With the influx of Europeans settling in America, vast numbers of Native American peoples were forced off their land. Yet there are still many place names of American Indian origin used in the United States today. To find out more, we spoke to Robert Allen Johnson II, a cultural historian researching early American colonization at the Amerika-Institute of the University of Munich in Germany. He began by explaining a few of the many ways that place names can evolve.
Robert Allen Johnson II (American accent): The first people to name these places were the people that lived there. In some cases the native Americans didn’t have place names for a certain place, and when they were asked by Europeans, "What is that place?", then they would give a name for it. A lot of times linguists in a modern sense aren’t able to actually link the nuances of a language with what the word actually meant. Here’s an example: Manhattan. What ’Manhattan’ actually means is unclear. It could mean ’the place where there is good wood.’ It could mean ’the place where you go to get drunk.’ It could mean ’the place that’s an island that has many hills.’
SAY IT IN FRENCH
As Johnson explained, there were three main colonizing countries: Spain, France and Britain (specifically, England.) All changed place names to assert their economic, religious and linguistic superiority.
Robert Allen Johnson II: The Spanish were technically the first, but they were sticking to the south. The French, on the other hand, really get into the North American continent. There’s this huge area of French influence that goes all the way from Greenland to the Gulf of Mexico near Florida. The two main groups of French that move through the area are fur-trappers or missionaries. And the fur-trappers’ goal is to trade and the missionaries’ goal is to trade in souls, so to speak. And so as a result, they take the names as they find them, as they can say them. And what the Spanish want to do is they want to convert people by force if necessary, and they want them to live a certain way. So you find that there are a lot of places where the Spanish settled where the Native American names aren’t there. And the Spanish give them then names for the saints. So you have places like San Francisco or San Bernardino.
NO SEX, PLEASE, WE’RE ENGLISH
Yet while French and Spanish settlers married local women and had kids, the English were less keen.
Robert Allen Johnson II: The French, the Spanish and the British has [had] a different way of dealing with the natives that they meet, at first. The French fur traders, we do find a lot of intermarriage and a lot of kids. The Spanish… we also find a lot of intermarriage because the Spanish men, explorers, conquistadores and later soldiers and settlers, are coming over and they’re not bringing Spanish women with them. And they will marry Native American women. The British, on the other hand, might also marry in. But the British have a tendency to want to push the Native Americans away. There’s not a lot of interbreeding and they don’t really want to live next to them either.
THE ’NEW’ AMERICANS
And, says Johnson, the American struggles for independence from Britain in the late 18th and early 19th centuries boosted an American sense of identity and had a corresponding impact on place names.
Robert Allen Johnson II: Immediately after the Revolution [in 1783], what we see is that Americans used the name[s] of the Founding Fathers, they named places after Jefferson, Madison… The Americans fight another war against the British in 1812, and after that war, the American culture in itself really starts to try to find its own way, because up until the American Revolution they thought of themselves as Englishmen.