the river, offer flowers and lamps, and carry her water home. Calling the river Ganga Devi or Mother Ganga expresses a belief that the river is a goddess who hears prayers, purifies body and spirit, and accompanies people through every stage of life. The language of devotion reveals a deep spiritual relationship with the river as a living presence. Generations of intensive urbanization, industrial growth, and agricultural expansion have overwhelmed this relationship. Dams, diversions, and untreated sewage and industrial discharges have turned long stretches of the river into highly polluted reaches, with profound consequences for human health, river dolphins, turtles, and many other species. Reverence and harm coexist in the same river.
In New Zealand, Māori describe te awa, the rivers, as ancestors and living entities. Te awa is a being with its own mauri, the life force, energy, and vital essence contained in objects of the physical world. This view helped shape Te Awa Tupua, the legal recognition of the Whanganui River as a person with rights, guardians, and a voice. It expresses the teaching that “I am the river, and the river is me.” Here, language and law come together: ancestral relationships are honored through governance structures that embody a spiritual understanding that the river and the people share one life, which is why concepts like mauri, the river’s life force, are central to both ceremony and law. Decisions about land use, water allocation, and restoration are increasingly framed not only in terms of human benefit, but in terms of the health and dignity of the river as a living relative.
Near my home on the Northern California coast, tribal nations such as the Yurok and Karuk along the Klamath River hold deep relationships with water, where salmon and other beings are not only food, but relatives and teachers. Languages and stories describe salmon and river places as living relatives and central beings in the world, so that naming sites is a way of honoring rather than marking property. Their ceremonies, law, and cultural practices reflect a recognition that river health and community health are inseparable. As dams, mining, logging, and water withdrawals for agriculture have damaged river connectivity and water quality over the past century, tribal leadership has driven efforts in dam removal, fire stewardship, and holistic river restoration that reconnect culture, ecology, and social justice. In 2019, the Yurok Tribal Council adopted a resolution recognizing the rights of the Klamath River to exist, flourish, and naturally evolve, followed in 2024 by a Tribal Ordinance that enshrines the rights of Heyhlkeek ‘Weroy, the Klamath River, in tribal law and establishes a legal framework for protecting and exercising those rights. This rights of nature framework grows directly from their spiritual understanding that the river is a sacred relative who must be defended.
Across the Amazon basin, many Indigenous communities understand rivers and forests as inhabited by powerful beings that guide hunting, fishing, and use of floodplain lands and are often named for the spirits, animals, and ancestral events that dwell there. Rivers are respected as pathways of life, and seasonal floods are read and responded to with intimate knowledge of place. Subsistence, ceremony, and governance are shaped by these relationships. Industrial expansion, dams, deforestation, and resource extraction increasingly disrupt these connections. As forests are cleared and streams altered, the spiritual and ecological ways of guiding land and water use for generations are fractured, and with them the resilience of Amazonian watersheds.
In Australia, Aboriginal connection to water and nature is revered and sung as stories and living maps called songlines that guide people across landscapes and are carried through generations. Songlines trace the journeys of ancestral beings across the lands, carrying wisdom about where to walk, where to camp, and how to be in reciprocity with the natural world. These relationships can also include connections with particular animals and other beings through totems, creating responsibilities to care for them and their habitats. Colonial land grab and tenure, groundwater extraction, and large-scale projects often ignore or override these relationships, severing the connections between communities and the land and waters they care for. As Aboriginal leaders work to restore rights and revive cultural practice, the old knowledge of how to care for the gift of water in a dry continent is still present but marginalized.
In each of these cultures there is a deep spiritual relationship to land and water. At the same time, extractive economies, engineering, and ownership models push that relationship aside. Lands are converted from native forest and regenerative food systems to plantations, pasture, urban development, and infrastructure. Streams are channelized, diverted, diked, and dammed. Wetlands are drained and filled. The results are familiar to anyone working in watershed protection: more runoff, higher sediment and nutrient loads, warmer temperatures, polluted water, and increasing stress on estuaries and offshore reefs. We often blame extreme storms or unprecedented weather for flood damage and coastal degradation, but we have systematically stripped watersheds of the resilience they once held and the ability of soils, plants, and wetlands to absorb, store, and slowly release water.
In Ecuador, the language of the constitution reflects a belief that humans and nature are bound together in a sharing of sumak kawsay, a good way of living. Nature, Pacha Mama, is recognized as a being with rights, and people are affirmed to have the right to live in a healthy and ecologically balanced environment that guarantees sustainability and this good way of living. The constitution acknowledges the human right to water as essential and upholds the rights of comunas, peoples, and nations to maintain and promote their own practices for managing biodiversity and their natural environments. In practice, however, these commitments are not upheld as new projects in mining, oil, and intensive water use are approved or often illegally carried out in sensitive watersheds. As a result, communities and advocates repeatedly invoke constitutional rights of nature and rights to water in court, and in some cases they have succeeded in stopping or reshaping projects, protecting rivers and ecosystems, and ordering restoration of degraded stretches. The words Pacha Mama and sumak kawsay thus describe not only a spiritual worldview, but one that continues to shape the legal and cultural struggle to ensure that rivers, forests, and the people can continue to flourish.
Similar legal shifts have emerged around the world. The recognition of Te Awa Tupua in Aotearoa New Zealand gives the Whanganui River rights as a legal person grounded in Māori concepts of river ancestry and mauri. In North America, the Yurok Tribe’s rights of river framework for the Klamath and other tribal efforts to recognize the rights of salmon and rivers show how Indigenous nations are using law to formalize relationships that have long been understood spiritually. In Colombia and other parts of Latin America, constitutional courts are beginning to recognize rivers as entities with biocultural rights. These developments do not replace spiritual practice; they extend it into governance, offering pathways to protect waters that are already understood as sacred.
The Hawaiian way and other cultural practices of caring for watersheds offer a way of stewardship: a practice of protecting our lands and waters to create resilience instead of treating them as resources to be exploited until crisis forces a response. When reverence is alive, it can shape our decisions before disaster. It allows us to pause and ask: How does this land use affect the people downstream? How does this diversion or clearing alter the relationship between streamflow and coral reef health, or salmon, or river dolphins? How does our use of water affect the larger system of which we are a part? In community-based restoration efforts today, whether in Hawaiʻi, on the Whanganui, on the Klamath, or along the Ganges, practitioners and cultural leaders are drawing on these questions to rebuild degraded watersheds, revive native plant and animal communities, and reconnect people with traditional practices of care and relationship.
For those of us working in conservation, restoration, or water policy, there is an invitation here to recognize that every watershed is more than a drainage or distribution area. It is food, culture, recreation, habitat, a spiritual connection and relationship. Using these principles in watershed protection, the goal is not only to reduce pollutant loads or meet regulatory standards. The goal is to restore the capacity of land and water to benefit the entire ecosystem and the communities that depend on it. This requires integrating science with values and restoration with social justice, especially for communities whose relationships to land and water have been disrupted or diminished.
If we can integrate reverence, respect, and care of our water in our strategic planning and remember that healthy watersheds are living systems and gifts rather than only resources, we will design our management plans and restoration projects to hold the wisdom of ahupuaʻa and other cultural traditions. Taking only what is needed. Sharing benefits equitably. Honoring the gift that flows from the mountain to the sea.
