Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 40, Number 3, 1 March 2023 — What's in a Name? [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

What's in a Name?

By Adam Keawe Manalo-Camp Indigenous plaee names are not merely location names. They have power. They speak stories. Indigenous plaee names invoke ancestral memories and rekindle the sound of ceremonies into our souls. Indigenous plaee names and geographies are narratives of histories, struggles, and claims. Some argue that nations themselves are communities held together by eommon narratives and symbols. So restoring indigenous plaee names is an act of reclaiming a narrative and completing the return of land while re-af-firming our sense of plaee and sovereignty. It is also an act of reclaiming the voice of our ancestors as plaee names restore the use of indigenous languages long suppressed. While Indigenous peoples, including Kānaka Maoli, seek the return of their lands, they also seek the restoration of indigenous plaee names and geography. Some may view restoring a plaee name without returning the land as merely symbolic or even performative. Regardless, indigenous plaee names help to restore connections to narratives. Whose narration is listened to and whose narrative is followed preceeds the right to elaim the land and decide its future. There is a term for the eolonial practice of renaming the lands of Indigenous people: toponymic subjugation. Another, less formal term is "name stripping." The process of toponymic subjugation of indigenous geographies in the Pacific began when Ferdinand Magellan stumbled upon Guāhan (Guam) in 1521. Using the "Doctrine of Discovery," Magellan laid elaim over the island and promptly renamed it. For the next four centuries, other eolonial powers eopied this pattern and proceeded to redraw, remap, and rename indigenous lands around the Pacific creating maps that erased indigenous geographies and entire identities. Native peoples heeame strangers in their own homelands and were forced to identify themselves way colonizers dictated. They were internally displaced. Indigenous plaee names were deliberatelty replaced with plaee names influenced by the European homelands of the colonists, either their location experience, or by honorific eponyms derived from captains, politicians, patrons, and monarchs in Europe. Just as they did in Turtle Island (North America) and elsewhere, Western explorers systemically shaped a mythical narrative in whieh the vast lei of islands of the Pacific were "terra nullius" or "empty lands" ready for colonization, exploitation, and European settlement. Of course, these lands were never actually empty. They were home to our ancestors. Even when indigenous plaee names were known, European cartographers (map makers) ignored them. Adelbert von Chamisso, a naturalist on the Russian scientific ship Riurik commanded by Otto von Kotzebue in the 1820s, in remarking on the Indigenous people of the Ralik islands, "...we eall most of these people and

tribes, mentioned by us, by names whieh they did not give themselves, but whieh were imposed upon them by strangers." The Ralik Islands are an island ehain in what is now called the "Marshall Islands." In 1788, a British Naval Captain, John William Marshall, happened to sail through the area on route to Australia. Captain Marshall named the islands after himself. All over the Pacific, indigenous plaee names were discarded because ship captains or cartographers found them too difRcult to pronounce - so they simply renamed them. Examples include Pohnpei whieh was renamed 'Ascension" in honor of a holiday. Rapa Nui was renamed "Easter Island" after another holiday. Aotearoa was renamed "New Zealand" after the Dutch province of Zeeland. Isatabu was renamed "Guadalcanal" after a town in Spain. Islands were sometimes renamed multiple times when control of land was passed ffom one eolonial power to another. Kosrae was called "Strongs Island" in the 19th century by an American captain after a governor of Massachusetts. It was later renamed "Kusaie" under the Japanese. This also happened in Hawai'i where Captain James Cook tried to rename our islands in honor of the Earl of Sandwich. Despite the fact that the Hawaiian Kingdom never adopted the name, the United States, France, and the United Kingdom continued to use "Sandwich Islands" on their maps and other documentation for the better part of the 19th century. Toponymic subjection in Hawai'i continues to manifest itself in the naming of towns, subdivisions, high schools, beaches, and monuments. Samuel Kamakau and other prominent Kānaka Maoli scholars of the 19th century directly attributed to Captain Cook the introduction of diseases to Hawai'i that

would eventually decimate the Kānaka Maoli population, killing 80% of our people. Yet the area of Ka'awaloa on Hawai'i Island was nevertheless renamed "Captain Cook" after the Captain Cook Sugar Company opened a post office there in the early 1900s. Lē'ahi is the name of Waikīkī's famous landmark, yet it is called "Diamond Head" today only because Western explorers mistook calcite crystals for diamonds in the late 1700s. Moku'ume'ume, an ancient fertility site, is now called "Ford Island" after a previous landowner. Maunalua has a storied name but was renamed "Hawai'i Kai" after the developer Henry Kaiser. Ka'ōhao was renamed "Lanikai" in the 1920s by developer Charles Frazier who purchased 300 acres there. Also in the 1920s, complaints that it was difRcult to pronounce Princess Ruth Ke'elikōlani School prompted ofRcials to instead give the school the generic non-de-script name "Central Middle School." The staff and community did the pono thing in 2021 and restored the honor of their school by renaming it Ke'elikōlani Middle School As we move forward to reclaim our voice as the Po'e Hawai'i 'Ōiwi, restoring our ancestral plaee names is an important part of reclaiming our lands and our narration. They hold our truths. 'Olelo (language), mo'olelo (stories/history), inoa wahi (plaee names), mēheuheu (cultural behaviors), 'ike (eultural wisdom), and wahi pana (storied places) are integral parts of our pa'i a'a mo'omeheu or cultural root system planted by our ancestors millennia ago and left to sustain us but we must continually plant and deepen these roots for the generations to eome. ■ Adam Keawe Manalo-Camp grew up in Papakōlea and is a Hawaiian and Filipino writer, blogger and independent researcher.

j I kc t/r /a ft arc i/c H'ca/tcc Jane /c.i Is/eJ Jlwc/wic/i An early illustration of O'ahu ("Woahoo") by Nth century Australian artist George Dixon refers to Hawai'i pae 'aina as the "Sandwich Isles."