Renaming Landscapes as Intentional Re-vision

            All over what is now the United States, the landscape is undergoing a long-overdue revision, and this is a good thing because we’ve all been working from a shitty draft. The land has been made familiar to us through centuries of colonial narratives, tightly woven into self-styled heroic settler narratives of exploration and white western-centered frontier fantasies…and apparently terrible writers. In her essay, “Shitty First Drafts,” Anne Lemont mobilized Hemingway’s observation that “the first draft of anything is shit” as a useful lesson for writers. We should not expect our early efforts to reflect our full potential and remember that revision is part of the writing process.

            In late 2021, Deb Haaland, the first Indigenous Interior Secretary of the United States, identified nearly 650 places that bear the offensive word, “Squ*w,” that are now being changed through a revision process. Haaland’s office has been working directly with Indigenous communities to reclaim Indigenous place-names or designate new ones, while many on state and federal land were changed in consultation with local governments. The term, “squ*w,” signals deeply ingrained anti-Indigenous misogyny and recalls sexualized violence against Indigenous women and girls that is ongoing, so this is a much-needed revision. The list includes 71 features in Idaho alone. Near Boise, Squ*w Butte is now Sehewoki’l Newenee’an Katete and Squ*w Creek has been revised to Chief Eagle Eye Creek.

            In her 2022 essay, “The End of ‘Savage,'” Writing for Change Journal contributor Veronica Yellowhair historicized the racial slur that appears in the essay’s title and used the collection’s focus on teaching and learning to educate the public on how harmful it is to Indigenous people and communities. “S*vage” has been wielded for centuries by white people to denigrate Indigenous people and Yellowhair lamented on how widespread the term is deployed today so casually across popular culture and in everyday speech. It is also present in the landscapes we love. In Denali National Park and Preserve, where the Indigenous Denali replaced “McKinley” to restore the traditional Indigenous place name, settlers continue to kayak on the nearby “S*vage River,” where they can access the “S*vage River Loop Trail.” And in western Maryland, there still exists the “Big S*vage Mountain Trail” near “Little S*vage Creek.”

            When Alan Ginsburg famously said, “first thought, best thought,” he needed only to look at a map to realize this is extremely terrible advice. As white European settlers moved west, they seemingly pointed and named (and unknowingly re-named) according to their whims, moods, and prejudices. This is why today the places we love to hike, bike, run, climb, ski, and paddle often bear names that reflect harmful anti-Indigenous slurs and stereotypes. Despite the Washington football team’s owners reluctantly caving to pressure from years of Indigenous-led organizing against the name, “R*dskins," the outdoor recreation community in Colorado continue to use the “R*dskin Creek Trail” next to “R*dskin Mountain.” Runners enjoy the “R*dman Trail” in eastern West Virginia, where ATVers connect to the “Indian Ridge Trail” via the “Pocahontas Trail System,” which all work together to cement associations between people and the historical slurs used to dehumanize them.

            I once heard Indigenous activist and writer, Winona LaDuke, ask, “why do we name big mountains after small men?” In most cases, big mountains like the former McKinley had Indigenous names before they were renamed. In several cases, such as with the San Francisco Peaks in northern Arizona, a mountain may go by several Indigenous names that reflect different cultural affinities. Place-names need not be outwardly racist to be a candidate for revision—sometimes we can just do better. Sometimes place names just don’t even make sense. For example, despite the fact that teepees are associated with the structures of nomadic tribes in the great plains, mountaineers traverse “Teepee Mountain” in British Columbia, and hikers access the “Teepee Trail” near Montpelier, Vermont, or the “Teepee Mesa Trail” near Crownpoint, New Mexico, and hikers arrive at an actual teepee constructed at the summit of “La Canada Teepee Trail” outside of Los Angeles, California. Some names are based on co-optations, in which terms are taken out of their Indigenous context: “Tomahawk Trail,” the “Kokopelli Trail.” Some are just plain condescending to the legacy of Indigenous resistance to colonization. Prominent Indigenous leaders who infamously led others in these resistance movements feature prominently, from the “Geronimo Trail” in southern Arizona to the “Tecumseh Trail” in Indiana to the “Sitting Bull Mountain Bike Trail” in Texas. Many seemingly serve as monuments that sustain settler belongings. How are we meant to think of ourselves and the history of these landscapes as we hike the “Frontier Trail” or the “Western Civilization Trail?” And the list goes on and on. Even if our efforts were limited to naming alone, there is much to revise. “First thought, best thought” only makes sense to those accountable to no one. Supporting structures of accountability is to recognize the need for a meaningful revision process.

            The discussion around revising placenames recalls similar actions centered on removing monuments. Material objects like monuments, street signs, and building names are key features in the narration of place, and revising them indicates a strong belief in the power these objects hold in the everyday lived experiences of those places. During the summer of 2020, a pivotal moment of racial justice movement building in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd, confederate monuments were taken down across the United States. Sometimes these were top-down decisions made by city leaders who were often pressured to do so by constituents; other times, they came down suddenly, by force, by people who could not stomach looking at them anymore as the worlds they want to build came into focus. The monuments valorized people who fought to maintain slavery and were active proponents and sometimes participants in colonial violence: confederate leaders like Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis, but also figures of colonial genocide like Christopher Columbus. The monuments were not compatible with the values of those communities and their commitments to each other. So the statues had to go—our shared spaces needed to be revised. Revising the name of a mountain or a trail or a butte is not “erasing history” as critics often cry; it’s about infusing (and occasionally restoring) dignity and respect to the landscape.

            These kinds of revisions are not as simple as using a delete key. The past can never be erased, the scars of colonialism and racism leave marks, like tarnish that won’t rub off. This is because the materiality of the object—iron, stone, rock—is always bound to the discursive, or the stories we tell about it. While monuments can be removed and the names of places changed, the revision becomes integrated into the narration of that place. We have the power to be active participants in the writing and rewriting of these places, forever marking the moments when we break with the past.

            While these kinds of revisions are essential, especially the revision of names that are deeply hurtful, changing names is actually the easy part. Other than white people learning to pronounce Sehewoki’l Newenee’an Katete (ha!), the harder, and arguably more meaningful component involves changing the way they view the landscape and their place in it, and to find ways to challenge those systems that made these offensive place-names possible in the first place. Klee Benally, a Diné activist, musician, and artist, has long challenged the idea that justice for Indigenous people is even possible in the context of stolen Indigenous lands, and in partnership with others has resisted developments by the Arizona Snowbowl ski resort for decades on the San Francisco Peaks in northern Arizona. For years Benally has helped me to recognize some of the ways gestures like name changes ring hollow when they are not also accompanied by commitments to upend colonial structures that maintain supremacist systems. When the City of Flagstaff, Arizona moved to recognize Indigenous People’s Day, Benally called for “justice, not gestures,” and maintained that the City needed to do more to “address historical trauma from settler colonialism.” He pointed to the city’s ongoing support of the Arizona Snowbowl ski resort’s actions to produce artificial snow from “treated sewage” on the Peaks which are held sacred by at least thirteen regional tribes, as well as homelessness and racial profiling. He asked, what would recognizing Indigenous Peoples Day in this context actually do for the Indigenous people who live here? “Our voices matter. Our cultures matter. Our ways of life matter,” he said. A simple name change is simply not enough.

            When the decision to remove “squ*w” from the landscape was finalized in 2022, Benally said it was hard for him to celebrate. “#namechange means little while the state & corporations perpetuate & profit from violence against the land & our bodies,” he wrote on Twitter, “Do we really just want a less offensive violent colonial system?” Name changes, while important in different ways depending on the context, diminishing opportunities for the casual deployment of anti-Indigenous language, it does little to address the underlying colonial structures.

            But revision is more than editing. Revision invites us to re-read something and reimagine it in its fuller context; it is a rich and wonderful opportunity to infuse reflection and intentionality into our use of language. Revision is not just a process that occurs on the page, but one that is ongoing within us. As we collaborate on this revision together, we write ourselves into the worlds we want to create, worlds that represent the best of who we are, that reflect a complex, multicultural and multi-experiential landscape of expression.

Author's note: On the day after I published this essay, December 31st, 2023, Klee Benally passed away. Klee was a friend, and has been monumentally important to the evolution of my writing and thinking. Much love to his family, his northern Arizona community where he lived, and the thousands of people who, like me, were touched by his art, and inspired by his fierce and tireless activism.