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Thoughts on Names
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4 thoughts on “Thoughts on Names”
I haven’t done naming students. So often with the wider society Native American naming is dissed. Little Bear, Two Feathers, etc. For us names are a deep part of our identity and we often do not share them with others as it is a means to a relationship we may or may not want to have with the other person. They aren’t a label to be worn on our shirt. Sometimes they are something we grow into. But at any rate they are highly personal.
I’ve been thinking of how to do it in the classroom and I am still a little stumped. I’ll go back and look at your book again.
…for us names are a deep part of our identity and we often do not share them with others as it is a means to a relationship we may or may not want to have with the other person. They aren’t a label to be worn on our shirt….
This blew my mind, since I wanted to try to hear the names of the Sauk people last summer and they wouldn’t tell me. My gosh, if you really think about that sentence, it gives insight into what culture is and how cultural formulae can nurture people. How the forms of cultures can help us or destroy us.
Exactly. Unacultured people don’t necessairly understand your personal name in the language so they want you to translate it to English. In English it doesn’t offer the essence of the meaning it has in your language. It sounds funny (which it might be in the language as well) or deragatory or . . . I have a friend who is a scholar par excellant. His stepfather nicknamed him “pointy head.” Now that stepfather is very proud of his success, but if you think of the dunce cap his stepfather saw used liberally in the boarding school era, it might be a mean name. If you know this guy has always been on the point as a thinker, you have a whole different concept.
If you don’t comprehend the deeper meanings, the play on words, or even the historical significance you can’t appreciate the name so why even bother sharing your name with someone who might not appreciate it. Some names are only spoken in certain situations. To speak their name outside the setting is to errode the Power of the name. Your thoughts that names carry Power in your book is certainly correct.
And there are plenty of folks who don’t have a name in the language because of their own family’s history (church folks often don’t have another name other than the English one they use in US society). Many people have a name given to them that was a historical name passed on to keep that name’s energy still alive.
You are right. Some people never have names that emerge. Acceptance is always helpful.
I would suggest letting them emerge rather than walking around trying to look below the ground and uncover something you can’t see. Wait. Names emerge when it is time. It is not up to us what name they have. It is a greater process than that. As you know more than any of us.
Some of the kids’ names never emerge because the soil of their lives, the soil that they are growing in, is not conducive to walking into a story class and being a real part of it. They are still hiding and their names may never emerge. We must accept that.