Public Administration alumnus John Clark has been a soldier, lifeguard, firefighter, writer and planning consultant. He has also has authored 10 books about Hawaiʻi’s place names. His most recent, Kalaupapa Place Names: Waikolu to Nihoa, was published this year by UH Press.
Your range of experience after high school is amazing. What do these different pursuits have in common?
I think the common denominator of those different pursuits was that I was willing to give anything a try at least once if I thought there was some value in it for me. It was kind of like that old saying, “You never know until you try.” It’s served me well throughout my life.
Why are you fascinated by the names and stories behind our place names?
My interest in place names goes back to 1954 when I was eight years old. That’s when I learned to surf at a spot in Waikīkī called Canoes, which is in front of the Moana Hotel, and realized that it got its name from the outrigger canoes that also surfed there.
As I got older and better, I surfed other spots at other beaches, and I really enjoyed learning the stories behind the names, and made it a point to remember them. In 1972, when I wrote my first book on Oʻahu’s beaches, I included this information I’d been gathering for so many years, and did the same in the books that followed.
Place names capture history. They tell us that for some reason a particular place was important enough to be given a name. They tell us about the people and the culture at the time they were given. They tell us what people were doing, what they were thinking, what was important to them, and what made an impression on them.
What’s especially fascinating are the moʻolelo, the stories behind the names. You really don’t know the meaning of a place name unless you know the moʻolelo that goes with it. This, however, doesn’t keep people who don’t know a moʻolelo from making educated guesses based on their own observations, so a key piece of place name research is sorting through the stories to find the original one, if it still exists.
What’s something in Kalaupapa Place Names most readers will find surprising?
Alfred Nobel invented dynamite in 1867, and by the early 1870s it was used in Hawaiʻi for road and tunnel construction. Creative fishermen, though, figured out how to use it for fishing. When you throw a lighted stick of dynamite into a school of fish, the explosion stuns or kills them, making them easy to net. Unfortunately, injuries and fatalities often followed its use, so the Hawaiian legislature passed a law in 1872 prohibiting fishing with explosives. With little enforcement, however, the practice continued, and three Hawaiian-language newspaper articles written in 1886, 1892, and 1908 document blast fishing at Kalaupapa.
