The lands and waters of the Finger Lakes region have been inscribed with colonial names that, over time, have come to seem like the only possible designations for these places. But what alternative rural and urban configurations have these lands undergone, what other names have shaped these spaces, and how can we experience the landscape through other languages that imbue them with other meanings?
This project, Mobilizing Naming in (Tompkins County) -MN(TC)- sponsored by the Rural Humanities Initiative and led by the Redistributive Computing Systems Group in collaboration with the Gayogohó:nǫˀ Learning Project, took a participatory approach to convene a diverse range of stakeholders. Together, we explored strategies for leveraging Tompkins County’s public information infrastructure to reveal the layered histories of place names across the region, with particular attention to those rooted in the Gayogohó:nǫˀ language.
MN(TC) included two key events: an Awareness activity, which fostered conversations around Gayogohó:nǫˀ culture and language, as well as sustainable ways of moving across the region; and a Participatory workshop, which invited collaborative reflection and hands-on creation around themes of naming, (counter-)mapping, orality, and diasporic belonging.
What follows is a log of these events, the artifacts prototyped through the project, and the open possibilities for future work.
Awareness activity
This event brought together 15 participants, including county workers and people familiar with Gayogohó:nǫˀ culture. Held at The History Center in the Ithaca Commons, it served as a public introduction to the project and opened space for dialogue around the Gayogohó:nǫˀ language, culture, and their enduring relationship with the region’s lands and waters. Participants also reflected on how we move through Tompkins County and the role that public information infrastructures play in supporting those movements.
Main takeaways we had during the conversation:
- The dominant narrative about Gayogohó:nǫˀ people reinforces the invisibility of Gayogohó:nǫˀ people in the region. It is urgent to continue resisting and contesting this narrative, since the ties of Gayogohó:nǫˀ people with this region, their homeland, not only precedes the United States, but also is remain today.
- The Gayogohó:nǫˀ culture and language reflects strong relationships with these lands and waters. However, the vast amount of Gayogohó:nǫˀ people have never being here. They are dispersed in Six Nations of the Grand River reserve in Canada, Seneca territory in western New York, and the Seneca-Cayuga Nation reservation and elsewhere in Oklahoma. In that sense, think interventions in this region related to Gayogohó:nǫˀ culture implies including people from the diaspora, and ideally in an active mode.
- What do the Gayogohó:nǫˀ communities get from these kinds of projects? Considering the heterogeneity of the different Gayogohó:nǫˀ communities, and also their painful histories around extraction and displacement, it is imperative to care of them in explicit ways. Care of them implies attitudes of humble listening, but also active proposals though participatory design and research methods.
- Recent efforts in Tompkins County to build a more sustainable transportation system have focused particularly on environmental sustainability. One example is the Tompkins Transportation Scout App, launched in April 2025, which helps residents navigate the region using eco-friendly options such as public transit (TCAT), biking, walking, carpooling, or carsharing.
- Biking, walking, or riding across the county gives us the time and space to experience it in ways that cars, and even buses, often do not. Programs like Bike Walk Tompkins support and encourage these more mindful and sustainable ways of moving through the region.
Participatory workshop
This workshop, held at the Tompkins County Public Library on June 16, 2025, served both as a recognition of the ongoing presence of Gayogohó:nǫˀ people, culture, and knowledge in the region, and as a call to action. We sought to reflect and start conversations about how digital technologies can support new ways of naming and connecting with places in the region, from our skills, feelings and ways of living here.
It began with a walk-and-talk activity through Gahę:dí:yo: (Downtown Ithaca), offering an embodied way to engage with the landscape. Following this, participants divided into small groups to explore four thematic areas: Naming and moving, Fuzzy borders, Making place through oral traditions, and Diasporic belonging: feeling the homeland. Each group approached a case developed from insights gathered during the awareness activity, which included a prompting question and proposed to collaboratively creating a poster to share their reflections and ideas with the larger group.
“When I first came [to Ithaca], everybody wanted to talk to me about 1779, about the destruction and how we moved to Canada,” Mr. Henhawk said. “Everything was historic, in historic terms. Every time we’re referenced, we’re always put in the past tense.”
“We’re here. We’re not gone. What I [am trying] to do is to make something today, to give us a presence today for all Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫˀ people,” Mr. Henhawk said. “A tomorrow. A future, here in our homelands, for our Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫˀ people.” [Ithaca.com, 2024]
Naming and moving
The two months of the Sullivan-Clinton campaign, 246 years ago, are often treated as the only history of the Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫˀ. But as anthropologist Kurt Jordan notes, archaeological evidence shows the Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫˀ people have been present in this region for at least 13,000 years.
From maps that highlight only Western place names, often celebrating individual settlers or military figures, to historical markers that suggest disappearance or indigenous peoples, the dominant narratives we encounter across (Tompkins) County attempt to fix the Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫˀ in the past.
How can we challenge erasure and affirm the ongoing presence of Gayogohó꞉nǫˀ people in this region—through signals and indicators—as we move or plan to move through the county?
Key discussions:
The importance of education and indigenization processes that challenge and prompt us to question what we have learned through formal Western education. A notable example raised was Khuba International. It is a call to relearn as a community.
The need to critically examine Land Acknowledgements, which, while valuable as initial steps, often lack meaningful follow-up actions. Suggested reading: Beyond Land Acknowledgement:
Toward a Gayogohó:nǫˀ-controlled land base
at Cornell’s Arnot Teaching and Research Forest.
The inclusion of “signals” of Gayogohó꞉nǫˀ presence that go beyond the visual. Participants highlighted possibilities such as traditional cooking or restaurants, and the teaching and learning of gestures associated with Indigenous crafting and collective ways of living and experiencing the landscape.
Fuzzy borders
Gayogohó:nǫˀ (Cayuga) means “from the swampy land” [Jordan, 2022]. In such a landscape, the ground is soft, wet, and constantly shifting; there are no firm boundaries between land and water, they blend into each other.
Most modern mapping techniques don’t account for this kind of indeterminacy. Instead, they rely on straight lines and rigid borders, drawing sharp separations that often reflect a mindset rooted in property: land and water are measured, divided, and owned. In contrast to these practices, the Gayogohó:nǫˀ people understand and represent the landscape in more relational ways. In their language, place names reflect what the land gives, what exists there, or what takes place there. These names are rooted in oral tradition and passed down through storytelling and lived, embodied experience with the land.
How can we challenge erasure and affirm the ongoing presence of Gayogohó꞉nǫˀ people in this region, through different ways of mapping, that allow more fluidity, and relational representations of the lands and waters in the (Tompkins County)?
This group created a multilayered, multi-textured, multimedia map that explored dynamic representations of relationships with the landscapes and waterscapes. One of the material strategies proposed for these alternative representations was embroidery, an embodied approach that goes beyond the flatness of traditional maps or images by introducing three-dimensionality, volume, and texture. The proposed counter-map also incorporated a speaker, emphasizing the importance of other-than-sight senses in approaching mapping as a relational practice.
Another speculative design imagined a futuristic sign reading: “Historic 7/11 Site: Once a late-evening stop for Ithaca locals and tourists in the early 21st century.”.
Some interesting referents:
| Stick charts | Recomenzar | Native land digital |
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| The stick charts or rebbelib are Polynesian seafarers maps of the Marshall Islands. The important information in the map isn’t the location of the islands. “The bamboo sticks that make up the frame represent ocean currents and wind patterns, which Marshallese sailors use as navigation guides.” | This testimonial textile is a cartographic tapestry that tells “Diosa García’s stories of pain and hope related to the armed conflict she experienced in [Medellin, Colombia].” | “The map is a living document, informed by the contributions of Indigenous communities, Indigenous knowledge holders and their stories. It does not claim to represent official or legal boundaries.” It offers an overlapping visual of regions that may be inhabited by multiple communities. |
Making place through oral traditions
“One night as we were singing, I realized it was the first time the land had heard those songs in 247 years,” said Jim Wikel, a Gayogohó:nǫˀ community member living in Oregon, who returned to his ancestral homeland in the Finger Lakes for the first time during a Gayogohó:nǫˀ language camp in 2023.
The camp was organized in part by Stephen Henhawk, a first-language Gayogohó:nǫˀ speaker who grew up on the Six Nations Reservation in Canada and learned the language from his grandmother. When Stephen returned to his homeland, he began recognizing the landscapes in his grandmother’s words, stories, and songs. That experience revealed the deep ties between language and place and inspired his efforts to reconnect others with their homeland. “We still have these relationships, even though we’ve been removed for 250 years,” Henhawk said. “They’ve remained alive—our connection to the forest, the lands, to the waters, to the rocks, to everything here. It’s been maintained through song, through our oral histories, and the great events that have happened here.”
How can orality, songs, and other sounds challenge narratives of erasure and communicate that Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫˀ’s presence is not past, but ongoing, living, and voiced?
Simultaneity. One of the most well-received activities among the Ithaca community has been the free screenings of Gayogohó:nǫˀ films and documentaries at Downtown Cinemapolis. These events sparked conversations about finding more dialogical and engaging ways to tell these stories, to make them more present in everyday community life.
One idea that emerged was to explore live theater performances streamed via digital platforms, allowing Gayogohó:nǫˀ and other communities in Ithaca to connect in real-time.
Archiving and Soundscaping. Efforts to preserve oral histories have primarily focused on the vocal sounds of the Gayogohó:nǫˀ language, archived in static settings through recordings of speakers. A key question that arose was: How can these recordings be activated and mobilized in more dynamic ways? One proposal was to circulate these recordings more widely through platforms like community radio and digital broadcasting. Another discussion centered on expanding the idea of sound archives to include non-human voices, such as the seasonal sounds of (Cayuga) Lake, or the calls of migratory birds. An exciting idea proposed was to stream daily soundscapes from the Gayogohó:nǫˀ homelands and waters to reservations via radio, creating a living sonic connection. An example of non-human participation mentioned was Pigeonblog by Beatriz da Costa, a project that used pigeons to collect and transmit data about air pollution.
Diasporic belonging, feeling the homeland
After the Sullivan-Clinton campaign, many Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫˀ people were forced from their homelands and dispersed to Six Nations of the Grand River reserve in Canada, Seneca territory in western New York, and to the Seneca-Cayuga Nation reservation and elsewhere in Oklahoma. Stephen Henhawk, Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫˀ educator and first-language speaker, observes: “A lot of [the Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫˀ people] have been separated. But the one commonality I’ve found — because I’ve taught in every little corner community — is reconnection. I’ve found it always leads to more.”2
Henhawk, who was raised at Six Nations and learned the language from his grandmother, returned to Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫˀ homelands and found the land itself speaking back to him. “Even after 250 years of displacement,” he says, “our relationships with the land remain alive—carried through our songs, our oral histories, and the memory of the great events that happened here.”
How might educational tools support Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫˀ people in reconnecting with their homeland?
One narrative this group sought to challenge was the binary framing of the homeland as inherently “good” and the diaspora as “bad.” Instead, they explored the idea of reclaiming diaspora as a form of expansion, a lived, evolving reality rather than staying with it as a condition of loss. This reframing prompted the question: How can we learn in all directions (across geographies, experiences, and generations)?
A powerful metaphor that emerged was that of dispersed seeds and the hidden networks of trees. Though trees may appear individual beings and separate, they are part of a larger community, connected through a “fascinating microscopic network of fungus.” [National Forest Foundation]. As a material response to this metaphor, the group proposed an artifact called “Gayogohó:nǫˀ Traveling Memory: Homeland on the go.” This would function as a traveling bag carrying tangible connections between Gayogohó:nǫˀ communities, such as seeds, leaves, letters, sound recordings, photographs, and other sensory objects. A resonant reference that I recalled was La Encomienda, a digital-textile carrier bag that linked women across memory-sewing circles in Colombia, weaving together stories, gestures, and materials across distances.
Exploratory Artifacts
As part of the project, we developed two exploratory artifacts. The first is a digital version of the Gayogohó:nǫˀgeh map: “Gayogohó:nǫˀ Community Knowledge from the Six Nations Reserve (Ontario, Canada), Transmitted to Stephen Henhawk.” The original map was created in July 2024 by Stephen Henhawk, Karen Edelstein, and Kurt Jordan. Because the information it contains has not yet been released publicly, we are not linking it here at this time.
This digital adaptation also incorporates images of historical markers across Tompkins County, where we speculated on how an augmented reality (AR) app could be used to reimagine these sites. Through AR, users could view, or even propose these markers with alternative messages, opening up space for layered histories for the signs.
The second artifact is a web application, accessible via both mobile and desktop browsers, that displays the nearest Gayogohó:nǫˀ place name based on the user’s real-time location. As the visitor moves through the region, the name dynamically updates to reflect their changing position along the route. The application is grounded in the same map created by Stephen Henhawk, Karen Edelstein, and Kurt Jordan, and the link will be shared once a public version becomes available.