DIRECTOR’S LETTER .............................
WHAT’S IN A NAME? BY KEVIN GOVER P
resident Obama started his recent historic tour of Alaska by an- nouncing official restoration of the Koyukon Athabaskan name Denali to the nation’s high-
est mountain. The State of Alaska has used that name officially since 1975 and Alaskan Natives, of course, have called the 20,000- foot peak Denali (The High One) from time immemorial. But the change is not without contro-
versy. Interior Secretary Sally Jewell made the decision to break a 40-year impasse at the United States Board on Geographic Names, a body of the U.S. Geological Survey. Despite constant petitioning by Native groups and Alaskan state and federal officials, the Board was stymied by opposition from the Ohio congressional delegation, which wanted to preserve the former official name Mount McKinley, in honor of President William McKinley of Canton, Ohio. It seems an odd thing that a place that
President McKinley never visited should bear his name. Still, we can understand Ohio’s concern for its history, and wondered whether McKinley is honored through place names within his home state. Currently, the only municipality in Ohio to bear his name is the town of McKinley Heights, population 700, near Youngstown. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to rename the state’s largest city, Columbus, population over 700,000, after the 25th
president. Or his name could be given to
the highest elevation in Ohio. But the use of McKinley’s name to supplant the Native name for a mountain he never saw in a territory he never visited shows just how strange the issue of place names can be. Our resident geographer Doug Herman, a
member of the Museum’s Scholarship Group, has laid out the issue well in a recent article in the American Indian Culture and Research Journal. He reminds us that assigning place names was “a means of forging a national identity for the settler culture.” The practice of replacing indigenous names with the nomen- clature of new arrivals is a universal feature of
12 AMERICAN INDIAN FALL 2015
human history, and Herman focuses on origi- nal American Indian place names. He surveys the vast literature on Indian names and finds three main phases. The first he calls the “hobbyist” approach, compilations of lists by amateur researchers often moved by Romantic notions of a vanishing people. This approach, also sometimes spiked with racial denigration, prevailed through the 19th
cen-
tury to the 1950s. It was supplanted by a sec- ond phase more solidly grounded in linguistic studies. This academic approach insisted, properly I think, on studying the rich variety of languages that produced these names. Herman’s third phase comes to the fore in
the activism of the ‘70s, the assertion of real living American Indians to have a say in the names used for and about them. This push takes two forms. One is the campaign against derogatory names, which readers of this space have heard about before. The other, evident in the President’s Denali announcement, is “a push to reinstitute traditional names, either in place of existing non-Native names, or as new names for as-yet-unnamed places.”
Herman observes, “Given the ways in
which American Indian place names have been trammeled by colonization over the past few centuries, it should not be surprising that the process of restoring traditional names is fraught.” But each campaign, he says, is “an act of sovereignty on the part of the tribal peoples involved.” To this I would add that when such campaigns are successful, they advance acknowledgements by the United States that Native people first claimed this land and introduced human civilization. His essay underscores the importance of
naming for defining a culture’s relation to place and to the people who were here first. “The romantic Indian of yore may never go away from American culture. But in the twenty-first century, the American search for identity has a postmodern instability that includes an in- creasing recognition that Indians are alive and well and often want their land back.” As this process develops, the restoration of Denali is indeed a landmark.X
Kevin Gover (Pawnee) is the director of the National Museum of the American Indian.
PHOTO BY D.A. PETERSON/©2013 THE WASHINGTON POST/GETTY IMAGES
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