To name a place is to attempt dominion over it. This has always been the project of Western cartography, wherein the impulse is to label, to fix, to stabilise. There is beauty in certainty; in claiming. The translation of our landscapes into symbols, our oceans into coordinates, all in an attempt to record, claim and understand. Space, as Michel de Certeau argues, is a practiced place. A territory that only comes into meaning through means of human inscription (i.e. a city only becomes a city once it has been spoken in, walked on, and lived in).

But not all languages mark space in this way.

The Wintu of north-central California do not speak in lefts or rights. They do not anchor direction to their bodies, but to the world around them. A mosquito does not bite your left arm, it bites your west arm. A tree is never to your right, but to the south. The river is always east if you are moving north, and when you turn back it remains unchanged. The self therefore is not an axis around which the world revolves. It is contingent and impermanent. The world is what’s stable. You are passing through.

This is not just a linguistic curiosity, but a fundamental reordering of reality. A way of seeing that has been steadily erased. It resists the Western compulsion to render ‘space’ into ‘place’, to domesticate the unknown, or to assume that human movement is the measure by which all else is understood.

This stands in opposition to the Cartesian subject, the foundation of Western epistemology, in which the self is the center of all knowledge and space is what needs to be mastered. For Descartes, to think is to be, and by extension, to name is to control. The landscape, by necessity, must be made into representations that reaffirm human certainty. Consider the classical hero’s journey. The protagonist begins by moving through unknown terrain, is subdued, and returns to the familiar, triumphant and transformed. The unknown is meaningful only insofar as it leads to mastery.

But what if the world was not meant to be mastered?

What if space did not exist for the traveler to claim it?