Extractive Place Naming Practices in Early Modern North America

Lauren Beck, Canada research chair in intercultural encounter and professor of visual and material culture studies at Mount Allison University, Canada, examines extractive naming practices using exploration narratives and associated cartography from the 16th-18th centuries alongside Indigenous historical sources.

Extractive place naming practices come in several forms in early modern North America. The first reflects European attempts to obtain Indigenous toponymy, whether for cultural caché, wayfinding or for understanding where the resources they described might be found. Yet language barriers prevented people such as Columbus and Cartier from extracting place names, which gave rise to misnaming. A second extractive naming practice awarded names relating to resources linked to locales where those resources had been confirmed to exist. This naming practice for describing what sort of resources one would encounter in a place was deployed differently by both Indigenous and European peoples. A third practice, which Europeans did not embrace, involved place stories that forewarned how one could move through, interact with, and care for the resources of a landscape.

This lecture is part of the Philip Lee Phillips Society 2024 Spring Presentation on Indigenous Cartography, co-sponsored by the Washington Map Society.

For transcript and more information, visit https://www.loc.gov/item/webcast-11329