Kate A. Berry, Department of Geography, University of Nevada, Reno, NV, 89557. Email: kberry@scs.unr.edu. Indigenous Community Building and the Language of Water.
In his 1991 article, Language and the Making of Place: A Narrative Descriptive Approach, Yi Fu Tuan describes a broad range of ways through which language can create place:
The meaning of a real place is constructed in a like manner, through accretional layers of gossip and song, oral history, written history, essays and poems; and through pictures, but we have just noted that the pictures draw meaning from the (sometimes ample) inscriptions. (Tuan 1991, 692)
Tuan urges geographers to explicitly raise the role of language in studying how places, at all scales, have come into existence.
This paper takes up one aspect of Tuan’s challenge to geographers by considering language describing water which informs its meanings, values, its uses and effects, its role in defining and shaping places. More specifically, the focus is on the role that the language of water has assumed in the construction and transformation of indigenous (native) communities. Historical and contemporary examples will be drawn from Hawai’i, considering the linkages made by Hawaiians between water, indigenous identity, and (re)building communities.
Keywords: water, indigenous identity, community building, Hawai'i