Owyhee - What's in a name? (Honolulu, Kailua: mobile home, gated, living)

[OpenD]

Originally Posted by Jonah K

During the 1970s and 1980s, Hawaiian activists struggled with finding a Hawaiian language expression to denote the indigenous people of Hawaiʻi. In a nutshell, some folks concluded that it would be a good idea to "take back" the term "kanaka" and try to remove its stigma by adding the adjectives "maoli" ("native", "true", "real", "genuine", etc.) or "ʻōiwi" ("native") to it; hence, "kanaka maoli" and "kanaka ʻōiwi." Nowadays, one usually has to add an adjective in front of the term "kanaka" to make it disparaging (e.g. "dumb kanaka", etc.) in Hawaiʻi.

Thanks, JonahK, you always have the best stuff...

And that explains a lot, including why it was once more neutral, then openly disparaging, and now seemingly more neutral, but just not used a lot.

[OpenD]

Originally Posted by OpenD

I've been trying to find reliable numbers that split Pacific Islanders out from those of native Hawaiians, but I've had trouble locating them. Mainstream Census reports combine them into one demographic number, while other sources seem to depend on estimates rather than surveys.

OK, I think I've got a bit of a handle now on why different numbers are floating around concerning the Native Hawaiian population.

To begin with, the Federal Office of Budget Management only deals with 5 broad racial groups, so the Census Bureau reports by those categories... White, Black or African American, American Indian or Alaska Native (AIAN), Asian, or Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander (NHOPI). Since the NHOPI group is relatively small, it gets used in most reporting, even in the Census Department Brief called "The Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander Population: 2010," which is used as a reference by news reporters and others.
http://www.census.gov/prod/cen2010/b...c2010br-12.pdf

And for the most part people seem to think NHOPI numbers are "close enough!" But I just dug into the data tables to break out Native Hawaiians alone, and discovered a bigger difference than I had suspected. For example, for the State of Hawai'i the combined NHOPI population for 2009-2011 was 130,495 while the Native Hawaiian population is only 59% of that total at 76,994. And the NHOPI populations for Hawai'i and California are nearly the same, but the Native Hawiian population is much lower in California. So here are the details I found in the tables...

Native Hawaiian Population per 2009-2011 US Census Data

Total in US 158, 610 (.0005 of US population)

Hawai'i........ 76,994 (5.5% of overall state population)(48.5% of all Native Hawaiians in country)

California.......23,961

Nevada...........6,834

Washington.....5,354

Oregon...........3,800

Within the state I found the following:

Honolulu County...45,379
Hawai'i County.....16,256
Maui County..........9,688
Kau'ai County........ * Could not break out. NHOPI population was 6,929

But just to keep us guessing, the State has its own surveys and its own numbers, and they're somewhat different.

[KaraBenNemsi]

The word 'Kanake' (pl. Kanaken) today is a very insulting term in the German language. It's utilized to demean immigrating Turkish and Arabic people. Yet it's German origin comes from sailors of the early 19th century, describing loyal and hard working comrades.

Changes happen by itself--in the seventies it was used to describe Italians and Spaniards. But the use migrated to people in the south east away from Europe.

[Jonah K]

Originally Posted by KaraBenNemsi

The word 'Kanake' (pl. Kanaken) today is a very insulting term in the German language. It's utilized to demean immigrating Turkish and Arabic people. Yet it's German origin comes from sailors of the early 19th century, describing loyal and hard working comrades.

Changes happen by itself--in the seventies it was used to describe Italians and Spaniards. But the use migrated to people in the south east away from Europe.

Ironically, New Caledonian separatist groups, such as the "Front de Libération Nationale Kanak et Socialiste (FLNKS), refer to the entire country as "Kanaky" and its indigenous people as "Kanaks" (or "Canaques" in French).

[Razzbar]

Originally Posted by OpenD

Reading
There is interesting history behind many of the place names IN Hawai'i as well. I was looking at an old map of the Island of Hawai'i from the U of H collection recently and found that the town we call Kea'au today was called Nine Mile on that map.

The area that is now known as Kea'au used to be known as Ola'a. Kea'au is the name of a landing on the coast, where Herbert Shipman built an estate. It has one of the few white sand beaches on the Puna coast. Shipman owned the sugar plantation, and present-day Kea'au was a plantation town. Still is, in a way. The 9 mile camp is directly behind Kea'au town.

I asked an elder why the name was changed from Ola'a to Kea'au, and he said only that Ola'a had a bad connotation. In earlier days, it was considered a dangerous place to travel through on the way between Hilo and Volcano, because of many highway robbers along the way. Someone also told me that the area of Ola'a was called "the spear". Ola'a shows on old maps as a strip of land roughly along the Volcano highway, that runs roughly from Kea'au to Mt. View.

In and around the 1950s, Kea'au was a popular weekend spot for Hilo residents to visit. There was a decent theater with a stage suitable for live shows, and mini amusement park near the hongwanji. The Ola'a theater was located where the bank currently sits, and there were small stores on both sides of the street going toward the post office. Between the main street and the highway, there were houses.

I'm not certain which side of the road camp 9 was on, or if it was both sides.

The theater was torn down in 1974, to make way for the shopping center, which was built almost 10 years later. All the houses and stores on that side of the street were gone by the time the theater was demolished -- providing lumber for at least three houses. About half the stores on the other side of the street were destroyed by a fire in the late 70s. One of the surviving buildings was torn down by Robin Buntyn, who built a plant store out of the salvaged materials. He now owns a ritzy gallery in Honolulu. He also did a commendable job of remodeling a decrepit former appliance store into an arcade of artist's shops. Robin used to take cleaning jobs for what he could salvage from peoples garages and attics. He'd take old family photographs, copyright them in his own name, and put them on display in the arcade.

[Razzbar]

Idaho is my other home state. When I was a kid, the story of Owyhee county was that it was named for Chinese laborers who came from Hawai'i. This is wrong, but an understandable confusion, since there were almost as many Chinese as whites living in Idaho at one time.

Owyhee county is Idaho's oldest and largest county.

I'd always know, or knew of, a few Hawaiians living in the area while growing up, but I don't want to suggest that they were connected to the Kanaka explorers of the Owyhee river. One of Don Ho's brothers lives in the area. There's also a connection in the Japanese-American community in nearby Ontario, Oregon. During WWII, there was an internment camp nearby, and when the war ended, quite a few stayed in the area. It has the only traditional Japanese Buddhist temple between Portland and Salt Lake City. Several of those families were originally from Hawai'i.

Kanaka participated in the California Gold Rush, and there was -- maybe still is(?) a place called "Kanaka Camp" in the area where the gold was being mined. Mostly, Kanaka were settling in Oregon and the Puget Sound area. The name "Owyhee" and "Kanaka" appear in many place names on the PNW.

When Oregon became a state, the legislature passed a law forbidding all but whites and indians from owning land in the state. As a result, many kanaka left, usually for Canada.

I've heard of an island near Vancouver island that has residents who can trace their ancestry back to the original kanaka settlers. There was an article in the Advertiser a long time back, that said the Hawaiian language was still spoken there.

For a good history of Hawaiian pioneers in the West, see a book titled "Kanaka" by Tom Koppel.

[leilaniguy]

I moved to hawaii from Jacksonville Oregon, and old gold mining town. About a mile past town there is an area called Kanaka flats. The Hawaiians were forced to live there, driven out of town by the white populace. Intersting to note the town had a chinatown, they were apparently more accepted because they did all the dirty work, laundry, cooking, ditch digging, etc.

[OpenD]

In the 1820s American Christian missionaries wanted to teach Hawaiian natives to read, so they could learn to read the Bible. That effort took two separate tracks... one to teach the natives to speak and read English, and another to give them a Bible to read in the Hawaiian language which is called Ōlelo Hawaiʻi. To do this they had to devise a written form of what heretofore had been only a spoken language, compile a Hawaiian dictionary, translate the Bible into Ōlelo Hawaiʻi, and then teach the natives to read it. They succeeded at both.

But the missionaries were not trained linguists, so they made mistakes in transcribing what the natives told them. Lasting errors were created because they couldn't correctly distinguish between many of the consonent sounds in the Hawaiian language. For instance they were unable to distinguish between Hawaiian t and k sounds, or l and r, or b and p, or w and v. So they just dropped the t, r, b, and v. And spoken Ōlelo Hawaiʻi simply did not have certain sounds that are common in English, such as c, j, s, z and others, so those letters were discarded as well.

When the missionaries were done, the stripped down alphabet they standardized on for writing the Hawaiian language consisted of just 5 vowels: a, e, i, o and u; and 8 consonants: h, k, l, m, n, p, w and ʻokina, (the symbol for the Hawaiian glottal stop sound, which looks like a backwards apostrophe, and gets ignored by the uninformed).

Due to these errors, when Hawaiian names and words were written down, some became distorted from their authentic spoken form. For example Honoruru became Honolulu. Ranaʻi became Lanaʻi, Mauna Roa became Mauna Loa, tabu became kapu, taro became kalo. And over time the written mispronunciations displaced the original spoken words. So, recalling the first postcard mailed from Hawai'i to Boston in 1820 that I mentioned earlier, the one postmarked from Honoruru? It turns out that wasn't a mistake after all.

[OpenD]

Originally Posted by Razzbar

The area that is now known as Kea'au used to be known as Ola'a. Kea'au is the name of a landing on the coast, where Herbert Shipman built an estate. It has one of the few white sand beaches on the Puna coast. Shipman owned the sugar plantation, and present-day Kea'au was a plantation town. Still is, in a way. The 9 mile camp is directly behind Kea'au town.

I asked an elder why the name was changed from Ola'a to Kea'au, and he said only that Ola'a had a bad connotation. In earlier days, it was considered a dangerous place to travel through on the way between Hilo and Volcano, because of many highway robbers along the way. Someone also told me that the area of Ola'a was called "the spear". Ola'a shows on old maps as a strip of land roughly along the Volcano highway, that runs roughly from Kea'au to Mt. View.

And the name lives on in the form of `Ola`a Forest, which is a separate 9,000 acre part of Hawai'i Volcanoes National Park mauka Mountain View and Volcano.

This mention here flushed up fragment of a memory of a ghost story I heard a long time ago about the Dead Boy in the `Ola`a pond, so I went searching for it. And I found it, on the Weird US travel site. Years ago, when I first read this story, I tried to find the town of `Ola`a on the map, not realizing the name had been changed to Kea'au.

Weird Hawaii

Hawaii Volcanoes National Park - Olaa

[OpenD]

I once was asked, "How far is it from Waimea to Kamuela?"

A smartalecky response might be, "Will you be traveling by plane, by car, or by canoe?," or the more direct question might be, "Which Waimea?," but from the context in which it was asked I inferred the confusion behind their question and answered, "They're the same place. Waimea is the town, Kamuela is the Post Office."

Waimea is a Hawaiian word which means "red water" and is a common place name in Hawai'i, being used more than half a dozen times on Kau'ai, Oahu, and Hawai'i Islands. But to avoid mistakes with the mail, US Postal Service only allows only one Post Office per state or territory to carry a given name. So when they were setting up the postal network in Hawai'i, the community on Kaua'i where Captain Cook first made contact with the Hawaiian people in 1778 was chosen to have its post office named Waimea.

So the sleepy little cow-town of Waimea on the Big Island needed a different name for its post office, and the name "Kamuela" was chosen, to honor Samuel Parker, owner of the huge cattle ranch which surrounded the town and was its primary reason for being.

What? Wait. Kamuela?

Yes, Kamuela was the affectionate local name for Samuel in Hawaiian, because there is no "S" sound in the language, and consonants are always followed by a vowel. So the "S" became a "K" and and "A" was added, and voila... Kamuela!

And today the town is still called Waimea, but postal addresses are listed as Kamuela, so business listings in Waimea on the Big Island are found online as being in Kamuela, which can confuse the unwary.