HWST 356: Aloha Kanaloa: Kai Storymap

Expanded edition of glossary of Hawaiian place names including valleys, streams, mountains, land sections, surfing areas, towns, villages, and Honolulu streets and buildings. Available online from Ulukau.

In North Shore Place Names: Kahuku to Ka'ena, ocean expert John Clark continues his fascinating look at Hawai'i's past as told through the stories hidden in its place names. This time the author takes the reader on a historical tour of the North Shore of O'ahu, from Kahuku (the north point of the island) to Ka'ena (the west point of the island), and uncovers the everyday lives of the residents, especially prior to the plantation era. Similar to his 2011 book, Hawaiian Surfing, to research this book Clark tapped into the Ho'olaupa'i online database (www.nupepa.org): a vast archive of 125,000 pages of Hawaiian-language newspapers published from 1834 to 1948. The author collected an enormous number of references to specific North Shore locations and presents them in an easy-to-use dictionary-style format, which includes original passages in Hawaiian with English translations by Keao NeSmith. Available online via JSTOR and EBSCOhost for UHM patrons.

John Clark, author of the highly regarded "Beaches of Hawaii" series, gives us the many captivating stories behind the hundreds of Hawaii place names associated with the ocean--the names of shores, beaches, and other sites where people fish, swim, dive, surf, and paddle. Significant features and landmarks on or near shores, such as fishponds, monuments, shrines, reefs, and small islands, are also included. The names of surfing sites are the most numerous and among the most colorful: from the purely descriptive (Black Rock, Blue Hole) to the humorous (No Can Tell, Pray for Sex). Clark began gathering information for the "Beaches" series in 1972, and during the years that followed interviewed hundreds of informants, many of them native Hawaiians, and consulted dozens of Hawaiian reference books, newspapers, and maps. A significant amount of the oral history he collected was unrecorded and remained only in his notebooks and memory. Hawaii Place Names: Shores, Beaches, and Surf Sites is the final result of those years of research, and like its popular predecessors, it benefits substantially from Clark's having spent a lifetime surfing and swimming Hawaii's beaches. Available online via JSTOR and Ebook Central for UHM patrons.

This extraordinary collection of Hawaiian sayings--collected, translated, and annotated by Mary Kawena Pukui--offers a unique opportunity to savor the wisdom, poetic beauty, and earthy humor of these finely crafted expressions. The sayings may be appreciated individually and collectively for their aesthetic, historic, and educational values. They reveal even deeper layers of meaning, giving understanding not only of Hawaii and its people but all of humanity. Since the sayings carry the immediacy of the spoken word, considered to be the highest form of cultural expression in old Hawaii, they bring us closer to the everyday thoughts and lives of the Hawaiians who created them. Taken together, the sayings offer a basis for an understanding of the essence and origins of traditional Hawaiian values. Available online via EBSCOhost for UHM patrons.

From earliest times, the chanting of poetry served the Hawaiians as a form of ritual celebration of the things they cherished–the beauty of their islands, the abundance of wild creatures that inhabited their sea and air, the majesty of their rulers, and the prowess of their gods. Commoners as well as highborn chiefs and poet-priests shared in the creation of the chants. These haku mele, or “composers,” the commoners especially, wove living threads from their own histoic circumstances and everyday experiences into the ongoing oral tradition, as handed down from expert to pupil, or from elder to descendant, generation after generation. Available online via de Gruyter eBooks Complete for UHM patrons.

Here for the first time is a large collection of Hawaiian songs in an authoritative text with translation (music not included). The texts have never before been written consistently with the glottal stops (indicating syllabic breaks between vowels) and macrons (indicating long vowels and stresses) that make the words pronounceable by those unfamiliar with the Hawaiian language. Many of the songs have not been translated before or have only been freely adapted rather than translated. These 101 songs are all postmissionary and owe their musical origin to missionary hymns, although only a few are religious. None are technically chants, though some are chants that have been edited and set to music. They date from the mid-1850s (most are from the time of the monarchy) to 1968 (the date of Mary Kawena Pukui's translation of Christmas songs). Nearly all of these songs are sung today and are well known to Hawaiian singers. Included are love songs, and Christmas songs. There is an exhaustive introduction, which includes classification and arrangement of the songs; a note on the composers; and analysis of the structure, symbolism, and meanings of the songs; and a note on the translations and on the poetic vocabulary of the Hawaiian words.