Dził is both the Diné word for mountain and the root word of strength, dziił. “There’s philosophy attached to these mountains. They have beauty and strength,” Tohe said, and can inspire all people, Native and non-Native alike. Diné people approach the peaks prayerfully, not haphazardly, Tohe said. Her grandma taught her that you cannot do whatever you want on a mountain, or in the water. “Water has spirit,” Tohe said. If you introduce yourself, approach it respectfully, it will help you. She honors the place where her grandma taught her that lesson: “Every time I go by that spot, when I drive past that, I remember that story she told about water.”
Psychologists call this “place identity,” a social constructivist theory designed to shed light on our subjective perceptions of geography. Place identity was originally defined by psychologist Harold Proshansky in 1978 as “those dimensions of self that define the individual’s personal identity in relation to the physical environment” via “conscious and unconscious ideas, feelings, values, goals, preferences, skills, and behavioral tendencies relevant to a specific environment.”
According to linguistic anthropologist Phillip Cash Cash (Cayuse and Nez Perce), in many Indigenous worldviews, people are not central to the landscape, but rather are one component participating equally with other life-forms. Recognition of a landscape produces an inner experience: The Indigenous place name orients you to its “meaning within the community mind.”
Cash Cash described community mind as “a stable set of beliefs” containing “the ongoing narrative of that community’s interaction with the world.” Ancestors who inhabited these spaces can convey teachings to their living descendants: “Their lives actually echo across the creational realm.”
Sacred sites also hold a mythic layer of significance, said Cash Cash. The topography of sacred landscapes is overlaid with mythical events that occurred during Creation. “When the two overlap, the time frame collapses, and they say that accessing these areas, those mythical beings and the energy they represent can affect you,” he said. Overwriting sacred place names with different information disrupts connections to mythic beings “still existing beyond our human realm.”
Colonial place names lack these deep connections. “A lot of these places were named after males,” said Tohe, “somebody that was in the military or had some great power in the government.” Tsé Si’ání, for example, or “Sitting Rock,” is about as basic a name as you can get — and yet it supports and is supported by the community mind of the land’s ancient people. “We named things oftentimes because of a distinct feature in the land.”
In mainstream America, Tsé Si’ání is called “Lupton.”