Is Indiana the stupidest name ever?
And other musings on Hoosier-ness and place
Welcome to ! Thanks for being here. I hit the 400-subscriber mark this week so thanks for helping to make that happen. Look for a behind-the-scenes post on my Substack journey so far later this week.
If you haven’t yet, here’s your reminder to order my young adult novel, Fair Game, about a girls’ basketball team that challenges the boys to a high stakes game. Yes, set in Indiana.
I’ve now lived in Indiana longer than I’ve lived in any other state—twenty-six years. How did this happen? I have no idea. I prefer to think of myself as an exile rather than a Hoosier, just a bridge-walk away from the my native home of Kentucky. Or I think of myself as a resident of the town of Madison, which is, let’s be honest, barely in Indiana at all.
Still, when I was at my daughter’s graduation ceremony at Indiana University and the president asked all the alum to stand up and count themselves as Hoosiers, I did, even if it startled my husband and maybe myself a little bit. Both my master’s and my Ph.D. are from IU. I lived in Bloomington for six years. Standing in that stadium I asked myself, “Am I a Hoosier? And if I’m not, what the hell am I?”
I spend a lot of time thinking about these sorts of things because where people are from is very important to me. There are few conversations as revealing as asking someone how they think about where they’re from. We use a shorthand most of the time in small talk. “I was born in Kentucky, but I live in Indiana.” But these brief sentences conceal much more than they reveal.
So, Hoosier or no?
On the one hand, there’s the fact that no state’s name is quite as deeply misguided as Indiana’s. The land of Indians. Only, of course, there were no ‘Indians’ here back then. Only Shawnee and Miami and Delaware. The whole Indian thing was wrong from the get-to, one mistake compiling onto another, until you end up living in a place called Indiana. A whole state built on a blunder with genocidal consequences.
Other states get to be actual Native American words, even if they’re contorted and wrong. Ohio. Oklahoma. Kentucky. Illinois. Or they drop the pretense and fully declare their European-ness. New York. Washington. New Hampshire.
But Indiana’s name is both lacking in all creativity and largely uninterested in accuracy. The capital is Indianapolis. City of Indians. Good grief.
On the other hand, we did lend that very dull name to a certain roguish archaeologist. Or at least we loaned it to his dog and then he took it for himself. Could any other state have been Indiana Jones’s first name? Not Kentucky or Illinois. Maybe Arizona or Montana, but not Vermont or even Idaho. California carries way too much baggage. Florida—the same. No, it had to be Indiana. No other state’s name rolls off the tongue so easily.
No other state is so bland as to make it possible to name a character after it and then completely forget that he is, in fact, named after a state. No one, when they think of Indiana Jones, actually thinks of the state of Indiana. Not even me and I think about these things a lot. The name works because there are absolutely zero associations with Indiana in the first place. There’s just a big blank space which Indy can more than fill. Play the game at home with your friends, a free-association with Indiana. What do you get?
Maybe the Indy 500. Perhaps, if they’re a big fan of that event, an image of Jim Nabors singing ‘Back Home in Indiana.’ Can you guess what Indiana’s biggest tourist attraction is? Notre Dame. Yes, the Touchdown Jesus is in Indiana. I forget sometimes, too. It seems mostly random that Notre Dame is in Indiana. Doesn’t it seem like it should be in Michigan?
But, okay, here’s a thing—slavery was never legal in the state of Indiana, which it totally was in Kentucky. Indiana fought on the side of the union in the American Civil War, while Kentucky was neutral. That’s seems like it’s worth something until you discover, as I did, that Indiana made sure slavery was never legal not because they thought it was wrong, but because it would bring more Black people into the state and they did not want that. Before I learned that about Indiana, I didn’t even know that could be a reason to oppose slavery. Go figure.
Stranger Things is set in Indiana, though it’s filmed in Georgia. There is no Pawnee, Indiana. Parks and Recreation is filmed in southern California. John Green’s book, The Fault In Our Stars, is set in Indianapolis, but does anyone care? I recently read Rebecca Makkai’s novel, I Have Some Questions for You, and the main character is technically from Indiana. That’s what the novel says. Indiana. She’s from a small town in Indiana. You can tell that Makkai was like, “What totally generic place can I have this woman be from so that I don’t have to do the least bit of research about what it might be like to live there and no one will assume that where she’s from matters in the least?” The answer was…Indiana.
My own young adult novel is set in Indiana, in a town much like Madison. So are the short stories I’ve been working on for the last year or so. When I workshopped one of the stories earlier this year, people wanted to know more about the details of the small town, but what they wanted to know was very specific. “Like, what industries are failing?” one of the people asked. “How are people struggling?” Also, they found it implausible that a small town in Indiana would have one drag show, let alone three. Huh.
I set my stories in Indiana because it’s where I live and I don’t trust people who write stories that are deeply grounded in a place they’ve never lived, let alone visited. I write stories set in Indiana because I know that this state is not as blank as everyone imagines it to be. Sure, we may have a very stupid name, but that doesn’t make us stupid.
I still don’t know if I’m a Hoosier or not, but I know that every place has interesting stories to tell. It did matter that Rebecca Makkai’s character was from Indiana, even if Makkai couldn’t conceive of how. Probably that left the character with a big chip on her shoulder. Probably she had to spend a lot of time explaining the difference between Illinois, Idaho and Indiana. All the I-states are the same, right? Maybe she wanted to love where she was from and who she was because of it, but couldn’t quite work out how, which is the kind of story I’d love to read.
We became acutely aware of blandness and identity-less-ness (new word) of Indiana when we were in England. We resorted to telling people we are from Kentucky which they knew from horse races and bourbon. Nothing I could say about Indiana helped in getting folks to understand where or "why" it is. I am a born Hoosier yet know less about this state than I do others, and little about it even interests me. I have no clue as to the whereabouts of places like Kokomo, Terre Haute, Fort Wayne, or Valparaiso.
Here in Idaho, we have a “Slickpoo,” a “Buzzard’s Roost,” and a “! Creek,” which is how the cartographers sanitized that creek you are up without a paddle. There is a giant granite monolith originally called “The Unmentionable,” another called “Elephants Perch,” and those oh! so lovely to the eyes of lonely French fur trappers peaks called the Grand Tetons, or in English, the “Big Boobs.” We also have a “Chicken Dinner Road” and a “Frozen Dog Road.” And that mysteriously named creek draining into the Salmon River called Chair Creek, which I explored as a kid and found an old outhouse built over it, apparently the chair in question.
Does anyone else have a Skookumchuck Creek?