-Anthony K. Webster
How sad it is that persons bent on debunking Native traditions in Alaska…have used linguistically naive variant spellings of Native place names to assert that the Native toponomy is amorphous and ever-changing. (Kari 1989: 139)
We create trust by hanging out with people in their own environment. We become more humane and treat people with trust, respect, and dignity. (Jim 2023: 151)
I.
Invisibility has been a persistent concern for many Native peoples—invisible to the broader society, invisible to the courts, invisible to the government (Deloria 2004; O’Brien 2010). Their languages reduced to invisibility and inaudibility—unseen and unheard. And yet, that invisibility and inaudibility, is never as secure or total as it might at first seem. It is, instead, a failure (willful or otherwise) to see and to hear. James Collins (1998) noted that in the Tolowa language dictionary produced in the late 80s, the dictionary included a map that remapped Del Norte County with Tolowa placenames. The very first section of the Mescalero Apache Dictionary (Breuninger et al 1982), after the grammatical sketch, is a listing of Mescalero Apache placenames, both on and off the Mescalero Reservation. In both cases, there is an attempt to remap and make visible historic and ongoing connections with places using placenames. These forms of remapping challenge the erasure of Indigenous presence.
Both Tolowa and Mescalero Apache are Athabaskan or Dene languages. The serious linguistic anthropological study of Athabaskan placenames finds its inspiration in the work of Keith Basso (1996) on Western Apache placenaming practices. Basso showed both the ways Western Apache placenames create descriptive pictures of places, but also the moral work that Western Apache placenames can be used for. Apache placenames are often quotations from the ancestors and are associated with particular narratives. Other work on related Athabaskan placenames have confirmed the imagistic quality of placenames and have also noted what James Kari (2010) calls, “geolinguistic conservatism”—that is to say, Athabaskan placenames are remarkably stable over time. Indeed, one way of thinking about this link between “geolinguistic conservatism” and the vivid descriptive quality of Athabaskan placenames, is to see them as essential for wayfinding. The placenames describe, as Harry Hoijer (1953: 557) noted of Chiricahua Apache, “topographic features of their environment with care and precision.” I should add, besides wayfinding, both the Apaches that Basso worked with and Navajos that I have talked with concerning such matters, point out that the placenames are pleasing to say. One Navajo woman described them as “beautiful words.” Beautiful words in Navajo can also be moral words—they can inspire moral reflection. To give a sense of the descriptive quality of such names, the famous monadnock known in English as Shiprock, is called in Navajo Tsé Bit’a’í (tsé ‘rock’ bi- ‘its’ -t’a’ ‘wing’ -í nominalizer) ‘Winged Rock.’ Navajo placenames don’t just vividly describe, they can also, when the placename is built from an ideophone, sonically evoke a location as well—Tóniil’aha’nii ‘sound of something moving in water out of sight’ (where the ideophone niil evokes the sound of hooves). One Navajo I knew enjoyed saying the name Tsé doon ‘popping rock.’
Image: Photo of Shiprock (Tsé Bit’a’í) taken by the author in 2011 from atop Buffalo Pass.
But if dictionaries are one site for making visible Athabaskan placenames, contemporary poetry, in this case contemporary Navajo poetry, seems yet another site to find Athabaskan placenames. For, if, as Basso (1996: 77) notes, “poets and songwriters have long understood that economy of expression may enhance the quality and force of aesthetic discourse, and that place-names stand ready for this purpose,” then Navajo poets may be particularly attentive to the quickness of Navajo placenames for the intertwined purposes of aesthetics and politics. In the early 2000s, I was lucky enough to begin linguistic anthropological work with Navajo poets. I have since worked with Navajo poets for the last twenty-five years. Among the topics that have drawn my interests, have been the uses of placenames, both in Navajo and in English (Webster 2009). In what follows, I want to move along a series of examples, from poems and essays and performances, by Navajo poets. Several of the examples will come from The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature, a book that I helped edit, along with Navajo poet Esther Belin, and two other colleagues, Jeff Berglund and Connie Jacobs (2021).
II.
Many poets write about Navajo places, and they ground those poems through the use of Navajo placenames. Rex Lee Jim (2021: 140), for example, writes of the changes that have been occurring at ‘Tó Háálį́’ ‘water i