Last Updated on December 18, 2025
Indigenous resurgence includes strengthening our ties to ancestral places and languages. Reclaiming our native languages is key to the process of recovery. Settler colonialism in Hawaiʻi, as in many other places, attempts constantly to erase and replace native landscapes with a settler-built landscape. These forms of erasure include replacing native place names and/or stripping native place names of their meanings through forceful assimilation tactics such as shifting the language to the colonial one. Kanaka ʻŌiwi Hawaiʻi are fortunate that our recent ancestors (since the 1820s) took up writing in the native language —ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi —seriously and prolifically. The shift to English has made it arduous for current generations to learn our own native language at levels sufficient to understand the writing of our ancestors. We are, however, determined to do so, and thousands of us are doing so. In the literature written in ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi between the 1820s and the 1940s are thousands of place names. This essay explores the project of recovering Hawaiian place names from this treasure trove of literature.
Many recent Kanaka scholars have articulated the importance of our native place names. Kekuewa Kikiloi writes: “Place names are important cultural signatures etched into the Hawaiian landscape and are embedded with traditional histories and stories that document how our ancestors felt about a particular area . . . They help to transform once-empty geographic spaces into cultural places enriched with meaning and significance.”[1] Kikiloi says that the names are etched into the landscape, but not all of those etchings are still visible and audible to us. Composer and eminent interpreter of Hawaiian texts Kīhei de Silva explains:
We live in a time of un-naming, in a time when old names for the land—names given in honor, happiness, and sorrow—have been set aside for marketing jingles that commemorate little more than a desire for sales . . . We who learn and love these old names . . . seek nourishment in that other deeper geography. [2]
In other words, settler colonialism writes over ancestral place names. This un-naming and renaming goes on as Hawaiian places are renamed and transformed for housing developments and resorts. One example is the area previously known as Kalāhuipuaʻa, an ahupuaʻa and fishpond in Kohala on Hawaiʻi Island. This place name appeared prominently on a sign until sometime in the early 1990s, when it disappeared and was replaced with signs for Mauna Lani resort. The name Kalāhuipuaʻa is translated by Pukui et al. as “family of pigs,” which, it seems, the developers did not think a suitable name for the area of their resort. Mauna Lani (heavenly mountain) lies on the flat and rocky shoreline of Kalāhuipuaʻa. That resort has now incorporated Kalāhuipuaʻa into what they sell, calling it “the essence and spiritual center of the resort,”[3] but the mountain-less area’s name is still Mauna Lani.
This example shows how place names get perpetuated, but in forms different from the original. In ʻŌiwi times, islands were divided into large districts called moku; within each moku were several to many ahupuaʻa; and within ahupuaʻa were smaller land divisions. Management of these large to small divisions was highly organized, as was the management of the freshwater flows and shoreline fishponds. Kalāhuipuaʻa was an ahupuaʻa, but its name is preserved only as the fishpond. In other cases, ahupuaʻa and smaller division names now appear as names of streets, for example, or neighborhoods. Most people are unaware of the origin of these street and neighborhood names.
In addition, we Kānaka are constantly perturbed by their mispronunciation, but perhaps also secretly pleased at the trouble they cause the settlers and visitors who have to try to pronounce them. For settlers, learning to pronounce these correctly would be one step towards their part in native resurgence, which Taiaiake Alfred describes as “to acknowledge our existence and the integrity of our connection to the land.”[4]
Because of the work of Mary Kawena Pukui and others, we have a few reference works that give us the origins and meanings of some place names, but the majority remains unrecorded in reference books.[5] In Place Names of Hawaii, Samuel Elbert writes that the book includes 4,000 names. He also explains: “Even a rough estimate [of the number of Hawaiian place names] is impossible . . . Hawaiians named taro patches, rocks and trees that represented deities and ancestors, sites of houses and heiau . . . and the tiniest spots . . .”[6] Despite his apparent exasperation with the immensity of any project to record all the names, he contributed a great deal to our ability to do so and apparently also understood our need to have our ʻāina carry the names our ancestors gave them.
Thus, while we have a lot of native place names, we have forgotten a lot of them because of the shift to English. I have been reading Hawaiian language literature of different genres for many years now, and a few years ago, I began to collect names that I couldn’t find in our regular reference sources. The great majority of this literature was originally published in serial form in Hawaiian language newspapers, which for a long time were only partially and poorly indexed, and available mainly on microfilm. Today the majority have been scanned and are available online, and the project of making them searchable is proceeding now. The digitization of place names is something rarely thought of as part of a community resurgence process but it is an unacknowledged and important aspect of reclamation.
The value in gathering the names from moʻolelo, as opposed to maps or city directories, is that stories associated with the names are written there, too. Sometimes the stories tell us the origin of the names, and often, the names tell us characteristics of the place. They usually tell us something that happened at each place. One example is a place in the moku of Waialua here on Oʻahu that was called Kamani or Ke Kamani a Hamanalau; the woman Hamanalau brought seeds of a kamani tree from Molokai and planted a grove for which the place was named.
Many moʻolelo are overflowing with names of places. Sometimes these are remembered in lists that can function as mnemonics for place names and their winds or rains, and also as maps. For example, in the moʻolelo of the volcano deity Pele, she calls the names of winds in order to literally blow away her rivals for the affections of her lover. Those rivals also happen to be moʻo (reptilian water deities) dangerous to humans. According to my research assistant Hoʻoleia Kaʻeo, Pele calls the names of 273 winds of 198 different place names from the islands of Nihoa, Lehua, Kaʻula, Niʻihau, and Kauaʻi. In addition to this list, Kaʻeo collected all of the place names from this moʻolelo written by Joseph Mokuʻōhai Poepoe and published between 1908 and 1911, many of which are not found in the reference sources. Her method was to go through a print copy of the moʻolelo page by page, identify the place names, and then check the current reference sources.
For another project, I read many works written by an author named Joseph Kānepuʻu. I collected 43 place names from his works that are not in our sources. Other scholars are making it a bit easier to do this. For example, Collette Leimomi Akana transcribed, annotated, and translated a portion of the moʻolelo of Kamapuaʻa from 1891, and her notes indicate which place names were not found in the reference sources.[7] Other works of transcription or retyping with contemporary orthography include lists of the place names in the moʻolelo, such as Hoʻoulumāhiehie’s version of the Pele and Hiʻiaka moʻolelo published by Puakea Nogelmeier.[8]
Our information is scattered over different kinds of books right now, and some of the formats are outdated, such as the indispensable Place Names of Hawaii. In that book, each island was divided into quadrants and then each place name entry gives the quadrant. I want to be able to make this information accessible in ways that are most useful for both other scholars and the general public. Today, many of us are more interested in and able to identify places by moku and ahupuaʻa so that they can become part of our everyday actions again.
I close by recognizing that I am just one of many Kānaka working on renaming our ʻāina aloha (beloved lands) with their ancestral names. These are acts of resurgence only when many of us are engaged in them. E ola mau ka ʻōlelo kumu o ka ʻāina aloha.
[1] Kekuewa Kikiloi, “Rebirth of an Archipelago: Sustaining a Hawaiian Cultural Identity for People and Homeland,” Hūlili: Multidisciplinary Research on Hawaiian Well-Being 6 (2010): 75.
[2] Kīhei de Silva, “Liner Notes for ʻO Kaʻōhao Kuʻu ʻāina Nani” (unknown, 1993).
[3] http://www.maunalani.com/press/fact-sheet-kalahuipuaa-at-mauna-lani Accessed February 3, 2017.
[4] Alfred, Wasáse, 19.
[5] Mary Kawena Pukui, Samuel H. Elbert, and Esther T. Mookini, Place Names of Hawaii, Rev. and enl. ed (Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1974); John R. K Clark, Hawaiʻi Place Names: Shores, Beaches, and Surf Sites (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2002); Lloyd J. Soehren, Hawaiian Place Names, http://ulukau.org/cgi-bin/hpn?e=&a=q. Accessed February 3, 2017.
[6] Mary Kawena Pukui, Samuel H. Elbert, and Esther T. Mookini, Place Names of Hawaii, Rev. and enl. ed. (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1976), ix–x.
[7] Collette L Akana-Gooch, trans., The Oʻahu Exploits of Kamapuaʻa, the Hawaiian Pig-God: An Annotated Translation of a Hawaiian Epic from Ka Leo O Ka Lahui, July 23, 1891-August 26, 1891 (Honolulu: Bishop Museum Press, 2004).
[8] Hoʻoulumāhiehie, Ka Moʻolelo O Hiʻiakaikapoliopele: Ka Wahine I Ka Hikina a Ka Lā, Ka Uʻi Palekoki Uila O Halemaʻumaʻu – The Epic Tale of Hiʻiakaikapoliopele: Woman of the Sunrise, Lightning-Skirted Beauty of Halemaʻumaʻu, trans. Puakea Nogelmeier (Honolulu, Hawaiʻi: Awaiaulu Press, 2006).
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