The meaning of Mililani

From my scanty and shoddy research, there seems to be a discrepancy in the meaning of "Mililani." According to the plaque at Mililani Town Center, the name "Mililani" was given to this region by the developers, Castle and Cooke, who intended it to be a planned community for middle to upper middle classers. On this plaque, as I recall, "Mililani" is supposed to mean "Look Skyward." Many of the streets in Mililani Town actually reflect this meaning of the town name, as they refer to stars and other heavenly bodies. For example, Meheula Parkway, the large thoroughfare running the length of Mililani (from Mililani Mauka all the way to "Safeway side") means "Pathway of the Sun" (lit: "with a redness"), and Aohoku Place, the culdesac I grew up in, is the Hawaiian name for Jupiter.

Yet, in other texts, Hawaiian dictionaries, for example, the name "Mililani" actually seems to mean something more along the lines of "Giving thanks." The "Hawaiian Street Names" book by Budnick and Wise translates "Mililani" as "To praise; exalt." It's possible that the latter definition may be "stretched" to include or connote the initial definition of looking skyward, as you tend to "look up" at what you "raise up" through praise (okay, okay, maybe I AM stretching it).

In any case, the plaque in Town Center says what it says. And it's that definition that I am taking advantage of, to critique Mililani...

By the way, a point of interest: Kipapa Gulch, the "wound" that encircles a large part of Mililani Town, and a popular and famous haunting ground (ghostly hitchhikers, the night marchers, etc.) has a name which means almost precisely the opposite of "Mililani." "Kipapa" means to lay prone, and if we take the [medical] definition of "prone," this means to lay FACE DOWN. The name "Kipapa" was given to the gulch after a major and legendary battle about 700 years ago, when a large army from the Big Island sought to invade Oahu, and was soundly defeated in the gulch. It was said that the floor of the gulch was filled with corpses, "lain prone."

The juxtaposition (or perhaps superimposing) of the two names is very interesting and intriguing to me. The one name, for the gulch below, refers to a bloody battle, to the corpses lying at the gulch floor. The other name, for the town built above, an "exalted" town with people who "only look up." This, to me, is a key dynamic of Mililani, its denial of the past violence beneath its feet, its middle class Pollyanna optimism...