taro

India and Southeast Asia, where Kew records Colocasia esculenta as native from India and Nepal to south China, Thailand, Malaya and Sumatra, and may have been first cultivated as early as 5000 BCE; kalo in Hawai'i, where it became the staple

East to China before 100 BCE and to Japan as satoimo, west to Egypt by about 100 BCE and through Africa, a staple in West Africa by the early centuries CE; taken across the Atlantic by slave traders to the West Indies, where it is dasheen and its leaves go into callaloo; a staple of the Pacific islands

In Hawaiian genealogy kalo is the elder sibling of the people: the Kumulipo tells of a stillborn first child, Hāloanakalaukapalili, buried in the land, from whom kalo grew to nourish the second-born, Hāloa, from whom Native Hawaiians trace their descent. Davidson adds that its cultivation was sacred, men's work, with the red variety once reserved for chiefs, and that Hawaiians built for it the most extensive systems of ditches and irrigated patches in Polynesia. The plantation economy broke that system: American businessmen overthrew Queen Liliʻuokalani in 1893 for the land and water that sugarcane and pineapple needed, and by 1930 more than half the islands' land was under sugarcane, pineapple or pasture, while the irrigation ditches diverted almost 900 million gallons of water a day. The plantations have closed, and millions of gallons a day still go to housing developments, hotels and golf courses. Restoring the loʻi kalo now means returning water to diverted streams, and communities across Hawaiʻi have long fought for that return. So growing kalo in Hawaiʻi is a fight over the same land and water the overthrow was for, and for Kānaka ʻŌiwi it is a fight for an elder sibling.