What's In a Name: Camp Onas' 7-Step Process to Move Past Appropriation

When I first arrived at Camp Onas as a young white kid from the Philadelphia suburbs, I was handed a slip of paper that had two names on it: mine and the name of my bunk. While both names looked like they were spelled correctly, years later I would learn that “Commanchee” was a misspelling of Comanche, a nation of people who currently reside in Southwest Oklahoma. For all of my years as a camper and most of my time as a counselor, our bunk names never raised any red flags to me, or, as far as I could tell, to other members of our community. This may have been due to people feeling unable to speak up or ignored when they did so. The space for these meaningful conversations opened recently, and more widespread conversations around the issues with our bunk names began in earnest a few years ago.

The camping industry has long relied on the appropriation of Indigenous history, culture, and people. The use of Indigenous images, names, and practices, whether real or invented off of stereotypes, remains an endemic part of summer camps across North America. Like many other summer camps, our community at Camp Onas has been reconciling our past and present relationship with this persistent problem and trying to chart a path forward.

The aim of my writing, however, is not to explain a problem that is already well-documented.  What I hope to do is first acknowledge our own camp’s complicity in a harmful practice and then share the specific steps we are took to change our culture and do less harm, in this instance renaming our bunks. When we started this work, we looked for resources on how other camps have navigated change of this kind and found that resources were few and far-between, so I hope that by sharing about our process, I can help with that. 

It’s important to acknowledge that many people arrived at Onas in the summer of 2021 having done some initial internal work that aided this process. The police murders and subsequent nationwide protests in 2020 called white folks like myself to examine our individual relationships with systemic racism, so I think many of us were aware we needed to do something about the names of the bunks, even if we weren’t sure where to start. When I use the word “we” to describe the people at Onas, I am generally speaking to our year-round staff who guided the process, but not necessarily the ideas that made the final product.

Below, I have outlined the seven steps I think were essential to making our process to rename the bunks work for our camp. I hope they will help other leaders in the work of creating more just, inclusive, and welcoming communities. 

Of course, the process we used might not be a perfect fit for your group. We are imperfect. Add or alter steps to meet the needs of your community. Remember that your process should never feel forced or contrived… but it should feel uncomfortable at times. If you encounter any discomfort with a step, I encourage you not to skip it. Grappling with the hard topics is how transformative change is made.

Step 1: Start with yourself

Layla Saad, activist, educator, and author of the book Me and White Supremacy, offers a valuable perspective:

We are living in challenging times. There is much work to be done. And it begins with getting honest with yourself, getting educated, becoming more conscious about what is really going on and how you are complicit in it…

Looking internally is the foundational step before turning your efforts outward. It is hard, but I try to adopt the attitude of a lifelong learner, of someone who knows that it is impossible for me to know everything. Key questions I ask myself regularly, but especially before taking on the bunk name changes at Camp Onas, were:

• Where are the gaps in my knowledge?

• How does my ignorance affect, and, more specifically, harm others?

• What resources and people can help me gradually fill in those gaps and how do I compensate them?

• How can I engage in my own learning while prioritizing the comfort and safety of those teaching me?

Questions like those are daunting, and I expect that throughout my life my answers to these and similar questions will change and evolve. But, there will always be gaps that I try to fill because others can be hurt if I do not try. For this work, it meant I needed to learn more about the history of settler colonialism and genocide in North America, the local tribes whose land we at Camp Onas occupy, and possible paths towards reconciliation put forward by Indigenous leaders. The more time I spend educating myself, the more I come to realize that my original lack of effort to confront my own knowledge gaps perpetuated false histories that continue to harm Indigenous people to this day. 

Step 2: Identify opportunities for change

Lots of people in our community, independently of one another, had decided that we could no longer drag our feet on changing the names of our bunks. Different conversations were happening that eventually crossed paths until we realized that we could seize the moment and move from introspection to collective action. 

We would not have been able to identify this problem that needed to be solved were it not for the work members of our community had already been doing on themselves. Yet, with our deeper understandings of the misuse of Indigenous terminology and appropriation of Indigenous cultures, we were able to see quite clearly that our camp community was confronted with a dilemma: our culture was heavily steeped in values that we did not want to live by. Because of the work we did in step one, it was now obvious how our bunk names perpetuated misunderstandings about Indigenous people and their history and that it still has harmful impacts on Indigenous communities. We were able to apply our self-reflection and education to evaluate the needs of our camp. 

Since changing our bunk names, I’ve begun to look more intentionally for places ripe for change all around Camp Onas. One example is in the name of a four-day backpacking and canoeing trip, which we call the “Pioneer.” In the context of outdoor adventuring and exploration, the idea of “pioneering” is intimately tied to the colonization of Indigenous lands in the United States. With the understanding that came directly from our personal work in Step 1 and the knowledge that we must apply this introspection to specific community challenges as described in Step 2, we are hoping to apply Steps 3-7 this summer to create a new, more appropriate term for one of the highlights of our camp program. 

Step 3: Set institutional intentions

After thinking through what I need to continue to learn more about and what changes we wanted to make, the next step was to set our intentions as an institution. This idea comes from both the Native Governance Center and Burke Museum’s work on creating land acknowledgments. While the creation of a land acknowledgment is not the same as changing existing aspects of our camp’s cultures and traditions, there is a lot of wisdom we can draw on from that process.

The questions they lift up for organizations to examine include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Why are we undertaking this change right now? What are our motivations?

• How has your organization been a part of colonial harm? 

• What is our current relationship with the original stewards of this land we stand on?

• What is our end goal with this effort? 

It took practice, but it was important to regularly remind ourselves that we might not know the right or wrong answers to these questions. That’s why Step 1 was so important! We can continue to be learners who are evaluating new information and reflecting on ourselves. And, the Native Governance Center and Burke Museum have done a lot of the hard work for us by providing examples of what might be right or wrong answers in the materials they have written.

This is one area where our process at Camp Onas could have been improved. Our intention-setting was done very informally, in small group conversations among our staff and in our office. But, doing so in larger, more formal settings would have benefitted us by building a shared identity around this change and making sure we were all on board for the right reasons. These questions, however, are ones that we will continue to unpack among our staff as changing our bunk names was only one small step toward reconciliation. 

Step 4: Do your research

Now that we established the what and why of our bunk name changes, it was time to narrow in and do research on the topic at hand. Our personal journeys to this work had given us the ability to see that a change needed to be made, but we lacked nuanced knowledge that would allow us to speak on these topics with our community. We needed to know the history of our current practices to both fully grapple with our history and to create a compelling narrative for change.

For us, this meant learning the history behind the names of bunks. We tried to figure out when each bunk got its name and, while we would certainly not be experts, learn more about the people whose names we were appropriating. One member of our team did a lot of the heavy-lifting, creating a large spreadsheet with information behind each name for the rest of our staff to learn from. While it may have felt like we knew what we were talking about before we did our research, what we found when we dug deeper exposed our limitations.

First, it became clear that our history was intertwined with the original stewards of our land: the Lenni-Lenape people. We knew that our camp’s name came from the Lenni-Lenape, but several of our bunk names were words used by the Lenni-Lenape to describe various locations in our area, such as “Tohickon” or “Wissahickon” which are local creeks. To learn more about the Lenni-Lenape, both past and present, we relied on the websites for tribes in the Lenni-Lenape diaspora, namely the Delaware Tribe of Indians, the Delaware Nation, the Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania, and the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Tribal Nation. And, for those who don’t know whose land they stand on, the Native Land app and website can help you figure it out. 

Second, we started to learn that there was no real theme to the names of our bunks other than “sounds Indigenous.” Many of the bunks used the names of Native American tribes, like Seminole or Cherokee. Some names were made-up words, derived from the names of tribes but either misspelled (such as the aforementioned “Commanchee” instead of Comanche) or, in the case of one bunk named “Remkokee,” so egregiously fictionalized or history so thoroughly erased that we do not know the origin of the word. 

In my opinion, the worst example was using the name “Huron” for a bunk. “Huron” is a derogatory name for the Wendat people given to them by French colonists. As our research unearthed information like this, our urgency increased. Having children build their camp identity around misunderstood and appropriated Indigeneity was in conflict with our values to begin with, but perpetuating an ethnic slur in a bunk name was even more unacceptable.

Step 5: Create a process

With the change we wanted to make identified and researched, it was time to talk about the process. I love process, but I recognize that not everyone feels the same way. Sometimes, talking about how you are going to do something takes much-needed time and energy away from actually doing it. However, in my experience, crafting a thoughtful process to achieve your goals helps make the hard step of getting it done far easier.

A key part of this process for us was engaging our stakeholders, the members of our community who we believe should have a voice in the kind of place Camp Onas strives to be. We started by going to the group who we thought would be most excited about the change, be able to articulate our values most clearly, and have the time to talk about it: our summer staff. We wanted to let them in on the plan early, to get them thinking about the change and begin brainstorming ideas so they could be our staunchest advocates. Then, we realized we had an optimal moment to engage our campers during a one-week session for campers aged 14-16. These were campers who would be able to work with our staff to understand the change and contribute to the new names. 

Our process was beginning to take shape — start with our staff and bring our campers in shortly after. There would be lots of benefits from involving these groups, from hearing their ideas, gaining their support, and giving them the opportunity to have a say in our shared future. One stakeholder group we neglected was our community of alums, an aspect of our process that could have been improved. Alums hold a wealth of collective memory and feelings for the original bunk names and taking their participation into account may have helped them process the change. In the end, we did not hear from alums that felt left out of the process, but I think it would have been valuable to include them in some capacity. 

Step 6: Make it happen

We had our process and were finally ready to make the change we wanted to see happen. In the end, we held a couple of meetings with staff to explain the well-researched reasons the names needed to change and enlist their help with choosing new themes and eventually new names for our bunks. Ultimately, we settled on local plants for our younger bunks and stars or constellations for our older bunks. All of our staff were excited and bubbling over with potential names, each person wanting to have an idea that stuck. 

After those meetings, we allowed ample time for staff to suggest additional names in a shared document and invited them to participate by adding ideas and comments. Finally, after a week of ruminating on our options (and researching the new suggestions), we took the large list to our older campers in an all-camp evening activity. Counselors facilitated small-group discussions with the campers, listening to campers’ thoughts on why they felt this was an important change for our camp to make. Then, discussion turned to the new names, and each group had the opportunity to share with everyone. Every camper and staff member wrote down the names they most wanted to see on our bunks. 

I had a great time reading through each response from our campers, with so many saying how excited they were to be a part of Camp Onas history. As I tallied all of the names that were mentioned, patterns started to emerge. I began assigning the most popular names to bunks based on the preferences people mentioned during the meeting, such as “Polaris” being assigned to the oldest bunk as it was the “guiding star” or “Sundrop” to the youngest because it just sounds adorable. 

Once I had my list, the final step was getting the approval of our senior staff, the group who is responsible for all things summer, and who had been the drivers of the change since day one. I sent the list to them as soon as I had it, but given how much feedback we had gotten, the list felt like it had made itself and nobody had any adjustments. It was time to share it with everyone!

Step 7: Share your success and get feedback

The night after our discussion and name choosing activity, we announced the new bunk names before starting our Lip Sync night. Each bunk cheered with enthusiasm and performed their choreographed lip sync after being called to the stage with their new name. It was a wonderful moment to hear the names read aloud and see campers embrace the change, finding much to love in their new bunk identity. 

Once we shared the news with everyone at camp, we needed to get the word out to the rest of our community. We sent an email to all the people who subscribed to receive camp updates and also posted on our website. Then, we prepared for feedback, expecting to hear from some that were disappointed in the decision we collectively made. 

However, what we got instead was overwhelming positivity, both in our inbox and on check-out day when hundreds of adults came to pick up their campers. So many people reached out to us to say how happy they were to see this change made at Camp Onas, with many articulating how much they appreciated the process and how it mirrored our values of collaboration and community care. One message that stood out to me was from the mother of a first-time camper, who said she’d been uncomfortable when she learned the name of her camper’s bunk at check-in. I imagine she understood Onas to be a caring and inclusive community, and hearing the bunk name cast doubt on that. We know she is not alone and are hopeful our new bunk names will be more inclusive for first-time campers going forward.

Conclusion

The 2021 summer at Camp Onas felt momentous in a lot of ways, from navigating the pandemic to creating a whole new session for older campers, but the overwhelming highlight for me was creating new names for all of our bunks. This change was not easy, it took a lot of thought and care, but, in the end, there was a tremendous amount of joy. The energy felt palpable as a weight that had been hanging on many members of our community was lifted, and we became one step closer to living our values. 

If you and your camp have been thinking about changing aspects of your culture or practices recently, I hope sharing our story and the process we used will help you take the first step toward tackling the challenge head-on. Changes made by all of us in our communities will inevitably result in a large and necessary shift in camping culture towards inclusivity and respect. These changes might start with looking at the names we use, but they certainly don’t end there. After each step we take at Camp Onas, we strive to ask ourselves: “What’s next?” 

I look forward to hearing your stories of success and learning from you, too! 

If you would like to learn more about the Indigenous origins of our name at Camp Onas or get in touch, visit our website. 

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DEX COEN GILBERT

ASSISTANT DIRECTOR, CAMP ONAS

dex@camponas.org