Since we learned about Chicken, Alaska, from a list of "the silliest place names in each state," diffrentcolours was aggravated that a couple on the list that were just indigenous names, which only sound weird to white settlers who refuse to learn the languages.

So I've been thinking about that a lot lately and looking at indigenous place names around where I grew up. There's nothing too local to me but lots about Bdote, now Minneapolis and St. Paul: like the Bdote Memory Map​ and work from The Decolonial Atlas.

It's just coincidence that I'm looking at this today (indigenous place names and languages are interests I periodically poke at), but I guess this Day of Mourning is a good day for USians to think about what was lost, and what still lives in the indigenous people and cultures that remain.

Well I say I can't find anything about place names too local to me, I mean I can't find much information but even the white settler maps are full of names derived from indigenous words: Waseca, Owatonna, Mankato (which has lots to mourn every day, not just Day of Mourning)...

Reading these names -- and others I know well like Bemidji (where we used to go on vacation) or Shakopee (for Valleyfair) -- makes me feel so homesick. I've never been away so long. I've never spent so much time so far from people who know how to say these names.