[ Lost in the Landscape ]

culturally insensitive plant names?

On one of my trips out hik­ing one of the group went run­ning over to a plant in hys­ter­i­cal full bloom, Pedic­u­laris den­si­flora, some­thing she referred to as “Indian war­rior.” It’s a stun­ning lit­tle plant that’s at least some­what related to the plants in the genus Castilleja that are some­times called “Indian paintbrush.”

I can’t say that I’ve had a con­ver­sa­tion with any­one about this pedic­u­laris. But in this age of height­ened cul­tural sen­si­tiv­i­ties and school mas­cots being changed to less poten­tially offen­sive char­ac­ters I’ve been try­ing to use the more generic name of “paint­brush” when dis­cussing the castille­jas. Most peo­ple still know what I’m refer­ring to.

A quick look at Calflora turned up dozens of other Cal­i­for­nia natives that have “Indian” in the name, includ­ing Palmer’s Indian mal­low (Abu­tilon palmeri), Indian man­zanita (Arc­tostaphy­los mewukka), Indian milk­weed (Ascle­pias eri­o­carpa), Indian straw­berry (Duch­es­nea indica) and Indian head­dress (Tra­cy­ina ros­trata). I’m not Native Amer­i­can but I won­der if these com­mon names might not be the best to use.

Try­ing to come up with other plant names that have left me a lit­tle queasy I thought imme­di­ately about the com­mon house­plant, wan­der­ing jew, Trades­cantia alb­i­flora. The for­mer own­ers of my house planted some in a bed, and I’m still try­ing to erad­i­cate it, twenty years later. I keep telling myself that “wan­der­ing Jew” is just a plant name and I’m not being anti-semitic when I take the weed­ing fork to it.

Alger­ian ivy is another incred­i­bly nox­ious plant pest, but I know that it’s named after the coun­try where it orig­i­nates and not the peo­ple who live there. In this case I don’t feel­ing like I’m com­mit­ting geno­cide when I yank it out by the yard. Same goes for all the thou­sands of other plants named after their coun­try of ori­gin, both in their com­mon and sci­en­tific latin names.

Look­ing on the web I came up with a cou­ple other plant names that folks might find offen­sive. Golden Gate Gar­dener had a note about Kef­fir lime, Cit­rus hys­trix, and Kef­fir lily, Clivia mini­ata. In Ara­bic, accord­ing to one of the com­menters on the post, “kef­fir” refers to a non-believer, some­thing sim­i­lar to the way “hea­then” is used in Eng­lish. Pos­si­bly objec­tion­able. But when the word trav­eled to South Africa it became a seri­ously trou­bling epi­thet for the non-white pop­u­la­tion. Ick. I buy the leaves of this lime in Asian gro­ceries for when I make curry or pasta, and I’ll make a point of call­ing it some­thing else. Thai lime, maybe. As for Clivia mini­ata, the latin name comes to the res­cue. Even my mother–not prone to show off with sci­en­tific names–called it clivia.

Plant names are impor­tant. They can tell you plenty about the soci­ol­ogy of those who did the nam­ing, and they can shape how you per­ceive the plant. I’ll try to pay more atten­tion to names when I use them, and I’ll try to reject the ones that really shouldn’t have a place in mod­ern, accept­ing, plu­ral­is­tic society.

March 20 2010 06:30 am | Categories: gardening • my garden |

18 Responses to “culturally insensitive plant names?”

1. Noelle/azplantlady on 20 Mar 2010 at 8:51 am #

   This is a very inter­est­ing post. I had never stopped to think of com­mon plant names in this way. Now, I will prob­a­bly be think­ing all day about the plants in my gar­den and what I call them. I usu­ally stick to botan­i­cal names which is prob­a­bly safer and much more polit­i­cally cor­rect

2. Sue in Milan on 20 Mar 2010 at 10:19 am #

   I’ve always avoided names like Wan­der­ing Jew too, though naively I would always have assumed that a plant like Indian mal­low was so-called because it was native to — well, India. You live and learn.
   I’d never heard of Kef­fir lily either — but only of Clivia. So per­haps these names are now dying out. Here’s hoping …

3. Elephant's Eye on 20 Mar 2010 at 12:42 pm #

   What was a k**** tree when I was a girl, is now a coral tree (Ery­th­rina) for its mag­nif­i­cent deep orange flow­ers, drip­ping nec­tar for the sun­birds. And the leaves you use in your curry are quite sim­ply ‘curry leaves’. Not so con­vinced that ‘Clive of India’ is rel­e­vant to a South African lily. Is ‘Indian’ offen­sive to Native Amer­i­cans? Or would it acknowl­edge a part of their her­itage and tradition?

4. Town Mouse on 20 Mar 2010 at 6:42 pm #

   Well, I think when weeds or bugs are named after some other nation (as the potato bee­tle of many names), we have a prob­lem. But Indian paint­brush and Indian war­rior are beau­ti­ful plants, so I’ve never thought twice about that name being a problem.

   I’m usu­ally happy enough if I know the com­mon and sci­en­tific name. There are so many other ways in which I com­monly get my foot in my mouth on a daily basis, plant names are the least of it.

5. tina on 21 Mar 2010 at 7:16 am #

   Def­i­nitely food for thought.

6. ryan on 21 Mar 2010 at 8:47 am #

   Inter­est­ing thought. I could see try­ing to call it just paint­brush. I’m with Town Mouse, though, that with such a beau­ti­ful and pop­u­lar plant as Indian Paint­brush the name doesn’t seem like a prob­lem to me (though I’m not the one who could really say whether it is offen­sive or not). Maybe if the Indian Paint­brush fans started wear­ing car­i­ca­ture t-shirts and base­ball hats and doing stu­pid tom­a­hawk chants in stadiums…

7. Easy Herb Gardening on 21 Mar 2010 at 10:29 am #

   Finally!! Some­one has been able to bring this topic out into the light. There have been many times where I won­dered what peo­ple would say to cer­tain offen­sive names of plant and bugs. The funny thing is that when I was lit­tle, I never thought about plant named being offensive.

8. Brad B on 21 Mar 2010 at 9:31 pm #

   I learned the name Indian paint­brush from my dad as a lit­tle kid, so didn’t think much about it till later. Then thought maybe some stu­pid Anglo thought up the name. But I’m with Ryan and Town Mouse on this one, they are some of my favorite plants and so I think of them and their name in a pos­i­tive light. I also read last year that sto­ries say Indian war­riors grow on the sites where Native war­riors were slain. True leg­end or roman­ti­cism? Not sure.
   To add another plant, Deb­o­rah Small on her Eth­nob­otany blog refer’s to Min­ers’ let­tuce as Indian let­tuce in this post: http://deborahsmall.wordpress.com/2010/03/18/red-maids-calandrinia-ciliata/
   And she is con­stantly work­ing with Indige­nous Cal­i­for­ni­ans, often related to food.

9. Brent on 21 Mar 2010 at 10:12 pm #

   Call me insen­si­tive, but I don’t think that Indian Paint­brush or any of the other com­mon names that you’ve men­tioned are more or less insen­si­tive than Ger­man potato salad, French fries, Bel­gian waf­fles, Span­ish rice, or any of a myr­iad of other com­mon names that invoke a place or peo­ple of origin.

10. Wendy on 22 Mar 2010 at 5:03 am #

    I guess there are some names that are fairly innocu­ous. Some­thing like Chi­nese lantern, is fine, but some­thing like Chi­nese top hat, or Chi­nese yel­low (I’m mak­ing these up!) would NOT be ok — and these names are unfor­tu­nately found in the industry.

    There are some names that I feel are just really depress­ing though — like bleed­ing hearts, love lies bleed­ing, widow’s tears, etc. I could maybe do bleed­ing hearts, but could not do widow’s tears. I’m prob­a­bly being overly sus­per­sti­tious, but still…

    Once, I com­mented on someone’s blog that their trail of tears beans had a depress­ing name. Now mind you, I real­ize there are impor­tant and often very sad times in his­tory and don’t aim to put my head in the sand, but I was just com­ment­ing on the name being sad. Boy did I get an ear­ful (and a review of history).

11. Lynn on 22 Mar 2010 at 10:37 am #

    Wow, I’ve been think­ing a lot about this issue lately and here you go with a great post about it. I too have found it hard to say, “wan­der­ing jew” though I’ve heard it my whole life. We’ve been look­ing for those lime leaves to cook with (indeed, dif­fer­ent from curry leaves), and I’d wager that many peo­ple from the US do not know the degrad­ing mean­ing of “kaf­fir.” Some­times insen­si­tiv­ity is sim­ple igno­rance, and that’s reme­died by start­ing dis­cus­sions like this one. Thanks!

12. Gayle Madwin on 23 Mar 2010 at 8:19 am #

    I have been under the impres­sion that call­ing paint­brush “Indian” was a healthy acknowl­edg­ment of cul­tural his­tory (and I have seen sur­vey data sug­gest­ing that slightly more peo­ple of Amer­i­can Indian her­itage pre­fer to call them­selves “Indi­ans” than pre­fer to call them­selves “Native Amer­i­cans”). But I can see that the name “Indian War­rior” could be problematic.

    This post also made me ques­tion the name of “Chi­nese houses.” Per­haps a name for the spe­cific type of Chi­nese house that the flow­ers resem­ble would be accept­able, but imply­ing that all Chi­nese houses look the same way cer­tainly seems like an instance of stereotyping.

13. Christine on 29 Mar 2010 at 4:36 pm #

    I feel that if we were to omit “Indian” from Indian Paint­brush, we would be for­get­ting our local his­tory and the impor­tant uses these plants served before the set­tlers arrived. Many of these plants are named not because they are meant to be deroga­tory, but because early set­tlers observed Native Amer­i­cans using these plants for var­i­ous pur­poses. Per­haps it would put your mind at ease to talk to some­one with Native Amer­i­can ances­try about what they think of the names.
    Wan­der­ing Jew, how­ever… yeah I’m right there with you on that one!

14. lostlandscape on 29 Mar 2010 at 8:35 pm #

    Everyone–thanks for all your ideas on this topic. It’s great to see every­one bring­ing some­thing inter­est­ing to the con­ver­sa­tion and I’ve enjoyed read­ing and think­ing about all your com­ments. My native plant soci­ety has sev­eral oppor­tu­ni­ties to hear of Native Amer­i­can uses of plants, often by peo­ple in our local tribes, and I’ll be tak­ing the oppor­tu­nity to have this dis­cus­sion with them. Granted, the plant name acknowl­edges a use of the plant by sev­eral tribes, and I appre­ci­ate that the name hon­ors that tra­di­tion. I’ve seen a few ref­er­ences drop­ping the “Indian” before “paint­brush,” so I’m not the only one to have thought about this.

    I could see how terms like “Indian head­dress” might still be a lit­tle more stereo­typ­i­cal, and a plant name that might not as wise to use as the ones that talk about a tra­di­tional use of the plant. At least it sounds like that there’s agree­ment that there are a few of these names that really are best left aban­doned to his­tory. I don’t want to for­get the names–they really talk about a cul­tural mind­set. But there are bet­ter names to use for some of them. And some of the orig­i­nal names I’ve men­tioned are prob­a­bly fine to use. I’ll post what I find out. I’m sure there won’t be agree­ment on every com­mon name.

15. ricki - sprig to twig on 30 Mar 2010 at 2:44 pm #

    Wow! I really look for­ward to your follow-up posts on this one. In the Pacific North­west, we have some names that could send you around the bend, but we also have some beau­ti­ful place names inher­ited from native peo­ples that no one who hasn’t grown up here can begin to pronounce.

16. Gayle Madwin on 11 Apr 2010 at 1:55 am #

    This post has been in the back of my mind for a while, and today I hap­pened to be edit­ing a local wiki page about paint­brushes imme­di­ately after hav­ing tried to explain in a gar­den­ing forum that uncon­scious polit­i­cal biases are still polit­i­cal, no mat­ter how uncon­scious they may be. I looked at the sen­tence on the wiki page about paint­brushes’ his­tory of being used as red dye, and won­dered why exactly this his­tory was por­trayed in the plants’ name as being first and fore­most a detail about his­tor­i­cal Indian use of the flow­ers, rather than sim­ply about his­tor­i­cal human use of the flow­ers. Nei­ther the name “paint­brush” nor the name “Indian paint­brush” really con­veys the his­tor­i­cal use of these flow­ers all by itself, so it occurred to me that as long as fur­ther expla­na­tion is going to be required any­way, the “Indian” detail could be moved from the plant name into that fur­ther expla­na­tion with­out actu­ally mak­ing that detail par­tic­u­larly less well known.

    And sud­denly it didn’t seem appro­pri­ate to use the name “Indian paint­brushes” any­more. So I edited the page and changed it to just “paint­brushes.” I changed my mind from my ear­lier com­ment here.

17. [ Lost in the Landscape ] » an invite to my groupies and stalkers on 18 Apr 2010 at 6:34 am #

    […] rude or offen­sive. Land­scape pho­tog­ra­phy that takes on issues of racism? Well, why not? (My recent blog post on cul­tur­ally offen­sive plant names comes from the same place in my brain and deals with some of the same issues.) James SOE NYUN. […]

18. Aanee @ Flower Delivery on 22 Sep 2010 at 2:17 am #

    I never thought about offen­sive plant and flower names before. It is some food for thought.

    Regards,
    Aanee xxx
    Flow­ers Dublin

Trackback URI | Comments RSS

Leave a Reply

Name (required)

Mail (hidden) (required)

Website

Notify me of followup comments via e-mail