Opinion: Renaming Gulf of Mexico straight out of colonialist playbook
To rename something is to claim it as one’s own. It is to overrule the autonomy of what is being renamed and, when it is a geographic place, to deny the relationship that others have with that location. Perhaps more sinisterly, the practice of renaming attempts to erase a cultural memory.
When I was 16, my family visited the Vermilionville history museum in Lafayette, Louisiana. The museum preserves buildings built by the some of the earliest settlers – the Cajuns – and tells their story. My father’s side of the family was Cajun. What many people don’t know is that the Cajuns didn’t choose to be in Louisiana, a place whose own name has changed each time a new power came into control of the land.
The Acadians were a group of French immigrants who originally settled in what is today called Nova Scotia. Over the next century, they enmeshed with indigenous inhabitants of this new land – the Mi’kmaq – and created a unique new culture and language. Though the communities flourished together, their relationship with local British colonists eventually grew tense.
In 1755, as the British footprint in Canada deepened, soldiers began imprisoning the French settlers, often in their own churches. As the churches began to fill, the British began funneling parishioners onto ships and deporting them to other French colonies. According to the Canadian Encyclopedia, it is estimated that 11,000 people were successfully deported during this time, with an additional 5,000 losing their lives. Here was an example of imperial hunger for land and wealth going to extremes, culminating in deportation.
Acadian families shipped to the Louisiana colony once again immersed themselves in an unfamiliar environment. They brought with them their unique French dialect, which had evolved during their isolation in Canada and as a result of their close relationship with the Mi’kmaq. As these transplanted colonists connected to the indigenous peoples of Louisiana, and with German and Spanish immigrants and enslaved people from Africa, their language grew even more distinct from the original French. We call the culture that developed from those interactions “Cajun” – a corruption of “Acadian” -- and the language “Cajun French.”
Cajun French was widely spoken by the community until the mid-20th century, at which point the Louisiana public school system began to punish children who used their home language on school grounds. The idea was to Americanize the subculture and increase loyalty to nation over community. Children were compelled to write lines as punishment for breaking this rule and were even subject to corporal punishment. Today, Cajun French is only rarely spoken. In my own family, it died with my great-grandfather just months after my family’s trip to Vermilionville.
In tandem with this history was the founding of the infamous American Indian Residential Schools. These schools enforced the idea that Native American children should conform to the larger, white American culture; they were established for the explicit purpose of achieving that goal. Across North America today, the remnants of innumerable indigenous languages are all but impossible to trace, and as a result we have lost much of our understanding of places and nature that were once innate to the people of the Americas.
Because a language is formed within a specific cultural context, there will always be concepts that other cultures cannot directly translate. Botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer writes about the loss of language in relationship to colonization in her groundbreaking 2013 book, Braiding Sweetgrass. Kimmerer connects the systemic erasure of hundreds of indigenous languages that once existed across North America with our society’s contemporary disconnection from the land we inhabit. In American Indian Residential Schools, not only were native languages forbidden – native ecological practices were forcibly suppressed. With this erasure came a loss of understanding of the functions of plants that naturally grow in the North American environment. Because these cultures maintained a deep connection with the environment, often the very words they used every day contained a layer of natural symbolism. For example, in Potawatomi, the word used in reference to land is “emingoyak” – which means “that which has been given to us.” The suggestion that the land was a gift prompted stewardship. With both practice and language ranked as a punishable offense, it is no wonder that the American Indian Residential Schools effectively abolished Native American children’s understanding of their culture and landscape.
The Gulf of Mexico has itself had numerous name name changes due to colonial influence. According to R.M. Darnell’s 2015 book The American Sea: A Natural History of the Gulf of Mexico, the body of water has at times been called the Chinese Sea, Gulf of the North, Gulf of New Spain, and Gulf of Cortes following the Spanish colonial power’s arrival in the Americas in the 16th century, before the Gulf of Mexico gained traction. Indigenous people of North America had their own names. The Aztecs, for example, called it Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl, after the goddess of water.
If, historically, the triumph of one nomenclature over another has not borne well, why should we expect it to now? If the renaming of geographic features has brought the deconstruction and death of people’s lives, cultures and language in every iteration, what makes us think that it will be different this time?
Maybe our current attitudes and beliefs are more closely tied to colonization than we think. The Gulf of Mexico is one place name whose recent renaming by President Donald Trump brings this insidious process forward. To change the Gulf’s name is to dishonor the years of history and culture baked into it. It claims the seas for whiteness, for a reimagined history in which our neighbors across the Texas border have never mattered. Will we change every textbook reference to the “Gulf of America?” Will we pretend that these waters don’t just affect us, but every shore they touch?
Colonization is not necessarily just claiming land on behalf of a country. In the examples of both Cajuns and Native Americans, land was not alone lost. Also erased was cultural knowledge. Colonization requires a specific attitude. It fosters an arrogant belief that one’s own cultural understanding and language is superior and requires an intolerance of diversity. All objects should behave as a mirror to reflect the “dominant” culture.
Unfortunately, attempting to rename the Gulf of Mexico is not the only recent or ongoing example of invoking a favorite rule from the colonialist’s handbook. Consider for example, the Trump Administration’s recent proposal to rename 8 navy ships, including the vessel named for veteran and Civil Rights hero Medgar Evers. Like the colonial powers of history, our modern politicians seek to force the world around them to affirm their own perspectives and relationships. Even inanimate objects like a ship must reflect them in some way.
Victoria Richard is a Jackson, Mississippi-based writer whose work can be found on Substack at Angels Over Presley Boulevard.
Image: Detail of 1811 Humbolt map of Mexico, Texas, Louisiana and Florida (Wikicommons)
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