Each Name a Breath

This feature is part of a six-month series from Magic Canoe’s Contributing Writers. Four writers were selected to each cover Salmon, New Economies, Environment, or Indigenous Leadership. This is the second story for the Indigenous Leadership Desk. Major support for the Contributing Writers Series is made possible by a gift from Priscilla Bernard Wieden, in loving memory of Dan Wieden. 

I remember the first time I saw her. I opened the shade like an eye until it was only her that filled my vision. I lifted my finger to the smooth airplane window and outlined her. I was new to this view. I did not know her name, but I traced glaciers from her obscured peak down through the subalpine, until they became silver glistening streams flowing west, toward the Pacific.

When I arrived in Seattle, I told my friend Richard, who lives in her shadow, that I had seen a god. He tilted his head back and sang, “Tahoma.”

He elongated the HO and emphasized the MA. I watched the way his mouth held the OH and opened again, into a smile, as MA was sung into the air. He is a big man who grew bigger when he spoke her name. He became fuller. And in this largeness also supplicant. A posture of reverie and respect. I knew then I would have no other name for this mountain. Tahoma.

Language has power. A name is not the thing; it is the relationship between the speaker and the thing. It is where meaning lives. N. Scott Momaday, a Kiowa and Pulitzer Prize winner, explores naming in his memoir, The Names.

Momaday’s name, Tsoai-talee, comes directly from the Kiowa word for Devils Tower in Wyoming, Tsoai, meaning “rock tree.” And it connects the infant to one of the most sacred stories in Kiowa cosmology: that of a Boy who becomes a Bear and chases his Seven Sisters up a rock where they pray to the Great Spirit for help. The rock rises from the ground toward the sky and out of Bear’s reach, though his claw marks, visible today, score the sides of the tower. The Seven Sisters are then born into the sky to become the stars of the Pleiades.

In the summer of 1934, six-month-old Navarre Scott Momaday traveled with his parents to Devils Tower in Wyoming. The child was brought to the place first. The place entered him. Then, back in Oklahoma, his great-grandfather and storyteller, Pohd-lohk—Old Wolf—came to the family home, lifted the boy skyward, and gave him his name. Tsoai-talee—Rock Tree Boy. In this act, Pohd-lohk affirmed the life of the child in a name, fixing him forever in the embrace of his people’s ancestral landscape. Momaday himself would later write: “My name is Tsoai-talee. I am, therefore, Tsoai-talee; therefore, I am.”

Long before Momaday’s birth, British Captain George Vancouver sailed into Puget Sound on May 8, 1792, and renamed Tahoma after his friend, Rear Admiral Peter Rainier. Vancouver never set foot on her. He recorded the moment in his journal, simply that he had seen a “very remarkable high round mountain,” and named it after his friend.

Rear Adm. Rainier had been severely wounded in 1778 while capturing an American privateer during the Revolutionary War. He fought against the colonies. Then, from 1794 to 1805, Rainier commanded Royal Navy operations in the East Indies. He seized large swaths of territory for the British Crown. He was an architect of British colonial expansion—Java, India, the seas between the Cape of Good Hope, and the South China Sea. A man who fought against American independence and went on to colonize Indigenous peoples across the East Indies had his name placed on one of the most sacred peaks on the North American continent, a mountain he would never even lay eyes on. His name tells only one story: Someone passed through and claimed something.

But pull back the colonial shroud and the ancient names reappear: Təqʷuʔməʔ. She feeds the people. She held them above the flood. She is still doing both.

One name describes a man. The other describes a relationship.

Yet even the word relationship in English cannot hold what Təqʷuʔməʔ carries. It comes from the Latin relatio—a carrying back, a recounting. At its root it is about connection, but the connection can be between people or things. Objects qualify. Your mother or your car. Your investment portfolio or a river. The word carries no moral weight, no requirement of reciprocity, no demand that the other party have standing or personhood or voice. In its original sense, a relationship is what exists between a subject and its object. The subject acts. The object receives. The relationship flows in one direction.

This is why English is such an efficient language for colonialism. You can have a relationship with land without the land having any say. You can have a relationship with a river and dam it. You can have a relationship with a mountain and strip-mine it. The word permits all of this without contradiction.

Six tribes relate to Tahoma as kin—Puyallup, Nisqually, Cowlitz, Squaxin Island, Muckleshoot, and Yakama. Not as landmark. Not as backdrop. As kin. Kinship requires that you belong to one another. That your existence is bound up in the other’s existence. That what harms one harms the other. That we carry each other’s names.

The Puyallup name Təqʷuʔməʔ means “the mother of all waters,” says Brandon Reynon, Cultural Regulatory Specialist and Tribal Archaeologist for the Puyallup Tribe. “She is important for us because she gives us life.” Fish, berries, trees—all the life that water from the mountain supports.

A recent linguistic analysis traces at least twenty Native names for the mountain across seven distinct languages—eighteen of them rooted in Salishan origin. They carry meaning ranging from “that frozen water” to “snow-covered mountain.” The names—təqʷuʔmaʔ, təqʷuʔbəd, təqʷuʔbəʔ, taqʷuʔma, təqubəd, təqʷubəʔ, t(xʷ)xʷaq’ʷ—are ancient, predating English on this continent by thousands of years.

Each name a breath held in common. I remember the way my friend Richard said “Tahoma.” The way he exhaled the word into the air. The way I inhaled and spoke it back to him. And how, for a moment, we held this mountain between us, while all around us people were coming and going. How Tahoma was breathed into being.

And that breath is only the beginning of the story.

Indigenous naming is not an act of domination. It is an act of recognition. Of respect. To name a mountain after an admiral is not leadership. It is erasure dressed as honor. True leadership comes with humility. With asking. With time. With presence. Indigenous leadership understands that we breathe each other into being. The land gives the people life. The people give the land ceremony, attention, care, restraint. Neither exists in the same way without the other. It is not an exchange. It is not dominance. It is co-creation.

When I fly, I carry that humility with me. I always choose the window seat on the left. I lift the shade and remain wide-eyed as we fly by. I still trace her with my finger. I feel the cold air against the acrylic window. I follow her ridges and her glaciers. I speak her name, Tahoma, the way it was spoken to me. I hold on to the OH. I emphasize the MA. I watch her until I can no longer see her and then I inhale deeply and take her into my heart.

Mother of waters, I say, thank you for the life you give. Help us to live in the kinship of your names.