Naming Fictional Locations

I got spoiled when writing my first middle grade historical novel, Desert Jewels, which follows a Japanese American girl living in California during World War II. There were plenty of good memoirs with detailed accounts of what happened to the Japanese Americans living on the West Coast during this relatively short period. More importantly, several of them traveled from Berkeley, California to the Tanforan Assembly Center in San Bruno, California to the Topaz War Relocation Center in the Utah desert as my characters did. So it was easy to set my story in real places and know that I would have all but a few minor facts correct.

I couldn’t do that with Creating Esther. The story is set in 1895, but the first off-reservation boarding school opened in 1879 and some existed until the late 1900s. The history goes back even farther when on-reservation boarding schools are included. That’s a very long period, and things change over time. Most of the memoirs I have are from the mid-20^th century, and they give little insight into the boarding school world of 1895. And although I have some earlier memoirs, those are short on details. I couldn’t find enough information to set my story in any particular school during the relevant time period without the risk that someone would find significant factual errors.

That means I had to create a fictional school using what is universal and making up details consistent with the ones in the memoirs. So that’s what I did.

But creating a fictional school meant I needed to make up a name, too.

The last three words in Dewmist Indian Boarding School were easy to come up with since that is what all of them were called. Well, some included “Industrial” after “Indian,” but the name is long enough without that. The challenge was to come up with something creative and unique for the first part of the name.

I discarded a few choices before deciding to play with the letters in the word “Midwest,” which is where my school is located. First, I tried reversing it, but Tsewdim isn’t easy to say or remember. So I switched the first two letters of that attempt and came up with Stewdim. But that didn’t seem very memorable, either. And Westmid is too obvious.

In the end, it came down to two choices: Mistdew and Dewmist. I chose Dewmist because it flows together better. As you can see, I simply rearranged a word and got a name.

But maybe you want a more fanciful explanation. Here’s one that I came up with after the fact. Dew and mist are temporary, dissolving when the sun comes out. The acculturation process at these boarding schools was also temporary, dissolving when the students went back to their reservations. Actually, some attributes stayed with them, but the schools couldn’t beat the Native American culture out of their residents.

And that’s a good thing.

__________

The picture shows the East Building of the Shawnee Indian Mission boarding school in Fairway, Kansas, which Roland and I saw on vacation in 2013. The building is typical of the dormitory and school buildings at the various Midwest boarding schools.