Whatshername
Indigenous peoples name places after the Life that is living there.
Colonizers name places after what displaces that Life when they conquer it: themselves.
It’s challenging to protest the destruction of the planet when we are forced to use the language of that which we are protesting against.
Take Thacker Pass in Nevada, for example.
Protestors are there right now trying to prevent a mining operation from blowing up and polluting the area — all to extract lithium, an element needed for the production of electric car batteries.
Thacker Pass is named after some shithead sheriff of the late 1800’s “Wild West”, who spent his career enforcing laws set up to protect the boom of mining operations in that whole area. It’s crazy that era is referred to as the “Wild West” when it’s marked by a fury of wilderness destruction and reckless “taming” of the wilds.
Thacker Pass is part of a larger area called McDermitt Caldera. McDermitt, we can assume, is another run-of-the-mill white colonialist d-bag. Caldera is the Spanish word first used there in 1865, meaning cauldren or kettle, derived from the Latin word caldarium, meaning “hot bath”. In geology, Caldera is used to describe any cavities or craters formed after volcanic eruptions.
Tragically, the name that the native Paiute people called this place (a people that have lived on that land for at least 15,000 years) is unknown today.*
This is like being given a beautifully poetic name when you are born, one that captures your essence perfectly and sets you on your path of destiny….but then after some 80 years everyone starts calling you Steve and before you know it you can’t remember your original name, and you even start acting like a Steve. Fuckin’ Steve.
The biggest mass execution that this government has ever carried out, ordered by Abraham Lincoln — the “great emancipator”, happened on Dec. 26, 1862. Thirty-eight Dakota men were hung after being convicted of “murder and other outrages” against European settlers during the U.S.- Dakota War of 1862. Here is a list of their names…
1. Ta-he-do-ne-cha (One who forbids his house.)
2. Plan-doo-ta, (Red Otter.)
3. Wy-a-tah-ta-wa, (His People.)
4. Hin-hau-shoon-ko-yag-ma-ne, (One who walks clothed in an Owl’s Tail.)
5. Ma-za-bom-doo, (Iron Blower.)
6. Wak-pa-doo-ta, (Red Leaf.)
7. Wa-he-hua
8. Sua-ma-ne, (Tinkling Walker.)
9. Ta-tay-me-ma, (Round Wind)
10. Rda-in-yan-ka, (Rattling Runner.)
11. Doo-wau-sa, (The Singer.)
12. Ha-pau, (Second child of a son.)
13. Shoon-ka-ska, (White Dog.)
14. Toon-kau-e-cha-tag-ma-ne, (One who walks by his Grandfather.)
15. E-tay-doo-tay, (Red Face.)
16. Am-da-cha, (Broken to Pieces.)
17. Hay-pe-pau, (Third child of a son.)
18. Mah-pe-o-ke-na-jui, (Who stands on the Clouds.)
19. Harry Milord, (Half Breed.)
20. Chas-kay-dau, (First born of a son.)
21. Baptiste Campbell
22. Ta-ta-ka-gay, (Wind Maker.)
23. Hay-pin-kpa, (The Tips of the Horn.)
24. Hypolite Auge, (Half-breed.)
25. Ka-pay-shue, (One who does not Flee.)
26. Wa-kau-tau-ka, (Great Spirit.)
27. Toon-kau-ko-yag-e-na-jui, (One who stands clothed with his Grandfather.)
28. Wa-ka-ta-e-na-jui, (One who stands on the earth.)
29. Pa-za-koo-tay-ma-ne, (One who walks prepared to shoot.)
30. Ta-tay-hde-dau, (Wind comes home.)
31. Wa-she-choon, (Frenchman.)
32. A-c-cha-ga, (To grow upon.)
33. Ho-tan-in-koo, (Voice that appears coming.)
34. Khay-tan-hoon-ka, (The Parent Hawk.)
35. Chau-ka-hda, (Near the Wood.)
36 Hda-hin-hday, (To make a rattling voice.)
37. O-ya-tay-a-kee, (The Coming People.)
38. Ma-hoo-way-ma, (He comes for me.)
39. Wa-kin-yan-wa, (Little Thunder.)…..executed at a later date
Can you fucking imagine having a name like ‘One Who Walks Clothed in an Owl’s Tail’ — what flair they must have had!
Or ‘One Who Does Not Flee’ — what bravery they must have shown!
Or ‘Broken to Pieces’ — what perseverance! Ah, to live in a culture where you are given a name like ‘Wind Maker’ due to your mad skills of calling upon the elements….and not because you are known for your devastating flatulence, Steve.
Comedian Hannah Gadsby tells the story of being in a dog park with her dog Doug and there was this annoying man who overheard her dog’s name and told her that was a funny name for a dog. She said “why?” and he said “because dogs dig, they dug, so it’s a pun, it’s funny.” Just to piss the guy off she lied and said “No, His name’s Douglas. And I named him after the Pouch of Douglas, I will have you know.” He said “what’s that?” and she went on to explain to the man….
“The Pouch of Douglas is a bit of potential space that exists, and it’s situated between the anal cavity… and the uterus in the female, biological sex reproductive environment. It’s neither front, nor back. It’s right in the middle. It’s in fanny neutral territory. We’ll call it fanny Switzerland. And it doesn’t have its own entrance,” I said, as if that made it all better. “Like, you can’t… You can’t just get to it. Although, if you were to stick your thumb up the bum and your finger up the relevant vagine… and clap… that bit in there… that’s your Pouch of Douglas. ’Cause it’s not an actual thing. It’s just… It’s a crawl space for emergencies. The best way I can explain it is this. You’ve got a suitcase and you want to open the suitcase. You take the zip all the way around the suitcase, but when you go to open the suitcase, it does not open, because you have not used the zip zip. You’ve used the funny zip, which does go all the way around the suitcase, but it doesn’t fucking open. It just mocks you. So when you go to open the suitcase, it just does that… And now, you have not opened the suitcase. But what you’ve done is you’ve created a bit of extra space in there, and you can’t see it, and you can’t access it. But you know it’s there.”
How are we to ever reconnect with the planet enough to save Her if we don’t even know Her real name, if we don’t take the time to get to know the real names of all Her curves and cliffs and cavities and creatures? When we meet someone new we ask their name. But we often forget to ask the names of non humans….or we just blindly accept the names these holy beings were coldly assigned by the culture of cataloging conquest.
“I just still can’t get over that there’s something inside of me, in a very particular part of my body… called the Pouch of Douglas. It’s fucking weird, borderline not okay. But it is also a reminder that we do live in a world where everything has been named by men. Everything. Everything. And that was named after a man. Dr. James Douglas, who was an 18th century Scottish man midwife. What an uncomfortable collection of demographics that is. Like, do not headline your LinkedIn with that. That is a mistake. It was named after Dr. James Douglas, because apparently he found it first. What a day. What a day he must have been having. Just rummaging around a lady cadaver. Rummage, rummage. Hobbies were different then. He must have just found her funny zip, and then saw it sitting there, all void, no name. At which point, Dr. James Douglas must have thought, “Well, this is it. This is my shot at legacy.” Honestly, it just never ceases to amaze me how little men have to do in order to be remembered. He found a “not thing” and called dibs. We would live in a very different world if women had participated in the naming of things. Like, do you fellows honestly believe you’d have balls if women had been at that meeting? No. ’Cause here’s the thing. Women don’t think of your testicles as a sport or a game. You like to play with them. That is your bag and your bag alone. Cool story. But how would you like it if we’d have given you “Karen’s handful?” How the fuck would you like that? Just having an olde woman with a grip around your tenderloins all fucking day. How would you like that?” ~Hannah Gadsby
Do you feel a pang when calling that place ‘Thacker Pass’?
It’s sacrilege.
It’s offensive.
It might as well be called something like ‘Thacker’s Ass Pack’
At the east end of Thacker’s Ass Pack there is a peak called ‘Sentinel Rock’.
Sentinel means “guard”, derived from the French word ‘sentinelle’ (16c.), and from the Italian word ‘sentinella’. But both come from the Latin word sentire, which means “feel, perceive by the senses” (as in a sentient being). It seems that as civilizations unfold, these odd switcheroos happen, where certain words get subverted and come to mean the opposite of what they originally meant. So sentinel means “guard” but has it’s roots in “feeling”. We went from being these feeling creatures to super guarded ones. Hmmm, what could have possibly made us do that?
Let’s look at the name of the company that wants to get their grubby paws on the lithium at Thacker’s Ass Pack: ‘Lithium Americas Corp’…..
• For an element formed 19 million years ago, Lithium has an extremely new name, assigned by Swedish chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius in 1818. It’s modern Latin: litho from the Greek “lithos”(stone) plus “ium”. Wow, how’d ya come up with that one, Jöns? The muses were really communing with you there, huh?
• The name America is always thought to have been named after Amerigo Vespucci, an Italian explorer that came to this continent right after Columbus and believed it not to be the Indies like Columbus did. BUT another theory suggests that this name actually comes from the Amerrisque Mountains of Nicaragua. Amerrique is a Mayan word that means “a country of perpetually strong wind, or the Land of the Wind”, and the suffixes can mean “a spirit that breathes” and “ life itself”. On Columbus’s 4th trip over here (did I say trip, I meant plundering murderous rape-fest rampage) he arrived right near the Amerrique Mountains. So in this origin theory it’s believed that the Natives spoke this word to Columbus a whole bunch and then when Columbus and his crew went back home it spread all around Europe until it reached the cartographer mapping the “new world” who was looking for a good name for it. But when people saw the maps circulating they were like “Hey, that kinda sounds like Amerigo Vespucci’s first name, it must be named after him because that would be crazy to NOT name something after a rich powerful white guy, right? I mean, WHO does that?”
• The group planning on mining at Thacker Pass is a subsidiary of Lithium Americas, called ‘Lithium Nevada Corp’. Nevada is named after the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Sierra is Spanish for “saw” (uh oh, there we go again naming natural things after industrial things) or “jagged mountain range”. Nevada is from the Spanish word nevado, which means “snowy”.
You always hear about how the Inuits have dozens of words for snow. So you don’t think the native peoples of Nevada had an equally descriptive lexicon for their snow, for their surroundings too?…But now reduced to ONE Spanish word, a lingering stamp of the Spanish Conquistadors* (*“he who conquers”). It’s not just Nature that gets displaced by colonization and industrialization but what also gets pushed out is the original language inspired by a love of Her beauty and shaped by the intimate intricate relationships with Her. Language is meant to be a lovesong, not a list.
Cheryl Angel, the Lakota Elder who graciously took me under her wing during my time at Standing Rock says that in the Lakota language there is no word for love. Instead they have different ways to describe the status of what the heart is feeling. She says “Learning to express one’s heart is paramount to self knowledge and growth….But most importantly to a self discipline that serves the whole of creation.”
Saying that the Inuits have 50 different words for snow is a gross oversimplification. It’s more that their language reflects their experience of snow, of observing and interacting with the snow in its many forms. There is a root word for snow but then there are many varied suffixes which change the meaning. This is called Polysynthesis — something non indigenous languages are sorely lacking. Decentralized, localized languages are often richly descriptive and marvelously complex. Because they are praise for a marvelously complex planet, not a lifeless reductionist compartmentalized system of labeling and categorizing.
Earth itself is from the Anglo-Saxon word “erda” and the German word “erde,” both of which mean “ground or soil”. Earth is the only planet not named after Greek or Roman Gods and Goddesses — which are names that evoke certain emotions and energies: Venus…love, Mars…war, etc.
But the name we industrialized humans use for the ONLY planet we know of that harbors life is this lifeless, spiritless name that basically means dirt…which would be totally OK if we actually understood just how friggin’ precious and miraculous dirt is! But we don’t. “Dirty” is a derogatory word to us modern industrialized domesticated humanoids, not one of praise. And that is precisely how we have come to see Earth as an “it”, and not as a “Her”, not as a Mother, not as a living entity as so many Indigenous peoples did and do.
Many Peoples native to North America called the Earth, ‘Turtle Island’.
You can imagine how that would shape your psychology and spirituality if you beheld the Earth as a giant turtle you were essentially riding on the back of, if you regarded the Earth as one large animal, one large being. You certainly wouldn’t want to violently crack Her shell open and rip out Her insides.
We have no life giving, life protecting, life honoring language… only a life taking one.
The only true dead language is that of Industrialized Colonizing Men, because speaking it cuts us off from the Living World.
Too many of us have forgotten the words to the song of Life that our Mother has sung for billions of years. There are a million renditions of this song, from lullabyes to ballads. At most we can just barely hum parts of the melodies, but the lyrics largely elude us. We have to start listening again. You hear that, Thacker?! You hear that, Jöns?! You hear that, Amerigo Vespucci?! You hear that, Douglas?! You hear that, fuckin’ STEVE???!!!
In his very detailed thoughtful essay about the history of Thacker Pass, Max Wilbert* (one of the founders of the protest camp there) reminds us of two quotes to help us as we remember to listen…..
“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” ~ Milan Kundera
“To know our history is to begin to see how to take up the struggle again.” ~Barbara Ehrenreich
But I wonder about the world “struggle”. Has there always been struggle? That’s what the dominant narrative tells us, that we must keep struggling and maybe someday we’ll make it to the promised land. But before all the large scale colonizing conquests maybe there wasn’t the need for this word. The word struggle is from the late 14th century but it’s origins are obscure. It might be a derivative of Middle English words struglen, stroglen, or strogelen. Or the Modern Dutch word struikelen, which means to stumble or falter. But one alternative etymology suggests the base of struggle is taken from the Old Norse word struger, which means “ARROGANCE, PRIDE, SPITEFULLNESS, ILL-WILL”. With this definition, it’s those in power that are doing the struggling, not those feeling their wrath, not those fighting back against their relentless onslaughts. You would think maintaining such negative energy all the time would be exhausting for the ruling class……
…….But it often feels as if there is no end in sight to their seemingly vast stores of energy.
Have we tried just asking these assholes if they are tired? If they want to rest now? Maybe we should invite them to rest, encourage them to stop struggling so hard……“There there, Elon. You don’t have to keep going, it’s OK, you are safe, you are loved, you have inherit value, you don’t have to prove anything to anyone anymore, just curl up in this pillow fort I made for you and close your eyes. When you wake up we can make a vision board to help you figure out what your real name is because with a name like Elon Musk it’s absolutely impossible not to act like a complete fucking slimeball all the goddamn time. It sounds like the name of a cheap cologne for sleazy cyborgs.”
Thacker Pass, like so many of the last sacred places, is in danger of being lost just so white men can continue to name things to death. A better name for Thacker Pass would perhaps be ‘This Too Shall Pass’…..if we’re not careful, if we don’t stop it from passing….like so much already has.
“Our inability to live entirely in the present (like most animals do), combined with our inability to see very far into the future, makes us strange in-between creatures, neither beast nor prophet. Our amazing intelligence seems to have outstripped our instinct for survival. We plunder the earth hoping that accumulating material surplus will make up for the profound, unfathomable thing that we have lost.”
~Arundhati Roy
