As struggles over history and power play out across monuments, maps, and public memory, the political landscape for place names has undergone a tectonic shift. 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 … Read more
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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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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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Place-names locate us in place, but also in relation to other places, not just across the country, but around the world. Place-names also locate us in time. Indigenous-led renaming campaigns remind us that there are other naming traditions that refer to times before and after colonial rule. They dislodge the sense of inevitability and permanence … Read more
Read PostA struggle over history and racial injustice is unfolding on the terrain of monuments, museums, school curricula, and maps. While authoritarians and billionaires move to remake the commemorative landscape in their image and interests, communities are pushing back—rising to reclaim and rename the ancestral, cultural, and political geographies they call home. WORDS ARE MONUMENTS is … Read more
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