I am both tangata whenua and tangata moana, a descendant of both the land and sea. Like the tide ebbing and flowing onto the shore that doesn't know where the land begins and the sea ends up, moving between these two communities is seamless for many of us who have the shared whakapapa. This connection always reminds me of a saying by poet and intellectual Teresia Teaiwa, who said, "We sweat and cry saltwater, so that we know that the ocean is really in our blood." It reminds me that before there were borders and lines that carved up the Pacific, that whakapapa connected these islands, and that there is a deeper and richer tapestry of history that has been woven over centuries of interaction, interactions that cannot be confined by borders, but share linguistic, ancestral, and cultural roots, from Aotearoa to Hawaii, over to Rapanui, and with connections with every island in between.