Indigenous stewardship of lands and waters has been suppressed around the world for centuries by colonization, but it has nonetheless persisted. Specific places that are cared for through such stewardship are known as Indigenous and community conserved areas (ICCAs). Some ICCAs are formally recognized in bureaucratic government systems, whereas others are not. In Hawaiʻi, communities have been reviving various aspects of Indigenous stewardship, which is Place-based and holistic in nature, extending from the mountains to the sea. However, these attempts to engage in Indigenous stewardship have confronted countless obstacles and hurdles within the American form of centralized governance in the process. Some communities have found novel ways to engage in Indigenous stewardship via formal recognition of ICCAs through collaborative management agreements with various governmental authorities, both state and federal, as well as with large landowners. As scholars and knowledge keepers of Place, we have synthesized our intergenerational knowledge of the communities we have lived and/or worked in within the context of other studies that we have led or otherwise collaborated on spanning the past 30+ years. We focus on exploring how three Hawaiʻi communities (Hāʻena, Kauaʻi; Heʻeia, Oʻahu; and Kaʻūpūlehu, Hawaiʻi Island) have navigated bureaucracy to get formal recognition of their ICCAs in ways that have garnered governmental support for community-based revival of Indigenous stewardship practices. These three communities have all achieved biocultural resource management successes using a compartmented approach to stitch together various ICCAs as a means to holistically work across contemporary land-ownership boundaries, with one of these communities forming a “collaboratively managed meta-ICCA” to increase synergistic effects. These communities are the first in Hawaiʻi in the modern era to be engaging in Indigenous stewardship via a patchwork of ICCAs from the mountains to the sea, and, therefore, demonstrate that this is a viable, albeit arduous, avenue for communities to holistically engage in Indigenous stewardship within an American system of governance.