In 1895, Queen Liliʻuokalani spent nearly eight months imprisoned in an upstairs bedroom in Iolani Palace in Honolulu. She had been put there by American businessmen backed by the United States military, which had overthrown the Hawaiian Kingdom, an internationally recognized sovereign nation.

She spent her days in confinement translating the creation story of the Hawaiian people into English, line by line.

She would never be allowed to rule over her people again. The U.S. annexed Hawaiʻi over the protests of the Native people, and the islands became a territory and then a state. But now the work of the imprisoned queen is resurfacing in the international debate over whether to mine the seabed for minerals that could accelerate the energy transition away from fossil fuels.

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Solomon Kahoʻohalahala, a Native Hawaiian activist from the island of Lānaʻi, has been poring over the queen’s translation, known as the Kumulipo, and bringing it to the attention of state and international lawmakers to make the case that the ocean is sacred to Hawaiians and that deep-sea mining would irreparably harm it.

On Friday, he’s flying to Kingston, Jamaica, to the headquarters of the International Seabed Authority, a United Nations agency that oversees international waters. He’s hoping to convince the agency to establish a committee where Indigenous people like himself can weigh the costs of mining proposals to their cultural heritage.

“The ocean doesn’t know any boundaries. The fish and the animals don’t know boundaries,” Kahoʻohalahala said. “We are the people that have subsisted and we have lived here, so we need to........

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