Do you ever think about words and why something has a certain name? Like this is a plant or
my nails are blue or we’re filming this in Miami -- but like, who decided that?
For a lot of words, we probably don’t think about where they come from too often.
But names are important -- they let us talk about things and share ideas and even build identities.
By now we know geography is so much more than just knowing
state names and capitals and memorizing locations.
But I’ll admit geographers do often know where a lot of places are and what they’re called.
It turns out, knowing what the capital of Indonesia is or which country first declared a
glacier dead often happens as we learn about how social and physical systems interact together.
From growing bananas and potatoes to the potential effects of natural hazards,
we’ve seen humans and our environment are always interacting together. We create rich cultures,
navigate economic systems, and organize ourselves through politics -- we like to build physically
and metaphorically, and a lot of what we build comes from and impacts the environments around us.
So for the next half of the series, we’ll look at how people,
power, and economics combine in the world, impacting the human and non-human alike.
I’m Alizé Carrère, and this is Crash Course Geography.
INTRO
Human geography uses a combination of spatial, physical, and social science to tell a complex
story of the world. This story focuses on the spatial patterns of people and how we've made
sense of the places we inhabit, explore, or create -- like by giving them names!
And as human geographers, we try to answer questions that pay special attention to the
way people, power, money, buildings, and so much more are distributed in the world.
Like what are the processes that shape where humans move across space?
Why do humans build and trade and consume and create where they do?
And why do those traits change across space? Why aren’t all people and places just … the same?
We’ve actually already used human geography tools when we’ve considered things like
the economics of banana plantations or the relationships between people or groups of people,
where one person or group has influence over another. This political power shows up when we
talk about water access or the motivations for building in floodplains, for example.
But the Earth is a big place, and we could use a few more tools to fully tackle human geography.
In addition to tools like maps and remote sensing or soil and
vegetation surveys that give us data on what makes up our physical landscapes,
the tools we’ll need moving forward are actually concepts that help guide our thinking.
Like the idea of place, or the meaning we give a location and the sense of
belonging we derive from constructing a place physically and in our minds.
Machu Picchu, or the Great Wall or Long Wall of China, or the Yucatan Peninsula,
or whatever name we give a place is called a toponym, and it’s an important part of how
we think about the place. Sort of like how my name is an important part of me.
And if we dig into the history of a toponym, we’ll learn the history of the location itself
and see how it’s changed over time and how different political and cultural forces
work to create the place’s identity. Like how I got my name and how it's changed,
or what nicknames I’ve gotten can tell part of the history of me.
In fact, studying place names is an important part of cultural geography which is one of
the many subfields of human geography. It examines how markers of our identity are
visible across space -- like names, language, religion, art, and dozens of other expressions.
Like let’s look at the highest point in North America: it’s a mountain reaching just over
6190 meters high known by some as Mt. McKinley in what we now call Alaska.
Even if we didn’t know much else about this place or the space it’s in,
the toponym Mt. McKinley already gives us some historical and cultural context.
It's a reference to the 25th president of the United States,
which signals this is also a place in the US. Or we could draw on another conceptual tool:
the concept of scale, or the relationship a place has to the rest of the world.
This mountain got the name Mt. McKinley from a gold prospector from Ohio who wrote about it in
The New York Sun newspaper in 1897, just before McKinley won the presidency. Other places in
Alaska were also given names based on political figures from Ohio, other US states, and the UK
which were published widely in articles and used in official maps made by people not from Alaska.
A few years later in 1901, the Board on Geographic Names, which is a division of
the United States Geological Survey, officially named the mountain Mount McKinley. And this was
one of many name changes across Alaska, the US, and around the world that moved the power to name
the place from residents at the local scale, to people with power at national and global scales,
without representing local residents. That being said, as we’ll see throughout the rest
of this series, power has a way of changing hands a lot, and local residents aren’t always united.
But…this majestic mountain already had a name. In fact, it had at least 30 names.
The Athabascans who’ve lived in and around the upper Kuskokwim River often called it Denali,
which reportedly means “The Tall One” or “the High One.”
And as early as 1906 there were writings that supported renaming this place Denali.
But other Indigenous nations who lived there had other names.
So did people descended from what we now call Russia who also lived in this place.
Names can also indicate power, as pop culture has explored many times from
urban legends to wizarding worlds. And in some cultures, like the Athabascans,
you do not name places or things after people because place names are a way to describe the
land and remember important details like resources or hunting techniques.
Ultimately, the people advocating to put back the name Denali had less power and influence
and could be ignored. In 1917 the area around Denali became Mount McKinley National Park,
years before Alaska even became a US state. Which redefined the place and
happened because of exactly the kind of uneven power dynamics human geographers study today.
All over the world we can see the way that power is distributed across space in part by
the toponyms we give places. The names and landmarks that are revered tell a lot about
who has the power to name and create an image of a place. So what we call a place matters,
because it sets up the way we imagine the space -- like who owns it or what the culture should be.
As Europeans settled throughout North America,
they made strong efforts to claim the space as their own by renaming places
and erasing the cultures and impacts of existing groups on the landscape.
In fact, there’s a third conceptual tool we can use to understand this place: the idea of a
region, which is a way of grouping and classifying similar places. And there are different types of
regions. Like many of the administrative regions, or regions with legal boundaries,
within Alaska were imposed over existing boundaries of the nations who already lived there.
And for Denali, or the renaming of many places known to Indigenous peoples,
the new name signifies a new perceptual region, or a region that’s united by how people think
about or see it. Like a region that’s unified around the language or cultural slang it uses,
or the team or cultural group it’s a part of.
The new name created a relationship between Ohio and Alaska.
It brought the mountain and Alaska into the imagination of people in the continental US
and possibly even evoked a sense of patriotism by connecting Alaska
to US politics -- even though President McKinley had no connection to that place.
Whereas at the time,
the name Denali created the perception this place has a culture and history foreign or
“other” to most European-Americans -- who held a lot of the political and cultural power.
But the act of re-naming also has power. That struggle that all humans feel to see
their identity reflected back to them in their landscape is what motivated Alaska
Natives and non-indigenous allies alike to work for decades to change the name back. In 2015,
that hard work paid off and this place was renamed
Denali to reflect the peoples who have an ancestral connection to the land.
We looked at the Denali name change and then re-change as cultural geographers,
but there are other big parts of human geography we could also use to explore this place and space.
Political geography studies the way that power shapes the landscape, like how here in Denali
there was an uneven power between those in Ohio and Washington D.C. and those in Alaska.
And if we zoom all the way out to a global scale, similar tension over toponyms can be found in many
other places, especially those that have been colonies or part of empires at some point in
their history. Like in 1995 when Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park in Australia was made official,
ending the British name of Ayers Rock-Mount Olga National Park.
Each place is complex, but as geographers we look for how places are connected.
There are similar political and economic forces at work that help those in power
show they have control over the identity of the place they’re in.
So restoring the names of places is an important part of identity and cultural geography
and important political work on the local scale as a way to push against regional and global powers.
Or in economic geography we study the uneven movement of economic opportunity.
Like the way some opportunities, like Alaskan gold mines, don’t end up making the people living
near those mines wealthy. Or the way the tourist economy may change throughout the national park
depending on environmental, cultural, or political factors.
And finally in urban geography, we study the way humans build
cities. Like what influences create the housing and industry patterns,
or the ways we can plan spaces to maximize walkable communities, and the relationships
between urban and rural spaces. Which is still an important field in Alaska.
As cities within the US grow, Alaska could have an important role as America’s “Last Frontier.”
Denali is just one example of a growing movement of indigenous and marginalized groups asserting
their cultural understanding of the places they have spiritual, cultural, and legal rights to.
There’s power in place names. There’s power in how we define regions, what’s in versus out and who
it includes and who it excludes. Which is why we see struggles over place names all over the world.
Our names shape our identities. And efforts to learn about the places we call home
and their histories is part of the cultural and political work we can do to recognize who has been
harmed by colonization and conquest. Learning more about economics, technology, language, religion,
power, and how they all move lets us tell fuller, richer stories of the Earth.
Which we’ll do more of next time when we explore cultural landscapes.
Many maps and borders represent modern geopolitical divisions that have often
been decided without the consultation, permission, or recognition of the land's original inhabitants.
Many geographical place names also don't reflect the Indigenous or Aboriginal peoples languages.
So we at Crash Course want to acknowledge these peoples’ traditional and ongoing
relationship with that land and all the physical and human geographical elements of it.
We encourage you to learn about the history of the place you call home
through resources like native-land.ca and by engaging with your local Indigenous
and Aboriginal nations through the websites and resources they provide.
Thanks for watching this episode of Crash Course Geography which is filmed at the Team
Sandoval Pierce Studio and was made with the help of all these nice people. If you want to
help keep all Crash Course free for everyone, forever, you can join our community on Patreon.