Visiting Contested Terrain: Archiving, Auditing, and Reforming Commemorative Place Names on US Marine Corps Bases

In recent years, commemorative naming has been discussed and called into question in the U.S. military, and with the establishment of the Confederate Naming Commission by Congress in 2021, representatives for branches of the US military and Department of Defense were tasked with evaluating commemorative practices associated with valorizing Confederate history. In this paper, we focus specifically on place naming patterns on US Marine Corps bases through an engagement with military archives. These archives are part of a hegemonic control of memory that sits uncomfortably at the intersection of the racialized history of the Armed Forces and its growing reliance on a multi-cultural America. We argue and find early evidence that the archives constitute contested terrain and the commemorative audits conducted by military institutions are a potentially fraught practice given possible self-interest and potential lack of a critical perspective on the past and place. We encountered many of the difficulties that complicate name reform and the commemorative audits, such as negotiated access to the physical archives and data, inconsistent practices and documentation which contributed to an incomplete audit, and conflicts with institutional interest. Even with the Confederate Naming Commission's recent reports and recommendations for renaming some military bases and structures, there remains a demand for greater attention to the audits of commemorative place names utilized to make such recommendations. This demand necessitates a recognition that the legacy of racism and racial violence goes far beyond the years of the Confederacy, particularly regarding the landscapes of the United States military.