Words Are Monuments

Across the United States and around the world, monuments to racists and genocidal colonists are being toppled, thrown into rivers, vandalized, and quietly removed. People are assembling around confederate flags, historical markers, derogatory street signs, and other symbolic sites of cultural and political violence, seeking to challenge structures of oppression through the symbols that serve to reinforce settler-colonial relations to the land. Within this context, campaigns to change place-names are erupting across the US, many led by communities that are dealing with the enduring impacts of settler-colonial dispossession and racism, as well as the historical and ongoing impacts of exploitation, erasure, and extraction.

Responding to these grassroots efforts, the US Department of the Interior recently announced plans to replace 660 place names containing the derogatory term ‘squaw’, as well as forming a Reconciliation in Place Names Advisory Committee. The National Association of Tribal Historic Preservation Officers recently released a guide on how to officially change place names, and this month a group of scientists have published “Words are Monuments,” a quantitative study of over 2,200 place names at 16 National Parks that reveals the system-wide scale of problematic names on public lands.

In 2018 Chief Stanley Charles Grier of the Piikani Nation gives Yellowstone National Park deputy superintendent a declaration from several Indigenous Nations demanding a change to the place names Mount Doane and Hayden Valley. Image: Nate Hegy (Mountain West News Bureau)

The Natural History Museum has created an interactive website and virtual event series exploring how place-names shape our ways of seeing and relating. Maps are not neutral, and they endure for generations. What is the ideological function of colonial place-names? How do they work to enshrine capitalist and colonial relations to place, and what do they render invisible? What struggles over place-names are currently ongoing, and how are artists, scientists, scholars, and communities participating in them? What other naming practices exist, and how do they function? How might campaigns to change place-names be situated within a broader emancipatory project—of remapping the world as a world in common, beyond domination, enclosure and extraction?

Programs

National Parks, Place Names, and #Landback

Date TBA **POSTPONED**

Place renaming campaigns are not just efforts to make federal lands more inclusive, they are also stepping stones on the path to Indigenous co-governance and #landback.

The Movement to Rename U.S. Mountains, Rivers, Valleys

Apr. 19, 2022 3 pm PT/ 6 pm ET, online

Thousands of mountains, valleys and rivers located on public lands have names that are derogatory, misogynistic, racist or just plain offensive. Join us for a conversation with grassroots advocates working to change offensive places nearest them, and learn about what you can do to help.

What’s in a name? Words as Monuments

Date TBA

In this panel, we’ll hear from artists and activists whose interventions reimagine monuments and maps, affirming the signposts and wayfinding signs that point to a world beyond the colonial and capitalist enclosure.

Words are Ideas: Ideology in Language and Place Names

Date TBA

This panel explores the ways in which language functions to structure thought and action, as well as how struggles over language can be part of a collective project of decolonization. Together, panelists will explore the modes of communication through which people have come to discover and assert their collective difference in the world.

Remapping the World: the global context

Date TBA

From post-apartheid South Africa to occupied Palestine, from Tahrir Square to Tibet to ongoing efforts to restore Te Reo Māori toponyms, place-names have been meaningful symbolic fronts of anti-colonial struggle.