Kapu aloha is seen by kia'i as a commitment to maintaining peaceful dissent and culturally informed interaction with the opposition while traversing highly emotional situations at Mauna Kea, Kahuku, and Sherwood Forrest. Many Kanaka Maoli relate to Mauna Kea ancestrally through cosmogonic oral histories. Mauna Kea is considered to be the wao akua (realm of the divine) and is home to multiple elemental and ancestrally venerated water deities called akua, e.g., Poliʻahu, Waiau, Lilinoe, Kahoupokāne, Kalauakolea and Kāneikawaiola. It is for these reasons that many Kanaka Maoli/settler-ally activists and members of the lāhui Hawaiʻi (community/nation) understand Mauna Kea to be sacred and feel a profound obligation to protect Mauna Kea from the development of the TMT (Thirty Meter Telescope). This ancestral and relational connection to place is bound by the ʻaha hoʻowili moʻo (ancestral umbilicus). Native Hawaiian scholar Iokepa Salazar states that: