President Obama’s trip to Alaska, highlighting the recognition and re-
1 Denali is only one of a number of names, in a number of languages, used by a number of peoples – some of them more closely related than others – for the mountain. As with ‘African’ or ‘Asian’ or even ‘European’, a few generalizations may no doubt be made about things ‘Native American’ – but, I think, only a few, given the vastness of the continent and the number of peoples and languages indigenous to it. It is at the very least ridiculous, and more likely to be profoundly disrespectful, to forget this diversity and multiplicity.
2 Names are given and used by humans for a variety of reasons, the names and reasons varying from one group and time to another. Perhaps everyone has a right to call a person, place, or thing what they will, but it is worth asking what a given name says about the named and the namer, what it denotes and connotes, who is being respected or disrespected, honored or dishonored, by the use of the name. In this case it would seem that to call the mountain in question after a little-known president who had no association with it has the effect of emphasizing the rule of the colonial government with no other great purpose, whereas to use one of the already extant names given to the place by people who have lived near it for a long time at least acknowledges the sometime presence of those people.
3 Names and gestures are important, but they are only the merest beginning (as is writing a weblog entry). Members of a colonial society cannot congratulate themselves on being liberal, progressive, sensitive, enlightened, or otherwise noble simply for making an ‘official’ name change if we are unwilling to change the way we relate to our fellow human beings whose mothers have lived here for countless generations, acknowledging their past, present, and continuing relationship to the land as the primary human presence in it, and acknowledging their past, present, and continuing barbaric and immoral treatment at the hands of our occupying society as the sin that it is, and turning from it.
4 Even the very concept of national parks, meant to protect ‘unspoiled’ nature largely for the titillation of tourists, is based on a view of the land within them, first, as terra nullius; second, as a resource owned by the government to be either protected or exploited as deemed expedient; and in any case as something separate from and conquerable by humans. I do not think one can claim that all indigenous, ancient, and/or traditional cultures have a fully respectful and sustainable relationship to their natural surroundings – though it has long been fashionable among some to idolize such cultures, deforestation and significant extinctions are not only modern problems – but those that have endured have done so only because they have learned to live on and with the earth in a way that modern Western culture has utterly abandoned.
5 The President’s supposed ‘environmentalist’ credentials and policies are utterly undermined by his use of an airplane to travel to Alaska and his support for the opening of another wound in our mother’s body in the form of an operation to extract petroleum. Oil is blood, and oil is a drug, whose grave costs we cannot afford and whose flow we must most urgently stanch.