Why do we name places after people?

I used to take place-names for granted. Then I realized how much they say about my culture’s relationship to nature and place.

Why is this area called Apgar? “See, there was this guy…” (John Clayton 2017 photo)

When I moved to southern Montana in 1990, I quickly learned the names of nearby towns. I liked some of them better than others, but I couldn’t articulate why.

Big Timber: an evocative and artistic place-name, especially on the edge of so much treeless prairie. Absarokee: challenging to learn how to say (“Ab-SOR-key”), and a nod to the region’s early residents, the Apsáalooké (“Children of the large-beaked bird”). Fishtail: celebrating an usually shaped butte. I found myself drawn to places with similarly evocative names (Greycliff, Beehive, Elk Basin…), wanting to see what they were like.

A second tier of names wasn’t as much fun but did provoke curiosity. Rapelje, Fromberg, Pray—what was the source of these names? Sadly, curiosity withered when the answer always turned out to be “some guy.” At least Belfry, named for some long-forgotten doctor, took advantage of the situation by christening its school athletic teams the Bats.

A third tier of names weirdly alluded to other, faraway places. Joliet has strengths, but a resemblance to Illinois is not among them. Nor does Silesia resemble central Europe, nor Sumatra Indonesia. As for Columbus: was it named after the explorer, or one of the 23 other Columbuses in the US? Let’s all mourn that community’s previous name, Sheep Dip.

It’s not just Montana. The same phenomenon holds in most of America. Some place-names are fun and memorable; others smack of dullness or delusional self-importance. We can credit or blame the people who founded the communities—though even if their names are enshrined, these people are mostly now lost to history.

Many years later, I was surprised to discover a rich cultural explanation for my differing reactions to names of places—and a debt to Indigenous people.

Since 1996, there’s been a cult book among place-name aficionados, especially in the West. In Wisdom Sits in Places, anthropologist Keith Basso tells stories of modern western Apache people, their place names, and their relationships to place. These turn out to be intertwined, illustrating how Indigenous cultures’ deep connection to land shows up in language.

The western Apache always name places in ways that paint a picture of the place: River Runs under Cottonwood Tree, or Rocks Make Three White Stripes on the Hillside. They never name a place after a person, or after a place elsewhere on the planet. In their culture, it seems self-evident that a name should be visual and unique, should carry your mind to an image of that place.

When I shared these thoughts with the marvelous writer Chris La Tray, he reminded me of the drive north from Missoula (a place-name derived from a Salish word painting a picture of the river there) to Apgar (a village in Glacier National Park named after some guy). You pass through the Flathead reservation, where the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes have put up lots of roadside signs identifying locations in their language. Most of these names are place descriptions, such as “Coming to the Edge of the Forest.”

Why did white settler culture so rarely adopt these place-descriptive names? Why rename “Coming to the Edge of the Forest” for a Navy rear admiral who never set foot in Montana? Likewise farther north: Why rename the Blackfoot Paahtoomahksikimi, “A lake built by water from ice,” after Charles Waterton? Setting aside the fact that Waterton was an eccentric English slaveowner who never ventured farther west than Niagara Falls, Waterton is a really boring place-name.

The white culture placed greater value on individuals—or sometimes resources or world history—than on characteristics of land itself. These people were telling different stories, ones that weren’t necessarily about nature and its places.

Every time the western Apache tell a story, Basso found, they start, and often also end, with the place-name. Where non-Native people say “In 1848…” or “On Thursday…”, the western Apache begin, “At [place]…” Beginning with a visual image makes for a memorable story.

In most cultures, stories get told at times when people need moral instruction. This is as true for the Bible or the Marvel Cinematic Universe as it is for the western Apache. But Basso explains that because the western Apache begin and end each story with the place where it’s set, that place becomes associated with the moral lesson. Sometimes a western Apache elder can simply say a place name, or take a person to the place, and not have to tell the story.

Reading Basso’s book, I realized the implications. When whites severed Indigenous cultures from their lands, those cultures were also severed from the root of their stories. Their vehicles for moral instruction lost power. It’d be like white people losing churches, and movie theaters, and Thursdays. Or, given the different values implied by our place-names, like losing Illinois, and central Europe, and Columbus.

I really love the landscapes of Montana. I would hate to be severed from them. This gives me empathy with Indigenous activists. But it also gives me fear around the anti-colonial Land Back movement, which talks about returning Native lands to Native peoples.

In relative ignorance, my Not-In-My-Back-Yard hackles go up. I’m all for Indigenous autonomy… but not my house. I want to believe that justice can be achieved on somebody else’s dime. I know this would be hypocritical, yet that knowledge only further raises my hackles.

My biggest fears center on rethinking “real estate.” Because real estate, in my tradition, is an either/or kind of thing. Either I own it or you do. Either it’s named after some guy in my family tree or yours. Either it bizarrely reminds me of Illinois or you of Indonesia.

Yet what if land isn’t about real estate? What if it’s about stories? Stories can be shared, they aren’t either/or—which means I have less to fear. You and I both see the big timber, the grey cliff, the butte shaped like a fishtail.

I used to love Sheepdip, the old name for what we call Columbus, because it was a funny-sounding word. But recently I learned the story behind it: moonshine brewed at this particular place tasted as bad as the insecticide that sheepherders dipped their sheep in. And this place was, at the time, on the boundary of the Apsáalooké reservation. That’s where most of the customers for this moonshine came from.

In other words, when people called this place Sheepdip, it involved a story about the town’s founders and their attitudes toward Indigenous people. Maybe the reason we no longer tell that story—and instead re-named the place after a long-ago Spanish-Italian sailor—is that we live in fear of the moral lesson they would teach.

Discussion:

• Thanks to subscriber Lee Nellis, who first recommended that I read Wisdom Sits in Places (that’s an affiliate link). Thanks also to subscriber Antonia Malchik, who regularly ties these issues to real estate at On the Commons.

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