Locals don’t think twice about the name Suicides, but newbies often ask how our surf spot earned such a dire moniker. Unlike Pipeline and Backdoors, it’s unrelated to wave shape; nor is it named after waterfront homeowners, as Tonggs and Castles are.

And no, it wasn’t the site of a suicide, or if it was, the neighborhood oldsters aren’t telling. They just grin and shrug, as if to say, “You never know.”

To my recollection, when the Tonggs Gang first started surfing the steep, shallow break outside the table reef in the late 1960s, they wanted to scare others off with the implication it would be suicide to go there.

Later the name was shortened — and softened — to Suis, just as Graveyards is now called Gravies.

I wasn’t motivated to delve deeper until I read “Waves of Knowing: A Seascape Epistemology” (Duke University Press, $23.95), a thought-provoking new book by Karin Amimoto Ingersoll. A local scholar and surfer, she elucidates the profound importance of hee nalu, wave riding, to Native Hawaiians and examines the negative environmental and cultural impacts of its commodification through surf tourism.

For example, when shorelines and surf breaks named by Native Hawaiians were renamed by Westerners, this effaced not only their original names and meanings, but also their history.

Ingersoll recounts the story of a beach on the North Shore “where the prince of Kauai, Kahikilani, came to prove himself in the 1700s as a surfer.” It’s also the site where, despite being warned by the konohiki (guardian), a woman overfished the squid and promptly had her legs bitten off by a large shark.

The Hawaiians named the site Paumalu, “taken by surprise.” Later, American surfers renamed it Sunset Beach.

“Losing the name Paumalu washes away the memories of prince Kahikilani, Hawaiian lessons of pono (“righteous” or “correct”) fishing in the area, and a knowledge of how the waves break along this shoreline,” Ingersoll writes.

“There is a form of symbolic appropriation through the renaming of surf spots in Hawai‘i, claiming authority over waves, as well as land and history,” she continues, adding that nearby Kaunala (“the weaving”) Beach was rechristened Velzyland by filmmakers Dale Velzy and Bruce Brown. The area is now a gated community.

TONGGS was called Kaluahole, according to John Clark, author of “Hawaiian Surfing” and “Hawaii Place Names.” The name “means ‘the ahole fish hole,’” Clark wrote in an email, “and according to my friend Mike Tongg (now deceased), the hole is in the reef inside of Suicides.”

A lot of the place names at Diamond Head are related to fishing, Clark added: For surfing, the Hawaiians preferred Kapua (Old Man’s) and Kapuni (Canoes).

Until Ingersoll began researching her book, “I didn’t know the Hawaiian names of the places where I grew up surfing, in Maunalua Bay,” she said in a phone interview.

“I was such an avid surfer, I would wake up and first thing I thought of was, what’s the wind doing?”

Her eyes were opened to another side of surfing when, in search of uncrowded waves, she worked as a guide for a surf camp in Samoa.

“It blew me away, what’s happening in the name of development of surfing and the pleasure of the surfer,” she said. Her book describes the dynamiting of the reef to make channels for surf boats, low wages paid to Samoan staff, and the way the Australian owners divided the beach from the surrounding village “to create a sense of ‘private property’ and segregation.”

In Hawaii, although surf schools add to crowding, they can play a positive role, she said. “People aren’t going to love and protect the ocean unless they know it, and teaching is a way to create awareness.” But, she added, “this isn’t the way I see surf schools being run.”

Ingersoll finds hope, however, in models such as Duane DeSoto’s nonprofit Na Kama Kai, which provides equipment and instruction grounded in traditional Hawaiian values to local children in need. Ocean literacy, she said, can empower Hawaiians to reclaim their history and culture and find ways to earn a living in an ethical, balanced way.

“What I want people to take from the book is a new epistemology, or way of looking at the world,” Ingersoll said, “so that when you are surfing you realize that it has to do with not just recreation (but) also an interconnection to other people, getting situated in your community, and as an individual to stars, wind, reef, everything that generates the waves.”

Conveying the beauty and meaning of hee nalu to Hawaiians past and present, with water photos by her husband, Russell J. Amimoto, “Waves of Knowing” is an impassioned and informative call to surfers to be responsible to ourselves, our community and our shared, beloved sea.