Has anyone heard of that lake north of Lake Harriet and south of Lake of the Isles being referred to as “Bdemakaska” yet?
I’m starting to think the Minneapolis City Council isn’t all that serious…
Has anyone heard of that lake north of Lake Harriet and south of Lake of the Isles being referred to as “Bdemakaska” yet?
I’m starting to think the Minneapolis City Council isn’t all that serious…
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They’re changing the name to avoid mentioning the guy who signed the Indian Removal Act.
But they’re not giving that land back to the Indians. It’s too valuable.
They’re virtuous, not stupid.
This is that weird things-that-white-people-like where they A) insist that other cultures have the same habit of giving official names to geographic entities that Europeans do, and B) the “authentic” name can be found by asking asking authorized indigenes to make one up for them.
These indiginous names often don’t translate well. In Polynesian, the highest point of land is called “una.” A higher point of land than you are standing at (wherever you are) is called “uka.” The lowest point is called “kai”. the word for “the sea.” The direction towards any of these places is given the prefix “ma.” So something seawards of you is makai, something higher than you is mauka. Mountain tops are called mauna, towards the highest place (i.e. Mauna Kea, Mauna Loa).
So mauna doesn’t really mean ‘mountain.’ In parts of Polynesia where the highest point on on the island is only a few feet above sea level, it is still called “mauna.”
The article notes that they’ve got to get approval at at least three levels of government. It will take a while, and my prediction is that it’ll be just as effective as it was when the Vietnamese renamed Saigon as…what was it again?…and just as effective as when the Russians renamed St. Petersburg as….what was that again?
This morning on MPR some dweeb used it.
The Alt Left Media or ALM (MPR NPR,CBS NBC,WAPO, NYT,CNN etc) is on the case – it will eventually catch on after the arbiter of pronunciation (MPR) instructs all their virtue signaling members on the proper ELCA pronunciation. They’ve got it wrong by the way – hang out with some Anishinabe for a while and you’ll twig to the proper way to stress the syllables.
That would be a great name for a cover band that plays, The Specials, The English Beat and The Clash.
” Alt Left Media or ALM”
That’s a word now. Nicely done.
It’s odd how Liberals work the name game. When the respectable settlers came to St. Paul, people with names like Irvine and Rice, Ramsey and Dayton, they lived in the nice part of town. Their immigrant neighbors were relegated to Swede Hollow and Little Mexico.
Voyageurs who trapped fur-bearing animals Up North all winter loaded the pelts onto canoes and paddled down the Mississippi to St. Anthony Falls, where they could go no further. The pelts were loaded onto ox carts driven to Pig’s Eye (where the tanners were located) by trappers’ kids – half-breed offspring of French-Canadian white men and Native American women, acceptable in neither culture.
The good English setters didn’t want filthy half-breeds living in their nice town speaking a rival nation’s language. They were relegated to crappy shacks in Frogtown, all they could afford. Eventually, the half-breeds’ kids moved into mainstream jobs and moved out of the old neighborhood, selling their homes to the next despised minority, Blacks, who moved up and moved out and sold to Southeast Asians escaping the fall of dominos that occurred after The Democrat Betrayal Of Vietnam.
A few years back, a bunch of Asian business owners announced they want to change the name of their neighborhood from Frogtown – no longer relevant – to “Little Mekong” named after the river. It reminds them of Vietnam, Laos, Thailand.
The good Liberals at City still have not approved the change. It doesn’t matter that the residents of the neighborhood want to replace a racist slur with a treasured memory. The change was not initiated by the city planning office. It has not been focus grouped. There have been no consultant studies, no public hearings. And most importantly of all, there’s no PR victory to claim.
Ask your Democrat friends if they will attend their party’s “Jefferson-Jackson Dinner” next year. The Democrats of today are directly descended from the Southern Democrats (not the slightly-less rabidly pro-slavery Northern Democrats). The name of the dinner alone is a macro-aggression. “Raise a toast to your founders, Democrats! Everyone, to your feet!”
We need the ALM to help us. In the 80s I never would have learned the proper pronunciation of “Nicaragua” without them.