Article from https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/renaming-racist-places-board-on-geographic-names/621342/ of interest to those of us who wrestle with place names. Partial text:
How to Rename a Place
A little-known federal body gives official approval to what appears on maps. Now it is caught in the middle of the country’s upheaval over racism and language.
By David A. Graham - January 27, 2022
David A. Graham is a staff writer at The Atlantic.
Examine a detailed map of pretty much any part of the United States and you can find scars left by racism. A reservoir in New Mexico is named Wetback Tank. Mulatto Bayou, in Louisiana, is one of several places using that slur. A half-dozen, from Florida to Colorado, include “Redskin”; Oregon has a Dead Injun Creek. Hundreds of place names include “Negro” or “Squaw,” among other, similarly offensive names.
Some have been updated, but only recently. Squaw Tits, a pair of pinnacles southwest of Phoenix, Arizona, has since last year been Isanaklesh Peaks. Louisiana’s Dead Negro Branch was renamed Alexander Branch, after a late local civil-rights leader. Mulatto Mountain, North Carolina, became Simone Mountain, honoring the great Black pianist and singer (and Old North State native) Nina Simone.
The new names are the work of the Board on Geographic Names, a little-known federal body with the remarkable power to literally remake the map. Founded in 1890, it is an Ocean’s 11 of civil servants: subject-matter experts from across the government—including the Pentagon and the Postal Service, the Commerce Department and the CIA—who have come together not to conduct a heist but to approve official names of lakes, mountains, and valleys on government documents.
Usually, the public eye is far from the BGN. But the board now finds itself in the middle of the fiery national debate over racism and language. In recent years, the BGN has spent more of its time reconsidering offensive names than doing anything else, but the process typically takes months and is reactive by design, with names considered case by case upon request.
A different, faster process is possible. In November, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, the first Native American to hold that post, issued an order designed to wipe any mentions of “Squaw,” probably the most frequently used slur in place names, off the map. She issued a second order that will establish an advisory committee to identify other offensive names that might be proactively changed under a similar mechanism. In 2020, when Haaland was a member of Congress, she introduced a bill that would also create such a committee, and although Green and Senator Elizabeth Warren reintroduced it this year, the bill is stuck in limbo.
..Even the expedited process will take time. Removing all uses of “Squaw” is expected to take about a year, and that’s the simpler of the two orders. One challenge is that determining what’s offensive isn’t always straightforward. Names including a slur are easy, but others—such as Jew Valley, Oregon, named after a group of Jewish homesteaders—are less clear-cut. Another is that any feature whose name is removed needs a new one, ideally one that is locally meaningful and that will age better than whatever it’s replacing. The BGN is designed with process in mind, not justice or equity.
But paradoxically, the persistence of many of these racist names helps explain why a careful naming procedure is important: Slapping a demeaning name on a feature and having it stick was once very easy. This makes the Board on Geographic Names a microcosm of some of the best and worst tendencies of the federal government: conscientious attention to detail by public servants, and endless bureaucratic quagmire. The BGN’s caution now is an effort not to make mistakes anew—but in the meantime, change is slow, sometimes agonizingly so.
The idea that place names should have standardized spellings, and that the government should set them, is relatively recent. George Washington knew the river that ran past his family’s estate well. He rhapsodized about it in letters to Thomas Jefferson and spearheaded a plan to connect it via canal to the Ohio River. At Mount Vernon, he cleared trees and lowered a bluff so that he’d have a better view, and he later chose the site of the nation’s capital along its banks.
What Washington didn’t know was how to spell the river’s name. In correspondence, he frequently wrote “Potomack.” The company he formed to build the canal—he soon left its presidency to take on the nation’s—was usually called the Patowmack Company, though it also sometimes used “Potowmack” and “Potowmac.” Today, the name of the river that flows through his namesake city is plain, because in 1931 the BGN decreed that it would be “Potomac.”
Casual navigators might believe that the labels on the maps we use—whether on phones, in dog-eared road atlases, or on tourist maps—are immutable and permanent. That is very much not the case. In 2014, the BGN bestowed 700,000 new names.
A panel of bureaucrats from across the government wielding the power to change the names on maps sounds like a Trumpian deep-state fever dream. But a meeting of the BGN’s Domestic Names Committee is oddly, well, domestic. (A separate committee handles foreign names, mostly involving transliteration tweaks, titles for unnamed places, and changes for military use.) It’s like any other pandemic-era Zoom meeting, only with a greater chance of digressions about the orthography of the 50th state. In case you’re wondering: The state is “Hawaii,” because that’s how Congress admitted it to the union, but the big island is “Hawaiʻi.”
I listened in to September’s meeting. A big chunk of the agenda was devoted to mundane changes. An unnamed body of water in Wisconsin was christened Blackberry Lake, though some members questioned whether it could really be true, as the application stated, that “the lake is itself the color of blackberries.” Lowes Lake, also in Wisconsin, became Loew Lake, in deference to new evidence that the namesake family spelled their name that way.
Another item seemed like an easy case: a proposal to name a creek in Texas for Merrel Telschow, who had once owned the land abutting it. The county commission and state board both supported the change, but members were immediately skeptical. Did Telschow have any connection to the stream other than owning land on its banks? Had he tended to or impounded or fished in it? Had he made any notable contributions to the local area other than his (laudable) World War II military service? In the end, members decided not to decide, and asked staff to seek more information.
Though the Board on Geographic Names now relies heavily on historical and local usage, it began when written maps of many parts of the United States were still a novelty.
