Hawaiian Place Names: Storied Symbols in Hawaiian Performance Cartographies

Abstract

This research explores the nature of Hawaiian performance cartographies with a specific focus on place names as storied symbols. It also presents the cartographic culture clash as two dissimilar spatial knowledge systems come together on the shores of Kealakekua, Hawaiʻi at the turn of the nineteenth century. Although it is natural to frame the discussion of Western and Hawaiian cartographies dichotomously, this text maintains that all knowledge, including spatial knowledge, is socially constructed according to each culture’s ontological and epistemological foundations. Thus, it recognizes the relationship between the two cartographic traditions as existing in parallel to or in tandem with one another up until Captain Cook’s arrival at Kapukapu (a.k.a. Kealakekua Bay). At that point in time, 1798, the interactive presentation of Hawaiian cultural knowing encountered the visual representations of Western archival knowledge. Hawaiian place names were transformed from (re)presenting place as a repository of a multiplicity of meaning to representing place as an objectified and distanced label on the landscape. This text also recognizes the need for Indigenous methodologies in geographic research. Geographers have been engaging with Indigenous communities for millennia. Yet very little has been developed in regard to geographic research methodologies and Indigenous people. This text embraces Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies and brings them to the forefront of geographic research.