Plants By Any Other Name

This essay originally appeared in Spanish in Endémico (December, 2022). This translation was produced by the authors.

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“When Cortés disembarked, he got on his horse and an Official of Magic told him the name of which to recall this place to make it safe. He recommended that he never unmount before renaming places. From then on, each conquered site was quickly renamed with a key-spell coded after a Christian name; an operation that annulled the opposing energy and imprisoned the protective numen of the place between the letters. In this way, they advanced safely through territories incapable of defending themselves. The rite of conquest spread like an infection.”

—Jorge Baradit (2003), “La Conquista Mágica de América” (translated by the authors)

There is great power in how words make worlds. In the magic realism story quoted above, the Spanish conqueror Hernán Cortés appoints the lands of the “New World” with Christian names. Erasing Indigenous names with colonized names is a way of denying the cultures and knowledges of the local inhabitants; it is an act of epistemic violence. In the words of philosopher of colonial art Daniela Bleichma, “The standard European approach of replacing indigenous names [is] a symbolic way of taking possession.”

Renaming geographies and species is a type of colonialism that very often goes unseen.  Names do not merely describe territory; they reorganize it. Colonialism does not end with independence, but survives through institutions, development narratives, and scientific language. This occurs specially through acts of naming and classification that erase Indigenous ways of knowing and turn living relationships into colonial categories.

The Scientific Language of Colonialism

The word ‘colonial’ is derived from the Latin “colere,” meaning “to cultivate land.” The word itself thus invokes the idea that non-Western areas and people must be civilized and cultivated.

Language plays an important role. Names create a narrative, a set of “truths” that become the basis of science. For example, many American plants were assigned scientific names based on the European plants they resemble. This was integral to the European domination of global knowledge systems. What we call and know about these plants today is the result.

In the context of colonial conquest, naturalists classified and sorted the natures of colonized territories. Species were stripped from their relations, removed from their soils, climates, and stories, and placed into a “universal” system that claimed neutrality while enforcing hierarchy.

One of the most influential expressions of this impulse was Systema Naturae (1735) by Carl Linnaeus: an attempt to order all known life according to a rationality shaped by White, cis-male, Western epistemologies.

In the dawn of ecology as a field of study, local ecological knowledges from non-Western communities were either dismissed or selectively extracted, recoded, and assimilated into European systems without care for or recognition of their Indigenous origins. Throughout this time, Indigenous ritual practices involving plants were also being censored. Recognizing this history allows us to trace how Eurocentric research has marginalized species, communities, traditional ecological knowledges, and the diversity of ways of knowing and living with the world, what some thinkers call the pluriverse.

Mapunche Kimün (The Knowledge of the People of the Earth)

In the extreme tip of America, our home territory, south of the Biobio River, scattered across vast surfaces of dried land destined for modern agriculture and pines monocultures, you can meet some survivors of the old times: chaotic and colorful patches of native forests that represent a symbol of resistance to Western epistemic colonization. This place is the Wallmapu, where the Mapuche people (“the people of the earth”) have lived since the old times.

The Mapuche word for wood/forest is “mawiza.” Mawiza, though, not only refers to forest. According to anthropologist Wladimir Riquelme Maulén, the word also conceives the integration between trees, soil, air, water, plants, and animals, what is to be considered as the “itrofillmongen,” “the seen and unseen relations between everything that lives” (Manuel Maribur, Indigenous tourism leader, in conversation with the authors).

For the Mapuche, the forest is an essential actor that provides and enables all forms of life. Yet, for decades the Chilean government has been funding the cutting of the forest and the monoplantation of two types of trees: pines and eucalyptus.

The Chilean government values monoculture plantations (uniformly planted, enslaved cellulose bodies—all individuals of the same age and clones of the same tree) above the forest (a multiage, diverse, and resilient community of more-than-humanbeings). This economic vision is a legacy of the European colonial enterprise. Instead of taking the forest as a model for society, as many ancestral cultures have, the factory is taken as a model for the forest. This model is characteristic of the Plantationocene, wherein extractivism restructures life itself into a system of multispecies forced labor.

The Fake Beech

At the heart of the mawiza, ancient woody ancestors grow in silence: Nothofagus. Enduring snow and drought, wind, fire, and heavy rains, they form one of the dominant arboreal presences of the southern tip of the Americas. Their rugged bark, varied leaf forms, and seasonal transformations mark them as a diverse and resilient collective, shaped by deep histories of climate, movement, and relation. Like many more-than-human beings of Chile’s native forests, Nothofagus have endured the brutal processes of ecological, territorial colonization and epistemic violence.

In Chile, these trees are commonly known by many names—roble, ruil, coihue, lenga, ñirre, raulí, hualo, each a different specie. Scientifically, these trees are all subsumed under a single genus: Nothofagus. Coined by Carl Ludwig Blume in 1850, Nothofagus roughly translates to “fake beech” (“nothus” meaning false and “fagus” meaning beech). As Skewes and Guerra describe, “What the Conqueror sees reminds him of the beech (Fagus sylvatica), the true fagus, if you will. What he has before his eyes can only aspire to be a nothofagus, a false beech as denoted by the Latin prefix. It is an image constructed from the outside and by negation.”

Thus Nothofagus were scientifically defined not by what they are (a diverse family of trees native to the Southern Hemisphere), but by what they are not (the beeches of the Northern Hemisphere). The beech of Europe remained the original, the reference point, the “true” form. What stood before the colonizer could only be a negation, a resemblance that failed.

And yet, traditional knowledge persists. Names in the Mapuche language for these trees still move through the southern forests, spoken and remembered. They carry traces of long-standing relationships between humans and trees, relationships that resist taxonomic absence and colonial negation.

Plants from an Indigenous Perspective

Local names do not simply describe plants; they narrate relationships. They encode time, place, and transformation. Nothofagus obliqua, for example, is known among the Mapuche as “koyam.” The tree is called “hualle” when young, its wood yellowish, and “pellín” when mature, its wood red. Here, the stages of a tree’s life matter, just as languages distinguish between children and adults.

The names that local people give to nature are even more interesting when we look at their complex semantics. Nothofagus dombeyi is known as “coigüe.” This word is formed from “ko,” meaning water, and “we,” meaning place. In this case, the name gives information about the place where this tree grows, usually near water.

There are countless other examples. Where Indigenous names reflect local culture and ecology, colonial names are often abstract metaphors or comparisons. The Araucaria araucana, for example, was coined the “monkey puzzle tree” by British observers who remarked that “it would puzzle a monkey to climb it.” In contrast, the Mapuche name, pewen, refers to the tree’s edible seed and to the Pewenche, the people whose livelihoods depend on it.

These so-called “native names” are not neutral descriptors. The category “native” itself belongs to a European tradition of distinguishing local knowledges from “universal” science. Through this distinction, European botanists positioned Indigenous language and classifications as secondary, contextual, or folkloric and its own naming systems as objective and authoritative.

By the late eighteenth century, botanists were using the term “native” as a catch-all category for what they understood as uncultivated or undomesticated life. This usage, of course, was not limited to plants. Indigenous people and cultures were subjected to the same hierarchical classification. Natural history Colonial “encounters”—with both humans and more-than-humans—were not defined simply by the distinction between Old World and New World, but by the geographies of imperial power.

Practicing Decolonial Ecology

After three decades, “colonialism” finally made its way into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) official vernacular. The IPCC’s sixth assessment report listed colonialism not only as a driver of the climate crisis but also as an ongoing process that is exacerbating climate vulnerability in communities around the world. With the use of this term, we are witnessing scientific institutions finally acknowledging how decolonization must be central in the global response to climate disasters. If we dive deeper into decolonial perspectives, we may find tools to reclaim the ecologies we inhabit on this damaged planet.

Decolonizing the gaze involves listening to multiple forms of knowledge, especially those held by people who live in close relation with plants and other species. It calls for a shift from learning about life to learning with life, embracing the relational knowledge that emerges through thinking with it.

Recognizing the entanglement of the discipline of ecology with colonialism is just the beginning. We must also recognize our own positionality as scientists or researchers within long histories of (ongoing) occupation and colonialism.

In Mary Louise Pratt’s words, “Si estudiamos solamente lo que los europeos vieron y dijeron, no haremos más que reproducir el monopolio del conocimiento y de la interpretación que la empresa imperial pretendía tener.” (“If we study only what Europeans saw and said, we will do nothing more than reproduce the monopoly over knowledge and interpretation that the imperial project sought to impose.”)

Decolonization is not a metaphor, nor a purely theoretical gesture. It is a situated practice of listening, unlearning, and refusing the comfort of universal explanations. Tracing the violence embedded in names such as “false beech,” and re-centering Indigenous names as expressions of living ontologies, can—and must—be extended to countless plants, animals, places, and histories.

Like a forest, decolonization does not reach completion. It grows unevenly and without guarantees. There is no single path forward. Decolonization must be as diverse as the ecosystems that sustain our lives.

Each place and group of beings has a legitimate knowledge that should be considered as part of the pluriverse we inhabit. Scientific institutions homogenize to create  “truth.” We firmly believe the contrary: Our approach should be to understand the complexity and diversity of knowledge systems that still exist on this earth.

A Return to the Southern Forest

Here, in Wallmapu, among fragmented patches of mawiza surrounded by monocultures, the so-called “false beeches” bear witness to another order of knowledge, one that does not separate name from body, tree from place, or life from relation. Each time we enter these forests, a deep sense of familiarity arises, an encounter with a being that is neither only a name nor merely wood. The old pellín stands enigmatically, offering its silence and its slow forms of companionship.

To decolonize ecology is not simply to replace one name with another. It is to relearn how to listen to forests that were never silent, to accept forms of knowledge that do not aspire to universality, and to carefully inhabit the discomfort of not fully understanding.

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Featured image: In this high-Andean forest, a lichen known as “old man’s beard” grows on the bark of of Nothofagus. Photo by Bastian Gygli / Montaraz.

Jens Benöhr is an anthropologist based in the Maullín watershed, southern Chile. He explores rivers and forests by kayak or on foot, listening to the stories they hold. Currently, he investigates the use of role-playing games for environmental education. Jens holds an Anthropology degree from the University of Concepción (2015) and a Master’s in Ecology and Evolution from the University of Munich (2022). His last contribution to Edge Effects was “Vegetal Diaspora and the Restless Life of Plants” (November 2025). Contact.

Constanza López is a researcher, writer, and editor based in Osorno, a small city in southern Chile. She is primarily dedicated to weaving stories and imagining possible futures through writing and research on environmental, cultural, and artistic issues. In addition, she is web editor of two Chilean magazines: Zánganos and Endémico. Contact.

Kara Lena Virik is a learning designer, facilitator and systems practitioner working at the intersection of gender, climate and leadership. Her work focuses on building relational, resilient movements for change through participatory learning, advocacy and collective strategy. Contact.