Indigenous stewardship across Eastern Polynesia has always been a shared inheritance, deeply rooted in the region’s histories, languages, and human mobilities. An example of this is the practice called rāhui, which centered temporary restrictions that sustained abundance and played a critical role in both governance and management of human–environment relations. Cognates of rāhui are found throughout Eastern Polynesia, where the practice bundled governance authority, spiritual potency, and community responsibility in maintaining coupled human and ecological well-being over marine and terrestrial resources. In Hawai‘i, interestingly, the cognate lāhui underwent a significant semantic shift. By the late nineteenth century it came to generally signify “the nation” or “the people of the nation,” becoming a key term in Hawaiian political identity and sovereignty struggles. Yet even as lāhui’s everyday sense in Hawaiʻi diverged from its original meaning as a practice of imposing temporary prohibitions, the substance of biocultural stewardship embodied in the word continued under other names and practices such as ho‘omalu, ho‘omaha, pu‘uhonua, among others. Together these practices demonstrate a continuity of resource governance despite colonial suppression and political displacements. Today, the revival of rāhui across Eastern Polynesia provides a framework for the formal revival of lāhui in Hawai‘i. This research argues for a positioning of rāhui/lāhui as a regionally shared, yet locally adapted, Indigenous institution that can be used for conservation and self-governance.