The Power of Place Names: How Toponyms Shape Identity and Geography

Q: What Is Human Geography?

- **Definition:** A blend of spatial, physical, and social science that examines how people, power, money, and ideas are distributed across space. - **Core Questions:** - Why do humans settle, trade, and build where they do? - How do these patterns vary across different places? - What forces shape those variations?

Q: How Toponyms Reflect Power

- **Colonial Practices:** European settlers frequently renamed places to claim ownership and erase existing cultures. - **Perceptual Regions:** A new name can create a mental region that links distant places (e.g., Ohio and Alaska) and reshapes public imagination. - **Global Examples:** Uluru‑Kata Tjuta National Park in Australia replaced the colonial name “Ayers Rock,” illustrating similar struggles worldwide.

Q: Why Learning About Place Names Matters

- **Identity:** Names are integral to cultural and personal identity; restoring original names validates Indigenous histories. - **Awareness:** Understanding toponyms reveals hidden power structures and encourages more equitable geographic narratives. - **Action:** Resources like native‑land.ca help individuals learn the Indigenous names of their own regions and engage with local communities.

CrashCourse

Feb 17, 2026

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3 min read

YouTube video ID: 4y2nndDs8m4

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Introduction

Do we ever wonder who decides that a plant is called a "plant" or that a mountain gets a particular name? Names are more than simple labels – they enable communication, build identities, and reveal power dynamics. This article explores why place names (toponyms) matter, using the story of Denali/Mount McKinley as a case study, and introduces key human‑geography concepts such as place, scale, and region.

What Is Human Geography?

Definition: A blend of spatial, physical, and social science that examines how people, power, money, and ideas are distributed across space.
Core Questions:
Why do humans settle, trade, and build where they do?
How do these patterns vary across different places?
What forces shape those variations?

Tools of Human Geography

Physical tools: maps, remote sensing, soil and vegetation surveys.
Conceptual tools:
Place: the meaning and sense of belonging we attach to a location.
Scale: the relationship of a place to larger or smaller spatial contexts.
Region: a way of grouping places that share similar characteristics.

Toponyms – The Names of Places

Definition: A toponym is any name given to a geographic feature (e.g., Machu Picchu, the Great Wall, the Yucatán Peninsula).
Cultural Geography: Studies how names, language, religion, art, and other identity markers appear across space.
Why They Matter: A name can reveal historical, political, and cultural information before we even learn other facts about a location.

Case Study: Denali vs. Mount McKinley

Original Indigenous Name: Denali (Athabascans) meaning “The Tall One.”
Colonial Renaming: In 1897 a gold prospector from Ohio named the peak after President William McKinley; the U.S. Board on Geographic Names officially adopted Mount McKinley in 1901.
Power Dynamics: The naming authority shifted from local Indigenous peoples to national political figures, reflecting broader patterns of colonial power.
Multiple Indigenous Names: Over 30 different names existed among various Indigenous groups, highlighting diverse cultural connections to the mountain.
Re‑renaming Movement: Decades of advocacy by Alaska Natives and allies led to the 2015 restoration of the name Denali, acknowledging ancestral ties.

How Toponyms Reflect Power

Colonial Practices: European settlers frequently renamed places to claim ownership and erase existing cultures.
Perceptual Regions: A new name can create a mental region that links distant places (e.g., Ohio and Alaska) and reshapes public imagination.
Global Examples: Uluru‑Kata Tjuta National Park in Australia replaced the colonial name “Ayers Rock,” illustrating similar struggles worldwide.

Related Subfields of Human Geography

Political Geography: Examines how power shapes landscapes, such as the uneven influence of Ohio versus Alaska in the Denali naming.
Economic Geography: Looks at how resources (e.g., Alaskan gold mines) may not benefit local communities and how tourism economies fluctuate.
Urban Geography: Studies city development, housing patterns, and the relationship between urban and rural spaces—relevant for Alaska’s growing role as America’s “Last Frontier.”

Why Learning About Place Names Matters

Identity: Names are integral to cultural and personal identity; restoring original names validates Indigenous histories.
Awareness: Understanding toponyms reveals hidden power structures and encourages more equitable geographic narratives.
Action: Resources like native‑land.ca help individuals learn the Indigenous names of their own regions and engage with local communities.

Conclusion

Place names are far more than convenient labels. They encode history, power, and cultural identity, and changing them can reshape how societies perceive and interact with the world.

Place names are powerful symbols of who holds authority over a landscape; recognizing and restoring original toponyms helps correct historical injustices and enriches our collective understanding of geography.

Frequently Asked Questions

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Helpful resources related to this video

If you want to practice or explore the concepts discussed in the video, these commonly used tools may help.

Denali National Park Guidebook Recommended

Provides detailed information about Denali’s geography, history, and cultural significance, helping readers appreciate the importance of indigenous place names

Amazon →

Human Geography Textbook

Covers concepts such as toponymy, scale, and regions, offering a comprehensive foundation for understanding how power and identity shape places

Amazon →

Cultural Geography Book

Explores how language, art, and naming practices reflect cultural identities across space, supporting deeper insight into the topics discussed

Amazon →

Links may be affiliate links. We only include resources that are genuinely relevant to the topic.

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Full Transcript YouTube

Do you ever think about words and why something 
has a certain name? Like this is a plant or  
my nails are blue or we’re filming this 
in Miami -- but like, who decided that?
For a lot of words, we probably don’t 
think about where they come from too often.  
But names are important -- they let us talk about 
things and share ideas and even build identities.
By now we know geography is 
so much more than just knowing  
state names and capitals and memorizing locations.  
But I’ll admit geographers do often know where 
a lot of places are and what they’re called.
It turns out, knowing what the capital of 
Indonesia is or which country first declared a  
glacier dead often happens as we learn about how 
social and physical systems interact together.
From growing bananas and potatoes to the 
potential effects of natural hazards,  
we’ve seen humans and our environment are always 
interacting together. We create rich cultures,  
navigate economic systems, and organize ourselves 
through politics -- we like to build physically  
and metaphorically, and a lot of what we build 
comes from and impacts the environments around us.
So for the next half of the 
series, we’ll look at how people,  
power, and economics combine in the world, 
impacting the human and non-human alike.
I’m Alizé Carrère, and this 
is Crash Course Geography.
INTRO
Human geography uses a combination of spatial, 
physical, and social science to tell a complex  
story of the world. This story focuses on the 
spatial patterns of people and how we've made  
sense of the places we inhabit, explore, 
or create -- like by giving them names!
And as human geographers, we try to answer 
questions that pay special attention to the  
way people, power, money, buildings, and 
so much more are distributed in the world.  
Like what are the processes that 
shape where humans move across space?
Why do humans build and trade and 
consume and create where they do?  
And why do those traits change across space? Why 
aren’t all people and places just … the same?
We’ve actually already used human geography 
tools when we’ve considered things like  
the economics of banana plantations or the 
relationships between people or groups of people,  
where one person or group has influence over 
another. This political power shows up when we  
talk about water access or the motivations 
for building in floodplains, for example.
But the Earth is a big place, and we could use a 
few more tools to fully tackle human geography.  
In addition to tools like maps 
and remote sensing or soil and  
vegetation surveys that give us data on 
what makes up our physical landscapes,  
the tools we’ll need moving forward are 
actually concepts that help guide our thinking.
Like the idea of place, or the meaning 
we give a location and the sense of  
belonging we derive from constructing 
a place physically and in our minds.
Machu Picchu, or the Great Wall or Long 
Wall of China, or the Yucatan Peninsula,  
or whatever name we give a place is called 
a toponym, and it’s an important part of how  
we think about the place. Sort of like 
how my name is an important part of me.
And if we dig into the history of a toponym, 
we’ll learn the history of the location itself  
and see how it’s changed over time and how 
different political and cultural forces  
work to create the place’s identity. Like 
how I got my name and how it's changed,  
or what nicknames I’ve gotten can 
tell part of the history of me.
In fact, studying place names is an important 
part of cultural geography which is one of  
the many subfields of human geography. It 
examines how markers of our identity are  
visible across space -- like names, language, 
religion, art, and dozens of other expressions.
Like let’s look at the highest point in North 
America: it’s a mountain reaching just over  
6190 meters high known by some as Mt. 
McKinley in what we now call Alaska.
Even if we didn’t know much else 
about this place or the space it’s in,  
the toponym Mt. McKinley already gives 
us some historical and cultural context.  
It's a reference to the 25th 
president of the United States,  
which signals this is also a place in the US.
Or we could draw on another conceptual tool:  
the concept of scale, or the relationship 
a place has to the rest of the world.
This mountain got the name Mt. McKinley from a 
gold prospector from Ohio who wrote about it in  
The New York Sun newspaper in 1897, just before 
McKinley won the presidency. Other places in  
Alaska were also given names based on political 
figures from Ohio, other US states, and the UK  
which were published widely in articles and used 
in official maps made by people not from Alaska.
A few years later in 1901, the Board on 
Geographic Names, which is a division of  
the United States Geological Survey, officially 
named the mountain Mount McKinley. And this was  
one of many name changes across Alaska, the US, 
and around the world that moved the power to name  
the place from residents at the local scale, to 
people with power at national and global scales,  
without representing local residents. That 
being said, as we’ll see throughout the rest  
of this series, power has a way of changing hands 
a lot, and local residents aren’t always united.
But…this majestic mountain already had a 
name. In fact, it had at least 30 names.  
The Athabascans who’ve lived in and around the 
upper Kuskokwim River often called it Denali,  
which reportedly means “The 
Tall One” or “the High One.”  
And as early as 1906 there were writings 
that supported renaming this place Denali.
But other Indigenous nations 
who lived there had other names.  
So did people descended from what we now 
call Russia who also lived in this place.
Names can also indicate power, as pop 
culture has explored many times from  
urban legends to wizarding worlds. And 
in some cultures, like the Athabascans,  
you do not name places or things after people 
because place names are a way to describe the  
land and remember important details 
like resources or hunting techniques.
Ultimately, the people advocating to put back 
the name Denali had less power and influence  
and could be ignored. In 1917 the area around 
Denali became Mount McKinley National Park,  
years before Alaska even became a US 
state. Which redefined the place and  
happened because of exactly the kind of uneven 
power dynamics human geographers study today.
All over the world we can see the way that 
power is distributed across space in part by  
the toponyms we give places. The names and 
landmarks that are revered tell a lot about  
who has the power to name and create an image 
of a place. So what we call a place matters,  
because it sets up the way we imagine the space 
-- like who owns it or what the culture should be.
As Europeans settled throughout North America,  
they made strong efforts to claim the 
space as their own by renaming places  
and erasing the cultures and impacts 
of existing groups on the landscape.
In fact, there’s a third conceptual tool we 
can use to understand this place: the idea of a  
region, which is a way of grouping and classifying 
similar places. And there are different types of  
regions. Like many of the administrative 
regions, or regions with legal boundaries,  
within Alaska were imposed over existing 
boundaries of the nations who already lived there.
And for Denali, or the renaming of many 
places known to Indigenous peoples,  
the new name signifies a new perceptual region, 
or a region that’s united by how people think  
about or see it. Like a region that’s unified 
around the language or cultural slang it uses,  
or the team or cultural group it’s a part of.
The new name created a relationship 
between Ohio and Alaska.  
It brought the mountain and Alaska into the 
imagination of people in the continental US  
and possibly even evoked a sense 
of patriotism by connecting Alaska  
to US politics -- even though President 
McKinley had no connection to that place.
Whereas at the time,  
the name Denali created the perception this 
place has a culture and history foreign or  
“other” to most European-Americans -- who held 
a lot of the political and cultural power.
But the act of re-naming also has power. 
That struggle that all humans feel to see  
their identity reflected back to them in 
their landscape is what motivated Alaska  
Natives and non-indigenous allies alike to work 
for decades to change the name back. In 2015,  
that hard work paid off and this place was renamed  
Denali to reflect the peoples who have 
an ancestral connection to the land.
We looked at the Denali name change and 
then re-change as cultural geographers,  
but there are other big parts of human geography 
we could also use to explore this place and space.
Political geography studies the way that power 
shapes the landscape, like how here in Denali  
there was an uneven power between those in 
Ohio and Washington D.C. and those in Alaska.
And if we zoom all the way out to a global scale, 
similar tension over toponyms can be found in many  
other places, especially those that have been 
colonies or part of empires at some point in  
their history. Like in 1995 when Uluru-Kata Tjuta 
National Park in Australia was made official,  
ending the British name of Ayers 
Rock-Mount Olga National Park.
Each place is complex, but as geographers 
we look for how places are connected.  
There are similar political and economic 
forces at work that help those in power  
show they have control over the 
identity of the place they’re in.
So restoring the names of places is an important 
part of identity and cultural geography  
and important political work on the local scale as 
a way to push against regional and global powers.
Or in economic geography we study the 
uneven movement of economic opportunity.  
Like the way some opportunities, like Alaskan 
gold mines, don’t end up making the people living  
near those mines wealthy. Or the way the tourist 
economy may change throughout the national park  
depending on environmental, 
cultural, or political factors.
And finally in urban geography, 
we study the way humans build  
cities. Like what influences create 
the housing and industry patterns,  
or the ways we can plan spaces to maximize 
walkable communities, and the relationships  
between urban and rural spaces. Which 
is still an important field in Alaska.  
As cities within the US grow, Alaska could have 
an important role as America’s “Last Frontier.”
Denali is just one example of a growing movement 
of indigenous and marginalized groups asserting  
their cultural understanding of the places they 
have spiritual, cultural, and legal rights to.
There’s power in place names. There’s power in how 
we define regions, what’s in versus out and who  
it includes and who it excludes. Which is why we 
see struggles over place names all over the world.
Our names shape our identities. And efforts 
to learn about the places we call home  
and their histories is part of the cultural and 
political work we can do to recognize who has been  
harmed by colonization and conquest. Learning more 
about economics, technology, language, religion,  
power, and how they all move lets us 
tell fuller, richer stories of the Earth.  
Which we’ll do more of next time 
when we explore cultural landscapes.
Many maps and borders represent modern 
geopolitical divisions that have often  
been decided without the consultation, permission, 
or recognition of the land's original inhabitants.  
Many geographical place names also don't reflect 
the Indigenous or Aboriginal peoples languages.  
So we at Crash Course want to acknowledge 
these peoples’ traditional and ongoing  
relationship with that land and all the 
physical and human geographical elements of it.
We encourage you to learn about the 
history of the place you call home  
through resources like native-land.ca and 
by engaging with your local Indigenous  
and Aboriginal nations through the 
websites and resources they provide.
Thanks for watching this episode of Crash 
Course Geography which is filmed at the Team  
Sandoval Pierce Studio and was made with the 
help of all these nice people. If you want to  
help keep all Crash Course free for everyone, 
forever, you can join our community on Patreon.