we already knew this! It's in the title of the Monmonier book! Neverthelessons, here's a quote:
Moves to eliminate the term "squaw" from names
of geographical sites are accelerating because of protests that the
term is offensive.
The U.S. Board on Geographic Names has renamed
16 valleys, creeks and other sites so far this year. Pending proposals
mean 2008 should see more changes than any year in a decade, the board
says.
...
Valerie Fast Horse, a council member with the
Coeur d'Alene Tribe of Idaho, Montana and Washington, says the usual
translation of "squaw" is a profane term for female genitalia. It's so
offensive in her tribe, she says, that members refer to it as "the 'S'
word."
"They should translate the names into English and see how fast they get changed," she says.
That's what I'm sayin'. Of course, there's always some clown who doesn't get it:
"It irritated me," says Cody McDonald, a Judith Basin County
commissioner. "When these things were named a hundred years ago, they
didn't mean to offend anybody. … And it's a waste of time. Everybody's
still going to call it 'Squaw Coulee.' "
the above image is from the opening titles for the Fox TV show New Amsterdam, which I've been watching with slightly but steadily decreasing interest in its usual TViness, but increasing interest in its geographical sensibilities. The opening titles show a quick animation of New York City getting built up from its original shape as a village at the lower end of Manhattan.
The premise is that a Dutchman from the seventeenth century goes to the New World and is killed there saving an Indian woman. She turns out to be a shaman who brings him back to life and keeps him alive until he finds his one true love.
So he lives through nearly four centuries, marrying many times and fathering sixty-three children, only to become an NYPD homicide cop in the present. One day, in the pilot, he has a heart attack and dies on a subway platform. When he revives later, he realizes that this means that his one true love was on that subway platform, and that this is the beginning of the end. Now all he has to do is find her.
Here's a trailer that sums up the show's premise:
It's not a very good show, although Lasse Hallstrom directed the first episode. The acting is not strong (the Danish lead actor's accent isn't convincing, and affects his affect), there's no chemistry between the lead and the woman who might be the one true love (she gets the boot at the end of this first short season), and there's nothing particularly unusual or standout about the show.
Except for the use of the city in history.
This is something that was done to a lesser extent with the showAngel, which took place in Los Angeles and featured a 250-year-old vampire who had lived in Los Angeles in the 1950s. Angel
frequently took us back to earlier eras--in other places as well as
LA--showing us the protagonist's involvement in historical moments.
But it was never done as quite such a love song to a particular city.
In New Amsterdam the protagonist, who names himself
alternately "Amsterdam" and "York," stays in New York throughout his
immortality, and possesses both generalized and personal knowledge of
the history and happenstances of each place. What Amsterdam knows about
the city is layered, often subtle, and broad in the field. The amount
of research they must do for this show is awesome.
The immortality conceit allows a very intimate, and story-driven, view of history which is satisfying to the narrative-obsessed on every level. What's even more satisfying is that this intimate and story-driven view of history is utterly tied not just to place, or to city as imaginative construct, but to geography, in all its weird and complex splendor.
By "geography" here I mean it all; all of it: social history, metonyms, reputations of people and places, the strange continuities that remain in a place even after the public stops going there, architecture and arts, physical transformations and how to track them, land use, recreation, the replacement of one population by another, the way people in a place are always doomed to repeat that place's history, as if geography were destiny, which, as we all know, it is.
The makers of the show eschew the cheap, shallow history of time-travel shows like "Quantum Leap" or "Dr. Who," which understand a historical era in terms of costuming and a single zeitgeist. Instead, they make choices which are often as interesting and complex as they are TV-awkward and clueless. For example, in the present, Amsterdam's sidekick/confidant is his sixty-year-old son, Omar. Omar is a biracial (black and Dutch) former trumpet player who now owns a club where Amsterdam hangs out. Amsterdam married Omar's mother in the late forties, against the desires of her wealthy, conservative, black father.
All of which is kind of amazing. Amsterdam may well be the first major TV protagonist (of a non-ensemble show) to have a biracial child. BUT, the jazz from the relationship comes from the role-reversal: Omar is now old enough to be Amsterdam's father, and acts like it. This role-reversal only enables Omar to be the magical negro, while giving Amsterdam a kind of racial cred he couldn't get any other way. And Omar seems also to be tied to New York in a way inexplicable for someone who was once a musician and presumably traveled a great deal. His ownership of the bar is a device that keeps him in place, available at every moment to serve Amsterdam. So, that line of inquiry is ambivalent about racial issues.
Or another example in a recent episode: Amsterdam is a painter during the era immediately preceding WWI. He's a cheesy representational painter (of course) during modernism; and they stupidly have him altering his own personality to become tempestuous and to have him cheatin' on his wife. Gah, moronic stereotypes.
But what that episode is actually about is the origins of ... you guessed it ... organized crime. Amsterdam is investigating a mob hit on the school-teacher scion of a (strangely) Dutch-named crime family who happens to look exactly like Amsterdam-the-pre-war-painter's son. Throughout the episode the usual flashbacks are to a time when Amsterdam--whose wife was starting to age (he himself remains perpetually 35) while his son, Rosie, was becoming a man--had an affair with an artist's model (gah! moronic stereotypes!)
Amsterdam confirms that the murdered boy is actually his great great grandson through his son Rosie, and tortures himself throughout the episode that his home-breakin' ways were what drove Rosie to crime. Then, once he's solved the murder, he sits down in the last few minutes of the show with his aging grandson--the murdered boy's grandfather--to find out why Rosie became a criminal. Well, guess what? It wasn't Rosie at all. Rosie was a schoolteacher in the teens and twenties, and it was the grandson who turned to crime during the great depression. "I made some choices" the old man says, and that's that.
I'm not sure how much of this was intentional--because after all, the acting and direction and even writing in the show is muddy--but in this one episode they've layered a number of factors and influences guiding the outcomes of individuals within movements of history. This crime family comes from a cultured, but presumably economically unstable artist's family. As is very realistic with such families, the son becomes a teacher, another culturally, but not economically, capitaled sector. So during a time of severe economic downturn, the grandson--who presumably has access to his parents' cultural and social capital, but not to any sort of economic safety net; and who lives in a city vast enough to support minor crime networks within neighborhoods--turns to organized crime.
Two generations later, the family's wealth is assured and the family returns to the cultural and social luxury of a low-paying, high-ideals job like teaching. It's all in there: the class and economics issues; Americans' strange love/hate relationship with high culture and learning, and violence; our contempt and reverence for the arts; our need to relate the great movements of history to our small, personal faults and triumphs, only to discover that the great movements were caused by great movements instead, and our individual choices were as drops in the ocean.
And there's even a lovely throwaway in there: the son's name, "Rosie," is short for "Roosevelt," which suggests that he was named after Teddy, but also suggests much more subtly that Amsterdam has a history with the New York Dutch Roosevelt family.
Every episode has stuff like this.
So I'm torn about this show. I'd love for it to get better, for it to become a conduit for this kind of thinking, and a quality drama as well, but I'm not hopeful. I haven't heard much buzz about the show and it doesn't seem to have legs. Oh well.
From the naughty toponyms archive comes the tale of a little town in Austria with a big problem keeping American tourists from stealing their street signs. Coming soon to a theater near you, it's Fucking, Austria!
The village is known to have existed as “Fucking” since at least 1070 and is named after a man from the 6th century called Focko. “Ing” is an old Germanic suffix meaning “people”; thus Fucking, in this case, means “place of Focko’s people”.
By the way:
Coincidentally there are two small municipalities just over the border in Bavaria, Germany called Petting and Kissing.
ragged Ass Road is my favorite. But I also like Dick Drive, Blue Ball Road, and Noisy Hole Road.
I should've posted this ages ago when I was working on odonymy, but for some reason I didn't. Since I seem to be playing catch up this week, here's a site called Freak Streets, a google maps mashup allowing people to submit the freakish and weird names of streets in their area. You (yes, you!) can add your own.
as I learned from reading Monmonier's From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow, time lag in place name changes are usually more of a bureaucratic disconnect between local, state and national mapping entities, than they are political issues.
But that doesn't stop politicians---and rightfully---from making political issues out of them. A small recent example from Alabama:
MONTGOMERY, Ala. The Martin Luther King Junior Expressway is back on the official Alabama road map.
... State Representative Alvin Holmes of Montgomery complained earlier this year that the official state map did not show the name of Interstate 85 through Montgomery... [but] the map did include the names of highways named for Confederate Civil War figures.
The governor's spokesman, Jeff Emerson, says in past years Alabama maps have included King's name beside I-85. He did not know why it was left off in recent years.
There's absolutely no way of telling what actually happened from just this information, but it seems unlikely that a figure with King's stature would be left off out of malice. If it were a lesser-known figure I might believe it, but King? That's like calling out Mahatma Gandhi. Oh.
Michelle Manafy at E Content, writes a readable essay arguing in favor of the organic, intuitive, and historically meaningful "user-generated" tagging as opposed to "an orderly top-down taxonomy". And she does this by comparing idiosyncratic street names to numbered and lettered grids.
When I think about these approaches, I can get lost in esoteric historical facts, but ultimately, the point of all this street naming is to help us get from point A to point B. Okay, naming them A and B is certainly clearer, but it isn't terribly intuitive. If I want to pick pumpkins at Angevine farm, I take a right onto Angevine Road off Route 341. Sure, you could argue that if and when the Angevines succumb to the perils of factory farming, the road will lose its meaning as it is overrun with development houses, but somehow I believe that the impact of its populist name will remain for decades after the Angevines host their last hayride.
Such is the appeal of user-generated tagging. Certainly, an orderly top-down taxonomy will be clearer and more accurate, but while it makes navigation neat, it can be imposing and unwelcoming. For those of us who have never, say, studied etymology, a taxonomy is not second nature.
I've been neglecting taxonomy (Greek for "arrangement method") in favor of mapping and geography, but this essay points to one of the many reasons why I think the subject areas are related. I'll address this soon, promise.
In 2000, the Canadian province British Columbia and the Canadian government settled a land claim with the Nisga'a Nation, one of Canada's First Nations or native tribes. As wikipedia tells us:
As part of the settlement in the Nass River valley nearly 2,000 square kilometres of land was officially recognized as Nisga'a, and as well a 300,000 cubic decameter water reservation was created. The Bear Glacier Provincial Park was also created a result of this agreement. The land-claim's settlement was the first formal treaty between a First Nation and the Province of British Columbia in modern times.
Since the Nisga'as' new empowerment allowed them to change toponyms (back) to original or correct spellings (34 Nisga'a names were "adopted" as part of the treaty) some geniuses decided to create a severely interactive map of Nisga'a lands. The map is divided into upper and lower. Click on one of these and you'll be taken to a larger map (like the one above, of the lower lands), marking out the locations of the 34 new toponyms. Click on one of the red dots indicating the place names, and you'll be taken to a page of information about that place, including a sound clip of how to pronounce the name!
Now this is what I'm talkin' about when I say "multimedia"! Too often we use the web, in our lamentably imitable American way, for navel-gazing (a nice way of saying "psychic masturbation"). Why don't we use it more for real educational purposes? Why don't we use it to reach across distances and give information in forms that books and magazines and even classrooms can't give it? It's not like recording or producing sound is difficult or expensive anymore. Many props to the B.C. website that made this.
local loyalty to off-color place names is best exemplified by Dildo, Newfoundland, a small fishing village forty miles west of St. John's. Dildo appeared on maps of the areas as early as 1771, and the name is not an isolated occurrence: the topographic map covering the village also identifies Dildo Islands, Dildo Arm, and Dildo Cove. The name's origin is obscure. Although the Oxford English Dictionary mentions a late sixteenth-century term for artifical penis ("dildoe of glasse"), it's unlikely the original namer had in mind the shape or function of the electromechanical vibrator that was invented in the 1880s as a medical device, marketed in the early twentieth century as a "personal care appliance," and reintroduced in the 1960s as a sex toy. In 1985 Robert Elford, a villager embarrassed by the connotation, collected nearly four hundred signatures on a petition asking the provincial government to change the name. Elford, who apparently had no particular replacement in mind, backed off after neighbors who liked the name started ridiculing him in public and calling him at home.
Diverse factors account for Elford's failure. His initiative lacked the homophobic imperative behind the renaming of Gayside, Newfoundland (now Baytona), in 1985 or whatever anti-Soviet feeling inspired the renaming of Mount Stalin (a British Columbia landmark now commemorating Don Peck, a highly regarded local conservationist) in 1987. Local residents had few reminders of Dildo's new, potentially offensive connotation --- sex aids were not a regular feature in the news or a lingering icon of cold war rhetoric --- and those with a sense of humor could delight in the salacious juxtaposition of Dildo Arm and Spread Eagle Bay. Indeed, jokes about the name were a way of being noticed, and perhaps an attraction to tourists who might stop by to mail a postcard or sample local hospitality during Dildo Days, a mid-August weekend featuring "a live band ... enjoyable games and activities, [and] a beer tent for people 19 and older." The long-standing name was reinforced by its identification of several nearby natural features, and the village had its own postal code (A0B 1P0), which would entail the cost and annoyance of changing one's address. What's more, some Dildodians no doubt felt the same sense of priority as residents of Swastika, Ontario, who resisted the provincial government's renaming their community in 1940 to honor Winston Churchill. Defiantly they ripped down the official sign and put up a replacement proclaiming, "To Hell with Hitler. We had the swastika first."
tips from Monmonier's From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow include not only the history of various US state and federal mapping and gazetteer compiling bodies, but also the names of online resources to do your own toponymy research (which I is doin' right now-like.)
To search the country for places named after your grandfather, your favorite animal, your favorite racial slur, or items of women's anatomy, go to the GNIS (Geographic Names Information System) query page. GNIS yields a listing with links to more info (at top) but no map. The info may or may not include an explanation of where the name comes from, plus listings of name variants (former names no longer used, often because they were offensive), and a lot of map geek info.
Or, for mappiness, you can check it on the USGS (United State Geological Survey) National Map Viewer, where there's a "find place" button on the left. It's a little counterintuitive, since you have to change the map viewer from a seperate pop-up window. And it's slow. But coolness awaits. (That, just above, is the unlabeled location of Chink's Peak.)
Yep, the print is tiny but you got it right. That right there is Claire City. Now all I have to do is find Planet Claire.
Geography and space are always gendered, always raced, always economical and always sexual. The textures that bind them together are daily re-written through a word, a gaze, a gesture.
-- Irit Rogoff
The books one reads in childhood, and perhaps most of all the bad and good bad books, create in one's mind a sort of false map of the world, a series of fabulous countries into which one can retreat at odd moments throughout the rest of life, and which in some cases can survive a visit to the real countries which they are supposed to represent.
-- George Orwell
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