Editor’s note: This commentary is by Leah Fury, of Barre, who volunteers as a member leader with Resource Generation, and works as a loan and outreach officer for the Cooperative Fund of New England. This commentary is a response to the column by Jon Margolis published by VTDigger on March 25 entitled “Much Ado About Names.”
[W]hile doing research on my family genealogy, I learned that my late grandfather, a child of German Jews, was born with the middle name Adolph. I knew that his family had changed their last name from Slawitsky as his father, my great-grandfather, faced insurmountable anti-Semitism while serving in the U.S. military against the German Nazis due to his surname. What I didn’t know was that when making the anglicized legal switch from Slawitsky to Lawton, the family had also changed my grandfather’s middle name from Adolph to Tilden, defiantly distancing him from a dangerous oppressor while assimilating to avoid discrimination. While I do grieve the loss that my family suffered through the assimilation of our last name, I also celebrate the agency that allowed my grandfather to feel liberation from one of the most despicable practitioners of violence and hate. The name Tilden was passed on to his own son, and just a month ago my cousin gave the name to her newborn son, his great-grandson who he did not live to meet.
Here in Vermont we have an unfortunate history of refusing individuals their agency that has played out from the first time that European settlers arrived, simultaneously and paradoxically denying both the presence and the humanity of the Western Abenaki. Since that relatively recent arrival, the Abenaki have survived genocide taking the forms of land theft, property destruction, mass murder, scalping and more – insult after injury after insult after injury. The forced sterilization of Abenaki en mass in the 1930s and early ‘40s via the Vermont Eugenics Survey is only one of the more recent manifestations of this genocide.
In his recent op-ed entitled “Much Ado About Names,” while naively lamenting the visibility of people who are standing up against centuries-old onslaughts against their people, VTDigger’s Jon Margolis suggests that “there is something abroad in the land these days that seems to require every sub-group to think of itself as put-upon and to see insults where none exist.” I am baffled by this argument and its disregard for the endurance that the Abenaki, including his target Judy Dow, have demonstrated. While I do not know Judy Dow personally, I have been blessed to attend a workshop she presented at the Root Social Justice Center with Abenaki scholar Dr. Lisa Brooks, where Dow shared about the ways her family has been adversely impacted by state-sanctioned violence via eugenics. The insults have accumulated over centuries, on top of the bodies of indigenous people. Only now are we seeing those insults called what they are as we are given clear opportunities to challenge and remedy them by listening to the requests of those who demand change. This includes renaming buildings and awards, a light lift relative to the trauma that has been survived.
I would encourage those wondering “what’s in a name?” with regard to place names in this geography we call Vermont to explore the essay “Earthshapers and Placemakers: Reflections on Algonkian Indian Stories and the Landscape” by Margaret M. Bruchac. The entire history of Vermont, which dates back more than 400 years, is only a fraction of the history of Ndakinna, the Western Abenaki “term that defines [their] communal relationship to ‘aki,’ ‘the land,’” which dates back thousands of years and endures today. In the piece, Bruchac explores the relationship of language and narrative tradition to place, specifically that of the Algonkian peoples, which includes the Western Abenaki. She touches not only on various cultural histories of how places have been named and renamed, but also on how inter-cultural interpretation of narrative traditions without cross-cultural dialogue yields misinformed results. What makes “good fiction,” or indeed even the format that narrative takes, be it literature or oral tradition, is culturally specific. Margolis’ sweeping generalizations about literary critique are dangerously ignorant to the multi-layered history of our region, and are a violent dismissal of the people whose ancestors have lived here since before any civilization on this planet conceived of written words.
Roses may smell like roses whatever you call them in whatever language you use, but I also know from my own family history that names are important. They can put us in harm’s way. They can symbolize our autonomy. They can remind us of histories – both painful and liberatory. A lot is in a name. If we can listen long enough to get over our own defensiveness, we may even arrive at understanding opportunities to name places and accolades together as opportunities to indeed look past our differences, recognize the humanity in our neighbors, and build community across affiliation. If we fail to do so in favor of going with the flow of history, we participate in perpetuating violence.
