Whose Streets? Our Streets!: A New Gazetteer for Downtown Detroit
As Ron DeSantis and his ilk across the country seek to further enshrine a white supremacist version of history in our schools, libraries, and cultural centers, “organized efforts to document and broadcast the truth of our past are the most significant defense we have against disinformation.”
Place names are an enduring and omnipresent way of remembering the past. The choice of place names informs whose version of history is commemorated and given precedence. Our daily interaction with the names of streets, parks, rivers, and buildings continuously reinforces a specific version of history and consciously and subconsciously informs our relationship to the places we live.
A Brief History of Place-Naming in Michigan
People have been naming places for as long as there have been people in places. Indigenous place names often relate to the intrinsic nature of the land. Teuchasa Grondie, the place of many beavers, is the placename Iroquois speakers call the place we call Detroit, and Maskigong, based on Ojibwe “mashkig” meaning “swamp,” describes the large wetlands at the headwaters of the Maskigong Ziibi (Muskegon River). Descriptive place names value the land for its innate properties and allow for the creation of practical maps that share knowledge of how to get from one place to another, using narrative stories, poetry, and song, as well as pictorial images.
Settler-colonialism brought with it the practice of naming places to claim land ownership. British, French, and Spanish colonizers asserted the collective ownership of their rulers and cultures by naming places for kings and queens, Christian saints, European towns and cities, and famous figures from their history. Hence across the river in Ontario there is a town called London and a river called Thames, and any number of places across the U.S. named for St. _____ and various Charleses, Marys and Georges.
Individual colonizers claimed ownership of land by affixing their names to the places they settled. To give just two of many examples in Michigan: Pellston was named by William Pells in 1882, to claim his ownership of a camp on the Grand Rapids and Indiana Railroad [1], and on the Lake Michigan coast, Bliss was named for Rhoda Bliss, the first white woman to colonize there [2]. Many of the places the colonial settlers slapped their names on already had names. Some of these names were erased and replaced, such as Teuchasa Grondie by Detroit, and some were erased and rewritten in English, such as Maskigong to Muskegon, Michigami to Michigan, and Michinimakinaang to Mackinaw.
Later settlers took over not only Anishinaabe land but also Anishinaabe language to name places. Peter White, iron mining tycoon, appropriated the Anishinaabemowin word “ni-ga-ni” meaning “he walks foremost or ahead,” and anglicized it to Negaunee, to name a colonial settlement on the Upper Peninsula in honor of the “pioneer” ore furnace in the region. Henry Schoolcraft, U.S. “Indian Agent” in Michigan, who incidentally has a street named after him in Detroit, made up place names by combining Anishinaabemowin and Latin. For instance, Arenac is a combination of Latin “arena” meaning sand and Ojibwe “ac” meaning land or earth, made up by Schoolcraft to mean “sandy land” or “sandy place.” Some other Schoolcraft-appropriated names include Alcona, Alpena, Iosco, Kalkaska, Oceola, and Oscoda. Before assuming that a place name is Indigenous in Michigan it is worth researching to ensure it was not made up by Henry Schoolcraft [3].
Place naming for individuals did not just rename the land, it redrew the map. Instead of explaining, verbally or pictorially, how to get from A to B by describing the features of the land, maps now facilitated navigation using the names of the local colonizers. This orientation around ownership claims removed a layer of connection to the land as people walked or rode along the path navigating, not by the wetlands at the headwaters of the river, but by Pells’ Railroad Camp.
Redrawing the map erased and rewrote history. Many books, blogs, historical societies, websites, and Wikipedia posts have been dedicated to the stories of settlers who named places for themselves. All these sources, directly or indirectly, legitimize colonizers’ land ownership claims and orient us to place from a settler colonial perspective. Trying to dig beneath the layers of William Pellses, Rhoda Blisses and Arenacs to learn the original place names and the stories of the people who called them home is not an easy task.
A New Gazetteer for Downtown Detroit
To visit downtown Detroit is to be immersed in a space created to laud a specific version of the city’s past and perpetuate a vision of the future where that vision is seen to be the natural, and only possible, order of things. This space is created using monuments, statues, parks, fountains and, most ubiquitously, street names. In his work on the naming of Martin Luther King Jr. Streets in the Southern U.S., Derek Alderman notes, “Naming is a powerful vehicle for promoting identification with the past and locating oneself within the wider networks of memory” and “[street names] make the past intimately familiar to people in ways that other memorials cannot [4].”
What does it feel like to move through a land where your place names, language and history have been erased or ignored? For People of European Descent, with our language and history so prolifically and seemingly indelibly inscribed on the land, it is almost impossible to imagine.
This map shows what downtown Detroit would look like if you erased the streets and street names that honor the colonizers. When you go downtown to enjoy the holiday lights, open this map on your phone and, even if you think you know where you are going, try to use it to navigate. While in no way parallel to hundreds of years of human, land, history, and language theft and erasure, may this little exercise give you pause to acknowledge that theft and to recognize the impact of its inscription on the land.
Click here to open the map in ARCGIS
Unlike removing monuments or changing the names of private buildings, such as university halls, changing street names is a hard and expensive task and one that, frankly, we do not have the time to organize around given all the other needs of our communities. We also cannot boycott or divest from street names, they are everywhere; on signposts, maps, your ID, your mail, every form you fill out, your online billing statements, your eventbrite RSVP, and many more.
This Gazetteer asks us to change the conversation by subverting the street name narrative to tell another version/s of our shared history…
Click here to open the map in ARCGIS
This project is not intended to be the final word on street names. I am in no way any more “qualified” to be naming Detroit’s streets than the city’s so called “founders.” My intention is to inspire Detroiters to use street names to tell different narratives of place that expand our learning of history and thus our vision for the future.
In working on this project, I noticed I was only able to find Black and White honorees for the street names. I want to recognize that this is directly related to the legacies of colonialism and imperialism as discussed above, and to the legacy of slavery, which erased the indigenous names of enslaved people, and replaced them with the names of their White enslavers.
If you would like to share an honoree/s (it could be anyone from the past or present, well-known or unsung, a personal hero or a family member, or someone who is both of those things) and their stories for the gazetteer, either for any of the streets on the current map or other Detroit streets, parks, plazas etc., please click here!
[1] Petoskey News Review, 14 April 1966
[2] The Petosky Record, 19 September 1883
[3] Walton, I. (1955). Indian Place Names in Michigan. Midwest Folklore, 5(1), 23–34. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4317501
[4] Alderman, D.H. (2008). Martin Luther King Jr. Streets in the South: A New Landscape of Memory. Southern Cultures. (14)3. 88–105. University of North Carolina Press.
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