Saving Disappearing Place Names

January 29, 2009 By: Miles Henriksen

The Coeur d'Alene Tribe's aboriginal territory comprises more than 5 million acres in three states.

At the Coeur d'Alene Tribe, the primary task of the GIS program is to create and maintain data layers within the Tribe's aboriginal territory. This area spans more than 5 million acres in Washington, Idaho, and Montana. The Coeur d'Alene Tribe has also developed a data layer of place names in the Coeur d'Alene language for sites within this territory, which has evolved into the Native Names Project.

One of the most important goals of this project is preserving the pronunciations of the places, and their individual stories. On many reservations across the United States, it is the unfortunate truth that only a handful of the residents know the native geographic names. The Native Names Project was created to collect these place names before they disappear forever.

The project has evolved over time, and it now has several goals. The first is to use GIS to preserve the culture and language associated with native geography; this is done by connecting native place names on a map to a Web site containing cultural information about those locations.

If GNIS already includes a name for a particular site, the submitted native term will be listed as a variant name.

The second goal is to have the native place names recognized by the federal government, by submitting them to the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) through contacts they have developed during the project. The GNIS is the official database of place names used by the United States. For locations that already have names, the native name is entered as an official variant. If a location does not yet have a name, the native name becomes the official name for that location.

The third aim of the project is to supply indigenous place names to USGS and The National Map (TNM). Since 2005, the Native Names Project has expanded to incorporate the place names of other tribes.

The Native Names project began when members of the Coeur d'Alene Tribe wanted maps created by the Tribe’s GIS program to include places names in the Coeur d'Alene language. In 1999, development began on a layer of locations named in the Coeur d'Alene language. Along with the development of that layer, audio, video, and photo files of the locations were gathered and linked to the place names data layer. The result was an internal product; tribal members could select a mapped site to hear the pronunciation of the name of the place in the Coeur d'Alene language, photographs of the location, and video of a tribal elder speaking about the significance of the location both culturally and historically. The data layer was then expanded to include names from the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe.