State replaces controversial name of small coastal park

The California Department of Parks and Recreation renamed a small park in Humboldt County on Thursday — the first in what the agency has signaled will be a broader renaming of public lands and geographic places across the state.

Patrick’s Point, a bluff-top park 30 miles north of Eureka overlooking Agate Beach and the Pacific Ocean, will now be known as Suemeg State Park. It’s the descriptor used by the indigenous Yurok people “since time immemorial,” according to a statement Thursday from California state parks.

The name Patrick’s Point had been in place since the 1800s and was kept in place after the park department acquired the land in 1930, according to the agency.

It referenced “a homesteader, Patrick Beegan, who was accused of murdering numerous Native Americans,” the agency said in a statement last month.

The land had traditionally been home to Yurok villages supported by fishing and hunting. But during the Gold Rush, the Yurok “suffered from violence, exploitation, dispossession and the attempted destruction of Yurok communities by an influx of Euro-American settlers and deleterious federal and state policies,” according to the agency.

The park was an obvious target for the agency’s “Reexamining Our Past“initiative, which was started last year to identify potentially discriminatory names and change ones deemed offensive. The Yurok people have been asking the state government for decades for a change, said Victor Bjelajac, superintendent of the park department’s North Coast Redwoods District.

“This is a 40- to 50year-old ask from Yurok people,” Bjelajac said. “They’ve always referreed to it as Sue-meg. But now we have a political climate right now and a process where it’s is possible to move this forward.”

State parks Director Armando Quintero called the renaming “a momentous step to heal relationships with Native Americans and working together in recognition and honor of indigenous cultural and linguistic relationships.”

Last fall, amid a national reckoning over place names affiliated with Confederate Civil War icons and Native American displacement, three state agencies overseeing public lands announced the creation of a special committee to examine geographic names that might merit changing. Since then, the newly formed California Advisory Committee on Geographic Names has been reevaluating names on behalf of the park department, Caltrans and the state Natural Resources Agency.

“This is a generational moment that calls for the California Department of Parks and Recreation to take stock of and critically examine our state’s historical legacy,” Quintero said at the time. “We want every Californian, whether they are first generation or the 500th generation, to feel welcome in parks and see stories shared by all voices.”

The effort ties into a nationwide rethinking of offensive or discriminatory names given to public lands, universities and academic institutions, professional sports teams and other businesses.

Earlier this month, the famous Lake Tahoe ski resort formerly known as Squaw Valley opted to change its name as a gesture of good will toward the indigenous Washoe tribe. A town in Fresno County also named Squaw Valley is heading toward its own reckoning on its name.

California Department of Parks and Recreation Sue-meg State Park, formerly known as Patrick’s Point, overlooks Agate Beach in Humboldt County. The new name comes from the Yurok tribe.