Settler placenaming was an anxious orientation practice, not just erasure

Evidence

I have written about settler colonialism in these pages as a violent and annihilatory practice, which it is. It also strikes me that it must have been frightening for the early European settlers of these lands to come to places they did not know or understand, places that, for them, had no stories, no myths, no sacredness. One of the ways that they attempted to orient themselves was by giving these places that were so new to them the names of other, more familiar places, or giving the new places their own names. The towns in the part of the world where I live mainly bear the names of men who happened to arrive with their families in the mid-1800s and had the audacity to name the land after themselves. Gibsons. Roberts Creek. Wilson Creek. — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 1117

Categorization

• SEED: Essay angle: settler naming as toponymic anxiety — a psychology of disorientation behind the annihilatory practice.
• XREF: connects to: Settler occupation can never be complete against a place’s deep local historicity — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1850