Rooted in ʻĀina: Ancestral Wisdom from Hawai’i with Kuʻulani Muise

At Primally Pure, we often reflect on the connection between the health of our soil and the health of our skin. Beneath both is a living, breathing microbiome—one that holds the potential for deep healing, resilience, and regeneration.

We recently traveled to Hawaiʻi to explore the healing properties and wisdom of the island.  While filming, we learned about an extraordinarily rare volcanic soil—a mineral-dense foundation that nourishes life from the ground up. 

To help us go deeper, we turned to Kuʻulani Muise—Co-Founder and Brand Director of Maui Nui Venison, a regenerative meat company working to restore ecological harmony on the island through the ethical harvesting of wild Axis deer. In this interview, Kuʻulani helps us remember what our kūpuna (ancestors) knew: that land, body, plant, and spirit are not separate. That to eat is to enter into a sacred relationship. From rare soils to healing plants, ancestral skincare to deeply rooted values of balance, we are honored to share Kuʻulani’s voice and vision with you here.

Read on for Kuʻulani’s reflections, rituals, and the ancestral wisdom that continues to shape Hawaiʻi’s past, present, and future.

What ancestral knowledge, stories, or practices connect the care of soil to the care of body and spirit – how might that perspective help us deepen our relationship with these living landscapes today?

“One of the most expansive words in our ʻōlelo, in our language, is our word for land as well as for soil, which we call ʻāina. 

At Maui Nui Venison, we work to balance wild Axis deer populations on the leeward slopes of Haleakalā, Maui, where ʻāina is uncommonly rich. Also called Ustands, a sub-order of Andisols that cover less than 0.05% of Earth's surface, these rare volcanic soils form over millennia (1” of soil forming every ~1,000 years) as volcanic ash and ejecta break down into some of the most mineral-rich soil on the planet, characterized by exceptional nutrient retention of iron, calcium, magnesium, sodium, potassium, phosphorous, and sulfur. 

Beyond land and soil, ʻāina—a contraction of ʻai (meaning to eat) and ʻana (a present participle)—also translates to any entity that feeds or nourishes. It is our word for the land that grows food. It is our word for food itself. The unique nutrient-density of the venison we produce on Maui is exemplary of the many layers of ʻāina—from rare volcanic soils to the diverse nutrient-rich plant communities they support to the wild deer that actively select these plants with high mineral and polyphenol content to maximize their own health. 

When we maintain and build soil, when we grow, produce or eat food, we enter into a manifold relationship. We too are ʻāina. That land and plant and animal and even people can all be referred to by the same term is not a lapse in lexicon, but evidence of the expansive way Hawaiʻi’s people see ourselves, our places and our systems of shared health, which are all inexplicably linked.”

Are there specific healing plants or elements of the Hawaiian landscape that are traditionally used for well-being or skin health? 

“I am not an expert in traditional Hawaiʻi healing practices, what we call, lāʻau lapaʻau, which is sacred work. What I can share comes from my limited understanding of these lifeways, with deep respect for the cultural practitioners and kūpuna who are the true keepers of this knowledge.

One door into this practice is to look, again, at what our language is always pointing to. In the way that the word ʻāina can refer to a multitude of entities all at once, lāʻau is another word that holds multiple meanings in beautiful concordance. Lāʻau is our word for plant, for tree and for forest. Lāʻau is also our word for medicine. In our mother tongue, plant and medicine are one and the same. Like every people, we turn to lāʻau to keep us well and to help us heal.

In terms of skincare, turn-of-the-century texts point to the use of nut oils—specifically, manoʻi (coconut oil), kamani (tamanu) and kukui (candlenut) oil—as potent hydration and nourishment for daily oiling. 

For acute skin conditions, a myriad of lāʻau were carefully gathered and prepared: ground ʻaʻaliʻi (Dodonaea viscosa) leaves were made into a paste for rashes, ʻulu (breadfruit) gum spread over skin irritations as a salve, laukahi (Plantago) leaves were used on boils, wounds, and lacerations, while naupaka kahakai (Scaevola taccada) could be used as a natural sunscreen and to heal cuts and stings.

In my own home, coconut oil is a pillar of our skincare. I use it as a body oil and for treating skin infections with its antibacterial properties. It is also our favorite carrier oil when using any essential oils on the kids (not to mention, itʻs great for cooking venison)! Primally Pure’s Lemongrass Body Oil, with its inclusion of several of our traditionally used nut oils, has become a fast favorite of mine as well.

In thinking about skincare from the inside out, our Venison Bone Broth is singular in its protein and collagen content and is another pillar of skincare for me."

Can you talk about Maui Nui Venison’s mission? What lessons from hunting, gathering, or farming traditions could the modern world benefit from?

“Balance! It is at the very core of our mission and while simple to state, is infinitely more challenging to find. 

For over a decade, our team has been tirelessly building a solution to help balance Axis deer populations—a highly invasive species that threatens the diversity and functionality of our critical watersheds and delicate native ecosystems—on the island of Maui. Through innovative wild-harvesting systems, we work to transform an overabundance of this incredible animal into a nutrient-dense and delicious food source. 

Hawaiʻi's people have a long and rich history of living, working, and thriving in balance with nature. To understand how our kūpuna, our ancestors, were able to live in this way, we have to try to understand how they saw the natural world, and, in turn, their relationship to it. Again, turning to language, we can find some instruction. Our ‘ōlelo has no word for "nature,” no named backdrop against which we might define ourselves. Hawaiʻi’s people see ourselves as deeply embedded in, and indistinguishable from, everything around us. As beloved Hawaiian scholar Mary Kawena Pukuʻi explained, the relationships that dominated the Hawaiian psyche were "with all nature, in its totality, and all its parts."

From a deep sense of environmental kinship, came ancient land stewardship practices. Land was managed through a strict system of land division, called the ahupuaʻa system, where each segment of land was kept in balance from the uplands all the way down to the plains and out to near-shore fisheries. Forests were stratified and named and were increasingly kapu, or prohibited, as they ascended in elevation, keeping critical watersheds inaccessible and intact.

A growing body of archaeological evidence tells the story of millennia of agricultural brilliance—from some of the most expansive pre-historic agricultural features in the world, to incredible aquaculture evidenced in over 450 known loko iʻa, fish ponds, that anciently encircled our many estuaries— built to support a booming human population (about half of Hawaiʻiʻs current size according to conservative estimates) through a deep understanding of the intricacies and interconnectivity of land, sea, and the movement of water throughout. Brilliance! in their vast kalo terraces, in the myriad of their food plant cultivars, in their planting and fishing, all timed by the cycles of the moon.

My humongous hope is that the ways in which we innovate at Maui Nui—to create nutrient-dense food for our communities and customers and to solve for the unique challenges of our time—will be reflective of the kinds of innovations that have existed in Hawaiʻi for so long, innovations that were able to feed a large population base whilst staying in balance with the natural world—a world in which they were deeply imbedded, a world populated throughout with elements, soil, flora and fauna, that were all looked to as kin, as ʻohana.

A ola hoʻi!

Visit mauinuivenison.com to learn more.