In her mesmerizing 1994 book, “Na Wahi Pana O Koolau Poko — Legendary Places of Koolaupoko,” photographer Kapulani Landgraf observes that a Hawaiian place name “physically and poetically describes an area while revealing its historical or literary significance.

“Place names evoke power in the Hawaiian language by emphasizing pride in our homeland. They are like kupuna, linking us to the past.”

After all of my years as a haole in the Islands, places and their Hawaiian names seem to have somehow fused together and become indivisible. The name is the place and vice-versa, whether it’s Makapuu or Makena, Kapalama or Kaena, Pawaa or Pelekunu.

Simply to say “Maunalua,” where I grew up, is to trigger many sensations and emotions in me. Each word, each name, is three-, maybe four-dimensional, an evocation of a specific land, its water, weather and spirit.

It’s difficult to describe, but let me try: Awhile ago, as an editor, I decided to stop capitalizing words like “bay,” “stream,” “beach” and “valley” when they’re attached to Hawaiian place names; e.g., Waikiki beach, Waiomao stream, Nuu bay. It was a way to honor the wholeness and integrity of the Hawaiian “map” and not divvy it up into separate, Western things.

“Kaena” says everything, all of its physical features, all its history, qualities and quirks. All its beauties.

As the scholar Katrina-Ann Kapa Oliveira put it in her fascinating treatise, “Ancestral Places: Understanding Kanaka Geographies,” published last year: “Like the many layers of kaona (hidden meaning) in olelo Hawaii poetry, place is viewed with immense dimensionality from a Kanaka perspective.”

Unlike place names elsewhere in the United States, 86 percent of the place names in Hawaii are in the language of the native population, and thus are accessible, pronounceable, and many have understandable meanings.

I don’t know many of the stories behind the place names, and I certainly have no kulaiwi, or an anchor place, the place of my ancestors’ bones, here, but I know the stories are there and very old, murmuring even now. With many meanings unknowable, forgotten or hidden, even to scholars, the names themselves persist, tender and alive and magical. Like people.

Landgraf’s book is a compilation of clear-eyed yet haunting, black-and-white images of windward Oahu mountain ridges, tumbled piles of stones, fecund valleys, reef flats, marshes and islets, all of them accompanied by short texts translated from Hawaiian sources, sketches of each place’s story.

For instance, a large rock in the shallow waters of Koonapou, just north of Makapuu, is called Pohaku Paakiki, where the shark god Kamohoalii, aggravated by a scalawag who routinely would cut off sharks’ tails, caught the tormentor and began to eat him, starting at his feet up to his buttocks. But the smell of excrement nauseated Kamohoalii, and he stopped. After that, the shark god never ate anyone else in the waters between Kalaeokaoio (at Kualoa) and Makapuu.

Furthermore, the text tells us, Koonapou is the ancient name for a fishing village, also called Kaupo, that once occupied the low-lying, rocky point where Sea Life Park and Kaupo Beach Park are now. The settlement was abandoned in 1853 because of a smallpox epidemic.

The rich kalo lands of Kaneohe were reserved by Kamehameha for himself and his heirs. Three famous waterfalls along the Koolau pali, Hiilaniwai, Kahuaiki, and Mamalahoa, are the three wives of the great procreator god Kane. But the name, by one account, comes from a distraught woman of the area, “who compared her husband’s cruelty to the edge of a bamboo knife: ‘He kane ohe — he is like a bamboo knife, cruel and heartless.’”

Recovering, Restoring Names Lost to Time

“Hundreds of names mentioned in published legends and chants cannot be found in maps,” notes Samuel H. Elbert in the 1974 edition of the standard reference work, “Place Names of Hawaii,” co-written by Elbert, Mary K. Pukui and Esther T. Mookini. “How many place names are there?” Elbert asks. “Even a rough estimate is impossible: a hundred-thousand? A million?”

Hawaiians, Elbert explains, named taro patches, rocks and trees, house sites, heiau, canoe landings, fishing stations at sea, canoe landings, and “the tiniest spots where miraculous or interesting events are believed to have taken place.” Adding to the proliferation, he notes, was the pleasure that place-naming gave to the poet, the punster and the jokester.

“When the Hawaiians lived on the land as farmers and gatherers, they became intimately acquainted with and named countless features and places. But when they left the land or died, many of the names disappeared, too.” — Lloyd J. Soehren

Unlike place names elsewhere in the United States, Elbert points out that 86 percent of the place names in Hawaii are in the language of the native population, and thus are accessible, pronounceable, and many have understandable meanings; the stories are often known and appreciated. For example, the epic exploits of peripatetic Pele, goddess of the volcano, and rampaging Kamapuaa, the pig god, animate hundreds of sites, even today, with hundred of stories. The land lives in its names.

Illustrating the breadth of Hawaiian place-naming, Lloyd J. Soehren’s online database, A Catalog of Hawaii Place Names, is set up to accept 999 different place names for each of the Islands’ hundreds of traditional land divisions, or ahupuaa, with one ahupuaa about the size of a single mountain valley.

In his preface to the catalog, Soehrens summarizes his noble enterprise:

“When the Hawaiians lived on the land as farmers and gatherers, they became intimately acquainted with and named countless features and places. But when they left the land or died, many of the names disappeared, too. While some were recorded in the land records of the nineteenth century, which are the basis of this catalog, the associations and meanings are usually lost. They are relics, artifacts from the past, buried in nearly forgotten volumes, yet part of the Hawaiian heritage. It is the aim here to recover then and restore them to the public.”

More immediate evidence of this revival are the standardized road signs popping up all over Oahu announcing the names of the island’s 81 ahupuaa as major roadways pass into them. Instigated by cultural advocate Mahealani Cypher and supported by Hawaiian civic clubs, the Office of Hawaiian Affairs and state and city agencies, the Ahupuaa Boundary Marker Project is scheduled for completion later this year.

“People don’t know where they are,” Cypher once told me. Taking care of your place, malama aina, is easier when you know what it is, she said, when you know its name. “It’s going to take at least a generation for the concept to sink in,” she said.

On Molokai, it’s almost a tic, how people there refer to “my place,” “our place” and “your place,” referring to where one lives, whether it’s Maunaloa, Kamalo or Honouliwai. After the island’s big victory defending itself against a luxury enclave proposed at Kaluakoi’s remote Laau point — and looking ahead to Molokai’s limitless future — longtime activist Wayde Lee of Hoolehua told me,  “All we gotta do is put all the pieces together and take care of our place. My grandmother once told me that the most powerful thing in America is the military, and if the Hawaiians can beat the U.S. military at Kahoolawe without firing a single shot, then everyone can go home and take care of their place. George Helm said it best, ‘Aloha Aina.’”