The Other 250 brings together stories of naming and renaming across Indigenous sovereignty, Black geographies, immigrant memory, labor struggle, incarceration, environmental justice, militarized borderlands, and queer and trans life—showing how place-names encode worldviews and histories that continue to shape present-day struggles over land, power, justice, and belonging.
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Part IV of “The New Frontier” asks how renaming initiatives advanced by the Trump Administration on federal lands may serve as the symbolic front for a billionaire-backed effort to reopen these territories to extraction, industrial development, and urbanization.
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Part III of “The New Frontier” turns to the cultural dimensions of Trump’s renaming campaign, examining how place-naming functions within the far right’s so-called “War on Woke.”
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Part II of “The New Frontier,” considers how the stakes of renaming have changed in the past year, surveying some of the Trump Administration’s sweeping efforts to rename sites and landmarks across the country.
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This four-part blog series, “The New Frontier: Place Names, Power, and Political World-Building,” explores the changing stakes of place-name campaigns in the United States—what has changed, where we’re heading, and what is to be done. “Part I: Renaming in Retrospect” revisits the origins of Words Are Monuments.
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What if we understood the movement to rename places not as a movement to make the settler-colonial world less offensive, but to affirm the enduring presence of the world that settler-colonial place-names have historically served to obscure?
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As the edifice of fortress conservation is giving way, the renaming of Mount Doane in Yellowstone as First People’s Mountain takes on a powerful meaning.
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As the case of Lake Tanaya demonstrates, when we read place-names out of context, they often tell us very little. They sometimes even mislead us. No place-name is neutral.
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Titled “Words Are Monuments”, a new a new scientific study presents findings from a quantitative analysis of National Park place-names. Results show that derogatory place-names are only the tip of the iceberg.
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In this video interview, Lummi elder, organizer, and Master Carver Jewell James explains how place-names and language serve to structure a way of seeing and interacting in the world.
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Within a larger reflection on the logics and limitations of Western Conservation, renaming campaigns function as punctuation marks: driving forward an important conversation about the history and future of our public lands in a time of profound environmental and social change.
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If the monument removals of the past two years have taught us anything, it is that symbolic struggles shape popular consciousness, revealing the collective capacity of the people to set the coordinates through which we navigate space.
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If it’s clear that maps have been central to the twin projects of colonial dispossession and capital accumulation, can they be mobilized in the other direction, not in the interest of accumulation, surveillance, and control, but collective liberation?
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