What's in a name?

I occasionally substitute teach in the off-season and recently completed a two-week stint with sixth graders assigned to read Sign of the Beaver, a coming of age story set in the interior of what would become Maine in 1769. The book, inspired by a true story of a young settler left on his own for a summer and befriended by a Native American, was written by Elizabeth George Speare and published in 1983. Speare, a two-time winner of the Newbery Medal, was well-known as a writer of historical fiction for children, yet her books are not without controversy — and this novel is contested for perpetuating Native American stereotypes through her use of the word s---- in a derogatory way toward native women. This blog post is not a diatribe punishing Speare for choosing to use particular words in her writing that have over time become acknowledged as offensive toward Native Americans by non-Indigenous people; it is instead a recognition that names — and the naming of people, places, and things — have impact.

Juliet, through William Shakespeare's quill, famously declared "What's in a name? That which we call a rose, by any other word would smell as sweet." The bard was making the case that what something is called does not affect what the thing truly is, but when a name is an offensive ethnic slur, or a culturally significant name is ignored, the differently-named rose can indeed have a radically different meaning. As the voices of Native American tribes have been more heard in the past few decades, and both the Canadian and United States governments have begun recognizing the intentional destruction of Native American culture through legislation like the Civilization Fund Act of 1819, society-at-large has begun to understand the havoc wrought by negative stereotypes, name calling, cultural genocide, and belief in both the Myth of the Vanishing Indian and the supposed divine mandate of Manifest Destiny.

Many states, and even the United States federal government, have recognized that place names can convey or perpetuate negative meanings, or discount the voices of minority or marginalized groups. To "correct" just one of these historical oversights, a movement started to evaluate the many hundreds of mapped locations, with groups of people from different cultural backgrounds and expertise coming together to specifically rename places containing the word s----. It was an exercise in listening and learning for many involved, not just because some new names were collectively chosen to honor individuals, but because it represented collaboration across the table and not a decision made by the decree of one person or just one side of the table. Many of these new names just became official in the past few years. If you're curious, the USGS map showing all the removals of the word s---- is linked here. (Note: this page is now archived by the current administration and marked as no longer active policy — which is itself telling.)

Here in Michigan, many of our place names derive from Native American names — including the name "Michigan" itself, which comes from the Ojibwe word "mishigami" meaning "large water" or "great lake." Surrounded by four of the five Great Lakes, it is a perfect name. Twenty-seven other U.S. states have similarly-derived names, including Ohio, Iowa, Idaho, and Connecticut.

Ironically, Michigan's most-famous Indian Agent — Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, fluent in several Indian dialects — spent time as an explorer and territorial official responsible for proposing place names as the Michigan Territory was evolving into the state of Michigan. Instead of maintaining place names, often named after Indian chiefs like Kautawaubet, Kaykakee, Keskkauko, Meegisee, Mikenauk, and Tonedagana, Schoolcraft made deliberate choices both to curry favor with state and federal leaders and to further the colonial ideology that would sever connections with existing Indigenous culture. He did this by inventing fictitious "Indian-sounding" place names through a process called "elision": combining syllables from Native American languages with Latin, Greek, and Arabic to create new words that sounded Indigenous but weren't. Alcona, Algoma, Allegan, Alpena, Arenac, Iosco, Kalkaska, Leelanau, Lenawee, Oscoda, Tuscola — all Schoolcraft inventions. (The one partial exception: Leelanau County is named after "Leelinau," the pen name his Ojibwe wife Jane Johnston Schoolcraft used for her own writings — uncredited, like so much of her work he later published as his own. He practiced erasure at home, too.)

Places like Calhoun County were named for John C. Calhoun, Andrew Jackson's Vice President and the driving political force behind the Indian Removal Act of 1830 — the law that forced tribes from their ancestral homelands and triggered the Treaty of Washington here in Michigan as the Odawa and Ojibwe negotiated to avoid being forced to leave by ceding nearly 14 million acres of the northwest portion of the Lower Peninsula and eastern half of the UP. Cass County honors Lewis Cass, who was Schoolcraft's boss as Governor of the Michigan Territory and later Jackson's Secretary of War — the man who actually implemented Indian Removal. These weren't neutral naming choices. They were political statements, written into the map.

Schoolcraft's influence extended beyond the Michigan map. His book Algic Researches (1839) became Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's primary source for The Song of Hiawatha (1855) — a Victorian-era poem Longfellow wrote without ever visiting Ojibwe land, borrowing the name "Hiawatha" from a 16th-century Iroquois leader in what's now New York and applying it to an Ojibwe figure. That's how the Hiawatha National Forest — where Woods & Waters holds a guide permit — got its name. A million acres of federal land in the eastern Upper Peninsula, carrying the name of a New England poet's invention, misborrowed from one tribe's history and grafted onto another's homeland. The romanticizing, erasing, and rewriting went far beyond maps — I'll tell that fuller story in another post.

This intentional disconnect by name-erasure has had long-lasting ramifications. Many tribes are still unable to regain federally-recognized tribal status or reclaim historical lands and usage rights — including Michigan's own Burt Lake Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians, whose desirable village location on Burt Lake was intentionally burned to the ground in 1900 by a county sheriff and a land speculator while the men were away hunting, and who are still fighting for federal re-recognition 125 years later.

As a thank you for his work — largely for implementing expansionist ideals and literally vanishing Indians — an eastern Upper Peninsula county is named in Schoolcraft's honor.

Schoolcraft was one man choosing to disregard long-established place names without discussion or input from all parties involved. History shows he's not alone. Denali, North America's highest mountain, had been called "Denali" — meaning "the High One" or "Great One" — by Interior Alaska's Koyukon people for thousands of years, until a gold prospector in an 1897 New York Sun article referred to the massif as Mount McKinley in honor of William McKinley winning the Republican Presidential nomination, simply because he supported using gold over silver as the monetary standard. With McKinley winning the presidency, the name stuck despite Alaskans continuing to request the mountain be officially renamed and recognized as Denali — even after attaining statehood in 1959. Alaskans — and many others — never stopped asking for an official re-designation. Even the National Park surrounding the mountain was re-named "Denali" in the 1970s. In 2015, President Barack Obama officially changed this most impressive peak's name; the change was long overdue, as many had been referring to the mountain as "Denali" for decades out of deference to its native name.

In January 2025, an Executive Order directed that the mountain be renamed back to McKinley. Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, a Republican, quickly introduced a bill in February 2025 to restore the name Denali, saying simply: "In Alaska, it's Denali." Murkowski has continued, futilely, to overcome the executive order through legislation — reintroducing her Denali bill, with no path to passage while the current Trump executive order stands.

It's worth sitting with that for a moment. A name used by the Koyukon people for thousands of years — restored after decades of advocacy — reversed by executive action in the first weeks of a new administration. Not because "Denali" was inaccurate or offensive. Because someone preferred the other one.

This is not a partisan observation. It's a simple one: the very least we can do is respect place names that belonged to the people who were here first. When any name is no longer appropriate — for any reason — we should work together to choose anew. What we should not do is choose alone, or choose in ways that erase the people who named things long before we arrived.

The rose deserves to keep its name.

PS: The image is from my visit to Denali in July 2000, where we were lucky enough to see the peak during a sightseeing flight. The mountain is incredibly massive — your perspective is that you are going to collide with it, it feels so close to the plane. To learn more history and about the tribes whose land Woods & Waters operates on, please read our Land Acknowledgement page.