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The Power of a Name: The Colonialism of Scientific Species Naming Karla Sosa “The power of a name and its value has long been immortalized in place names, historical events, people’s names, song, prose, poetry, religious ceremony and even in naming species. Names evoke memories of the past and they provide a frame of reference to signify the connection of people, culture and language to the environment, to historical, social and political events.” —Hēmi Whaanga, Wiki Papa, Priscilla Wehi, and Tom Roa The use of the Māori language in species nomenclature
I ran into botany when I was in college, during an internship at the New York Botanical Garden. Even as a little girl, I have been an attentive person, noticing details: the shifting clouds, the beetle trying to get to the next branch, the house door that yesterday was white and today is blue. This job was precisely that: notice the small details in the herbarium specimens—samples that had been collected over half a world, were dried, and then brought to the museum to be studied. The goal of this research is to catalogue the diversity of species so that we can preserve them for future generations, since many have not yet been “discovered”; researchers aim through this study of differences between samples to identify possible new species. But that’s the real question: are we really discovering something? The reality is that Science (I capitalise it because I am referring to the institution, not the practice) is still a Eurocentric system. Although it claims to aim for objectivity, the true initial drive behind cataloguing species was to identify resources that could be exploited1. Consider simply the economic value of chocolate, coffee, tea, and rubber, none of which originated nor were cultivated in Europe, yet which brought enormous riches to the colonising countries. The kings of these countries pushed for the classification of the diversity in their new colonies, searching for riches. Further, we know that many of these samples, which now are housed in museums, were brought over from the colonies in ships that also carried slaves2.
What about the knowledge of Indigenous communities? Many of the species that the colonisers say they discovered already had flourishing histories and well-developed uses in the communities in which they were found. Unfortunately, like so many other things the coloniser erased, they also erased and denied knowledge of the flora and fauna. Think of the legacy of this policy: in “high society”, herbal remedies are looked at with scorn, with doubt. How the tune changes when Science confirms, however, what our ancestors already knew, that this plant helps with stomach aches, that this other one helps one to sleep. Only then does this knowledge become valid for the colonisers and those who listen to them. There exists a human tendency for classification3. In and of itself this isn’t a bad thing, especially if we keep in mind that binaries do not exist, that there are never clear lines dividing one thing from another. But Linnaean classification—the only classification accepted by Science—looks to do precisely that: put each thing in its place. In fact, this classification originally included human races, which we know have no basis in biology and are purely a social construct4. As such, the Linnaean system is in its essence racist, violent, a system that attempts to erase the ambiguities that exist in each of us and in nature. Worse still, that the invention of races and their false hierarchy has been used as a weapon to determine who has the right to speak on behalf of nature5. Let us not overlook the violence in taking a being that is valued by Indigenous communities, that has a unique name and possibly unique spiritual value, and to not only say it has been discovered, but to name this “discovery” after the coloni-
