Denali, Tumanguya, Uluru, Gitche Gumme — Decolonializing the Landscape

Photo by Rohit Tandon on Unsplash

Some of you will already know which four geological features I named in the title of this article.

Some of you will be scratching your heads. Many will probably recognize one or two, but not all of them.

Before I do the “reveal,” all four of these are the names given to those features by the indigenous inhabitants, that is to say the first human beings to migrate from our evolutionary center to these places.

And all four of these places were renamed, in three cases after white people, in the fourth with a name that makes sense, but still is not the original. There are thousands more such places all the way across the Americas, Australia, parts of Africa, etc…

So, What Are They?

Before I go into why this is important, let’s reveal the places:

1. Denali. The tallest mountain on the planet, located in Alaska. Colonial name Mt. McKinley.
2. Tumanguya. The highest mountain in the lower 48, located in California. Colonial name Mt. Whitney or Fisherman’s Peak. (Look that one up. It’s a mess).
3. Uluru. A rock formation in the Australian outback. Colonial name Ayers Rock.
4. Gitche Gumme. The largest freshwater lake in the world…