Recent Highlights

Native Issues

Hampton, S.C. 2025. The Native women in the Capitol Rotunda: The interior decorating of a white male ethnostate. Native Hoop 146: February 2025. Also at my Substack.

Keynote address at the Decolonizing Bird Knowledge Symposium, hosted by the Tsleil-Waututh First Nation and the Wild Bird Trust of British Columbia at Maplewood Flats, BC. November 30, 2024.

Hampton, S.C. 2024. Women Leaders are an Indigenous Tradition; Is it Time for a Woman US President? Native News Online. October 9, 2024.

Hampton, S.C. 2024. Revelations about the Revolution: The Freedom to Steal Land from “Merciless Indian savages” was Key to the Declaration of Independence. Native News Online. July 4, 2024. Also in Yahoo News.

Hampton, S.C. 2024. Mass burials and unmarked graves. Native Hoop 144: December 2024.

Hampton, S.C. 2024. Sky Woman vs The Hillbilly: An Indigenous Critique. Native Hoop 141: September 2024.

Hampton, S.C. 2024. Eclipses and Native Revivals. Native News Online. April 2, 2024. Also in Yahoo News.

Hampton, S.C. 2023. After “Killers of the Flower Moon,” There Are Many More Indigenous Stories to Be Told. Native News Online. August 9, 2023. Also in Yahoo News.

Hampton, S.C. 2023. Dear Justice Alito: What You Don’t Know About Us. Native News Online. April 23, 2023. Also in YahooNews and Native Hoop 129: Sept 2023.

Hampton, S.C. 2024. Eclipses and Native Revivals. Native Hoop 136: April 2024.

Hampton, S.C. 2024. Voices from the Boarding Schools. Native Hoop 134: February 2024.

Hampton, S.C. 2023. Standing Rock and DAPL in 2023: The public’s second chance to fight the black snake. Native Hoop 131: November 2023.

Hampton, S.C. 2023. “White history” on the northern Plains: How the word is not passed. Native Hoop 130: October 2023.

Hampton, S.C. 2023. Going Nuclear: The High School Mascot of Mass Destruction. Rainshadow Journal. August 11, 2023.

Bird Names

Cadena, C. D. et al. 2023. Ad Hoc English Bird Names Committee Recommendations for Council of the American Ornithological Society (AOS). Report to AOS. November 1, 2023.

Hampton, S.C. 2023. From a Native perspective, bird names are being decolonized. Native Hoop 132: Dec 2023.

See also my blog posts:

The trials of John P. McCown: Why the case-by-case approach is already dead. The Cottonwood Post, February 28, 2024.

The fun part: New bird names. The Cottonwood Post, May 14, 2022. Focuses on 82 species, providing scientific and historic names, as well as their names in other languages.

Reflections of a Native birder: The one Indian killer bird name I really have trouble with. Memories of the People, June 6, 2021.

Erasure, white fragility, and the verbal monuments of bird names: Should we hold people in the past accountable to present-day mores? Memories of the People, June 4, 2021.

Honorific bird names facts and figures. The Cottonwood Post, May 30, 2021. Provides background on when, where, and by and for whom all these names came from. See the chart below.

Featured in:

American Birding Podcast. January 4, 2024. Inside the Bird Name Committee.

Ed Yong’s article in The Atlantic. May 25, 2023. The Fight Over Animal Names Has Reached a New Extreme.

Sierra Club Magazine. April 27, 2024. What’s in a bird name? By Julia Zarankin.

High Country News. January 5, 2024. (Re)name that bird! Now’s your chance.

The Bird Banter Podcast. December 11, 2023. The Bird Banter Podcast #166 with Steve Hampton, Additional Info. (This includes discussion of other birding topics as well; the bird names discussion starts at 14:10.)

The Nature Conservancy Magazine. August 25, 2023. The Movement to Rename Species. By Suzanne Goldsmith.

Audubon Magazine. Summer 2022. What’s in a bird name? By Ariana Remmel.

BirdNote podcast. June 1, 2022. Bring Birds Back: Season 2, Episode 3. What’s in a Name?

Science News. August 25, 2021. Racism lurks in names given to plants and animals. That’s starting to change. By Jaime Chambers.