During a storm in 1822, a pair of English whaling ships — the Pearl and the Hermes — crashed into a reef about 1,200 miles from Oʻahu in the remote Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.

More than 200 years later, most people still call that place Pearl and Hermes Atoll, commemorating the lackluster navigational skills of Pacific profiteers.

Other islands in the Hawaiian archipelago were similarly named. The French had their turn in 1786. Compte de La Pérouse cruised by a pinnacle covered in bird poop that, in the moonlight, looked like a ship with white sails. It inspired some mariners to get a closer look, only to run aground in the shallow waters.

That pinnacle is still known as La Pérouse. The waters around it are French Frigate Shoals. And a neighboring island 90 miles away is labeled Necker on most maps, which La Pérouse named after Louis XVI’s finance minister.

Colonialists did what colonialists do. They came, they claimed, they took what they wanted and they moved on. They left behind pieces of their sunken ships, and the new names they gave these old places — the same places Hawaiians had frequented for hundreds of years before Westerners arrived, places for which they had their own names, preserved in chants passed down through generations.

But the times are changing with a movement to restore the original names of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, which since 2006 have been protected as part of Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument.

It began from the ground up, according to Randy Kosaki, the monument’s deputy superintendent for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. A handful of Native Hawaiian scientists started using the original Hawaiian names for these islands in their research papers, and it’s caught on.

Now, federal agencies like NOAA print maps with both Hawaiian and Western names. Pearl and Hermes Atoll is also labeled as Manawai, French Frigate Shoals as Lalo, Necker as Mokumanamana. 

On NOAA’s most recent research expedition to the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, the mix of scientists from Hawaiʻi and the mainland almost exclusively used the Hawaiian names when discussing where they were diving and surveying the reefs. That wasn’t the case on trips even a few years earlier.

Learn About The NOAA Expedition: Guardians Of The Deep

Kekuewa Kikiloi laid much of the groundwork in his seminal 2010 paper, “Rebirth of an Archipelago: Sustaining a Hawaiian Cultural Identity for People and Homeland.”

“The recovery of each one of these island names helps to reconstitute our identity and essentially rediscover a greater sense of ourselves,” he wrote. “In the shifting currents of today’s world, these islands are a timeless point of reference that links each one of us to an integral part of our past.”

Fourteen years later one of his graduate students, Kainalu Steward, is among the next generation of marine scientists working to bring the original Hawaiian names back. He’s been working with Kikiloi and the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Native Hawaiian Cultural Working Group, whose 170 members have ancestral ties to Papahānaumokuākea, to track down the original names and return them to prominence.

It only takes one or two people to turn the tide, he said, just as it only took a few people to change the names to begin with. “It was only a small thing that helped us forget a whole history,” he said.

Steward’s mentor, Haunani Kane, was among the first to use the Hawaiian names for places in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands in one of her scientific papers, referring matter-of-factly to French Frigate Shoals as Lalo. 

“We don’t want to call them the Gin islands because of a person who found a gin bottle there,” Kane said, referring to two tiny islands in Lalo that still carry that name.

Using the original names does more than reconnect people with their culture, she said. It also helps scientists understand the history of these places. Lalo generally means low-lying or down, for instance, and it is indeed a place known for low-lying islands emerging and sinking and reappearing. Hawaiian stories about these places capture how they may have existed through the centuries, Kane said.

“We look at the names our ancestors gave them and it’s very clear these islands were always shifting and changing,” she said. “We’re classically trained as scientists but also have a deep love and knowledge of Hawaiian language to deepen our collective understanding of what these islands do, their personalities. It’s so much more than just the name. It’s the knowledge and lessons.”

Kosaki, who’s part Native Hawaiian and served as chief scientist on this past trip, celebrates the change. He’s worked for NOAA the past 22 years, and while he always hoped people would revert to calling these places by their original names, he didn’t think it would happen in his lifetime.

“I really think this is our greatest contribution to science,” he said. “By naming them in ʻōlelo Hawai‘i, we are providing a permanent link to a culture and place.”

Kosaki is looking beyond just using the Hawaiian names for the places in the archipelago. He’s focused on the animals that inhabit it too. Papahānaumokuākea is home to 7,000 species, more than a quarter found nowhere else in the world. 

Giving new species a Hawaiian name is more than just using Hawaiian words, too. It’s the thought process that groups like the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Native Hawaiian Cultural Working Group and the Nomenclature Hui put into the name that makes them truly Hawaiian, he said.

As an example, Kosaki said some species have a land and marine pairing. Scientists were aware of the endemic nohu plant, known for its large thorns. When they discovered a native scorpion fish in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, they noted its long spiky fins and other similarities, and named it nohu as well. This tradition follows the Kumulipo, the Hawaiian creation chant.

Yet few species in Hawaiʻi have Indigenous names. That’s not by chance.

“Barbarous tongues” were outlawed from the scientific naming of species until 1961. Any names not from Latin or Greek were banned. That restriction has been lifted, but to this day a small percent of Hawaiian species have Hawaiian scientific names.

New Zealand, which also is trying to incorporate its Indigenous roots into the names of its native species, quantified it. A 2023 study by Stephen Heard and Julia Mlynarek notes that only 4% of 30,000 named species in New Zealand use Māori. 

The study’s authors underscore how the naming of species can bring attention to the animal, the area and even new species discovery. Some species are now named for celebrities, for instance, to garner publicity. There’s a fern named after Lady Gaga, a beetle named after Kate Winslet, an algae after Tim Burton. Others celebrate politicians, athletes and novelists. 

Scientists named a species discovered in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands after President Barack Obama to honor him for expanding Papahānaumokuākea. NOAA scientists had found Tosanoides obama, a type of coral reef fish, during a June 2016 expedition in the monument. 

A 2020 paper by Len Gillman and Shane Wright in Communications Biology pushed their peers to evaluate the practice of naming species with a view toward using more Indigenous names. 

The names for plants and animals are “knowledge conduits,” they wrote, so when Europeans “discovered” places, and renamed them, it severed historical knowledge.

Hōlanikū, for instance, loosely means “bringing forth heaven.” It’s a place Hawaiians believed to be a homeland of the gods at the end of the Hawaiian archipelago.

That history was at least partially lost when it went through a series of new names in the 1800s before Kure Atoll (initially Cure Island) eventually stuck, in honor of a Russian navigator.

“The society that we live in is changing,” said Hau‘oli Lorenzo-Elarco, a Hawaiian language instructor and translator whose dissertation focuses on the naming of species in Papahānaumokuākea.

“There’s a deeper recognition that Indigenous knowledge isn’t just an ornament on the wall that we should place in our plans,” he said. “Bringing back the names is part of decolonizing Hawaiʻi. Names carry power. And it’s so simple.”

Civil Beat’s coverage of climate change is supported by The Healy Foundation, Marisla Fund of the Hawaii Community Foundation and the Frost Family Foundation.