Fritinancy

Name in the News: Malheur

On the evening of Saturday, January 2, a group of armed protestors commandeered the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, a federal preserve near Malheur Lake, about 30 miles south of Burns, in eastern Oregon. The group, which includes Ryan and Ammon Bundy, sons of Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy – who had his own clash with the federal Bureau of Land Management in 2014 – is protesting the arrest and imprisonment of two Oregon cattle ranchers convicted of arson on federal land. (The convicted ranchers, father and son Steven and Dwight Hammond, have disclaimed any connection to the armed group, and have begun serving their sentences.) As of today, January 6, the standoff continues, with the protestors vowing to occupy the building “for as long as it takes.” (Or until the local community asks them to leave. Or until their food runs out: Ammon Bundy made a Facebook appeal for “supplies or snacks” – to be sent via U.S. Postal Service, that tool of the archenemy. PETA responded by hand-delivering vegan jerky.) The refuge, which is an important habitat for some 320 species of birds, remains closed to the public until further notice.

For more about the motives and legality of the protest, follow the links at the end of this post. In the meantime, let’s take a look at the story from my preferred angle: naming.

Names on the Map

Ken Jennings, best known for his record-setting 2004 appearance on Jeopardy!—74 consecutive wins—has  published a new book, Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks. Jennings ranges over treasure maps, Google Maps, map collecting, highway numbering, and geocaching, and devotes a section of one chapter to toponyms—the names of places. Here’s an excerpt: 

Names aren’t neutral; they come with agendas. In 1614, John Smith coined the name “New England” for the North American coast he was exploring; his map of the area pointedly left off any Native American settlements or place-names. Instead, every place got a cozy—and completely arbitrary—British name: Ipswich, Southampton, Cape Elizabeth. Most of Smith’s names never caught on, but one of his choices was adopted by the Mayflower pilgrims when they founded their colony there six years later: Plymouth, a spot that the Wampanoag Indians, then as now, actually called “Patuxet.” As late as 1854, Commodore Matthew Perry steamed into Tokyo Bay and returned to Washington bearing a map of Edo, with all the parts of the harbor given suspiciously un-Japanese names like “Mississippi Bay” and “Susquehanna Bay.” On the map, some islets in the Uraga Channel have even been labeled “Plymouth Rocks.” “Look!” the maps say, all wide-eyed and innocent-like. “These places must be ours! Why else would they have our names on them?”

Jennings’s own love of names and word play is evident in Maphead’s chapter titles, each of which carries multiple meanings: Eccentricity, Bearing, Fault, Benchmarks, Elevation, Legend, Reckoning, Meander, Transit, Overedge, Frontier, and Relief.

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Image: Crumpled Paris city map, in polyethylene, from Uncommon Goods. Also available in San Francisco, Berlin, Tokyo, London, New York, Amsterdam, Chicago, and Barcelona.