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?
Read Post
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.
Read Post
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.
Read Post
Place names are never neutral—they shape how we understand and inhabit land. Naming is both a tool of colonial power and a site of insurgent resistance. What stories do official names establish or erase, and how can naming be reclaimed to reflect cultural survival, justice, and collective care? Officially called toponyms, place-names are the names … Read more
Read PostA national reckoning with American history and racial injustice has been playing out on the terrain of monuments, museums, school curricula, and increasingly–maps. Against this backdrop, a team of conservation researchers has released “Words Are Monuments”, a quantitative study of settler-colonial violence in National Park place-names. In tandem with the release of their report, The … Read more
Read Post