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Native Hawaiian Names for Birds
Names help sustain links between Indigenous people and birds.
© Alex Wang
Noah Gomes is an educator and researcher with a life-long love of birds and a passion for Hawaiian culture and language. His research into Native Hawaiian names for birds has shed light on the long-standing connections between people and birds on the islands. Noah helped reconnect the name ʻAlawī to the bird otherwise known as the Hawaiian Creeper. By exploring the links between humans and wildlife, Noah says we can find better ways to live alongside these birds, many of which are at risk of extinction.
BirdNote®
Native Hawaiian Names for Birds
Adapted from the Threatened podcast
This is BirdNote.
[clip of Noah’s mele]
Noah Gomes is an educator and researcher with a life-long love of birds and a passion for Hawaiian culture and language.
Noah Gomes: Our native birds have a lot of meaning in a lot of different ways. A lot of them appear in our stories and our mele, our chants.
[ʻIʻiwi calls, XC 157360]
His research into Native Hawaiian names for birds has shed light on the long-standing connections between people and birds on the islands. Noah helped reconnect the name ʻAlawī to the bird otherwise known as the Hawaiian Creeper.
Noah Gomes: Names are power, right? You know something’s name, you have a degree of familiarity with it, you have a relationship you’re building with it. Knowing the name for this bird is ʻAlawī connects us where suddenly it’s relevant to all kinds of things in our past that we didn’t know about. It’s particularly important for Native peoples who have experienced loss of their language, um, because there are so many things encoded in that.
By exploring the links between humans and wildlife, Noah says we can find better ways to live alongside these birds, many of which are at risk of extinction.
Noah Gomes: Everything is just really connected -- in a lot of different ways -- within the Indigenous world, within the science world. There are things that we can learn from the Indigenous way of thinking. Not just living, but the way of thinking – and the perspectives that are involved with that that can inform our practices today.
Learn more about Hawai‘i’s birds and their cultural connection to Native Hawaiians on the Threatened podcast. Listen in your podcast app or at BirdNote.org. I’m Ari Daniel.
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Senior Producer: John Kessler
Content Director: Allison Wilson
Producer: Mark Bramhill
Managing Producer: Conor Gearin
Bird sounds provided by The Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. ʻIʻiwi Xeno Canto 157360 recorded by T. Hamel.
BirdNote’s theme was composed and played by Nancy Rumbel and John Kessler.
© 2022 BirdNote August 2022
Narrator: Ari Daniel
ID# names-05-2022-08-09 names-05
