Snap open a map and read the place names listed across the landscape. Those words—the place names on the map—are decided by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, a federal agency created more than a century ago to standardize place names throughout the United States.

But the world outside is different from what you find on paper or a screen. Just think of how you describe places when talking to your friends and family: Turn at the cottonwood alongside the road. Let’s hike the trail where you saw the hummingbird last summer.

Here in New Mexico, and across the United States, Indigenous people have moved across these landscapes for millennia. And naming a place never meant claiming ownership.