What’s in a Name: ‘We do not Name Places, Places Name Themselves’

Last updated on: May 5, 2016 at 7:31 am by Jason M. Brown

What’s in a Name: ‘We do not Name Places, Places Name Themselves’ 2016-05-05T07:31:58-08:00 Jason M. Brown

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Lynn Creek, BC

At a recent workshop I gave on Spiritual Ecology in the Salish Sea, the participants had just gone outside for a mindful walk and we were sharing our experiences. The idea of place names came up. A white male lamented that the Euro-American place names did not seem to reflect the deep cultural knowledge of the First Peoples who had dwelled with the land for several thousand years before white settlers arrived. We discussed the importance of naming, and returning to some sense of indigeneity and connection to our places.

I mentioned that most indigenous place names were not all that elaborate, that they are mostly descriptive of a feature or an activity, like these Squamish Place names: ‘Place of Smelt’ or ‘Good Land.’ Taking Mount Baker as another example, the Lummi people called it the “White Sentinel” or mountain, and surrounding people’s had similar names for the glaciated volcano. When the Spanish were exploring the area in 1790, they named it after Mount Carmel in Palestine. English explorer George Vancouver, exploring around the same time, named it after his 3rd Lieutenant, Joseph Baker. My point being that perhaps our naming was not all that different. That it was more the experiences and stories and myths that accumulate around these place names that differ and that make holy. That if we are to decolonize ourselves and move toward indigeneity, we need to not only recognize the spiritual ecologies that First Peoples permit us to know, but create some of our own. Regardless of whether white place names were mostly explorers and their friends, it is the experiences that we have there that make a place name meaningful. I continued by pointing out that place names can also be plural, because the worlds of those who experience them are plural. First Peoples had variations on common stories associated with similar place names, and sometimes different names all together.

Feeling smart, I turned it back to the participants. A wonderful young indigenous college student studying clam gardens in the Pacific Northwest, smiled and spoke up with a calm and collected demeanor. She was apparently used to humoring whites with good intentions and loved sharing her knowledge with us. She said: we do not name the places, or plants or animals like Adams in the Bible. The places themselves gave us their names; they told us what their names were. The conversation continued, but her point was like a bolt of lightning. It totally shifted my view of the possibilities.

The idea that place names are layers that we impose on the land strips them of their agency. The notion that place name themselves brings to the fore the very real participation of places in the lives of people seemed totally obvious. Even my more phenomenological approach was a constructivist model, that put all of the agency within human hands. Her perspective has been knocking around in my mind ever since. Even the names we give to places and other creatures can perhaps obscure the names they might subtly propose that we call them. Imagine someone walking up to you and just calling you by a name that is not yours! Perhaps this is why the land does not speak to us in the same way that it speaks to indigenous peoples, we do not even know its name!

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