Squaw Valley plans to drop ‘racist and sexist’ resort name
Squaw Valley, a destination and a brand that put the entire Lake Tahoe snow skiing region on the international map when it hosted the 1960 Olympic Winter Games, is Squaw Valley no more.
The owner of the ever expanding, yearround resort now known as Squaw Valley Alpine Meadows said Tuesday it plans to drop the word squaw from its name, calling the term “racist and sexist.”
“We see that our name is something that our neighbors think is offensive to them,” Squaw Valley President and COO Ron Cohen said in an interview. “In a country that is undergoing a significant reckoning over racial injustice, it is important for us to think deeply about those issues and act on it.”
An internal renaming committee will select a
new name by next year. The Squaw Valley name will remain until then, owing to the difficulty of overhauling the “thousands of places where that name appears,” Cohen said. He said the name change had been under discussion on and off for the past 25 years.
The name change was prompted by pushback from local Native American tribes, who have called for the change for years. Particular pressure came from the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California, said Victoria Christensen, executive assistant to the tribe’s chairman.
The connotations associated with the word “squaw” are particularly troubling for Washoe women, she said, because Squaw Valley was known as the site of rapes and kidnappings.
“When white immigrants came, they used to buy and sell Native American women there,” Christensen said. “That is why they called it Squaw Valley — because that’s where men went to get women.”
The tribe’s historical preservation office has been lobbying Placer County officials and business owners to instead use Olympic Valley, which is the name of the post office and unincorporated community at the base of the mountain, Christensen said.
But changing the name on the United States Geological Survey map will require federal action, said Dave Antonucci, a retired Tahoe City civil engineer. That’s one reason the name change on the resort has been such a long time coming.
In an online post, the ski resort acknowledged that the efforts of local tribes helped it decide to finally remove the derogatory term from its property and branding. The name has been in use since 1949.
“Having our name be associated with pain and dehumanization is contrary to our goal of making the outdoors a welcoming space for all people,” Cohen wrote on the resort’s website.
The ski resort’s name change is seen as a step forward, but the use of the word squaw remains common throughout the valley, something the Washoe Tribe hopes will change, Christensen said.
Squaw Valley is the latest in a string of highprofile name changes in recent months, including the Washington Football Team’s July announcement that it would no longer use the nickname Redskins.
Mounting public pressure has led to a reevaluation of the way that Indigenous tribes are represented in place names and marketing, said Debra Merskin, a professor at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication who studies media portrayals of marginalized people.
The use of slurs is so commonplace that “unless you are in the group that it is used against, you might say it’s no big deal,” Merskin said.
However long the name change has been rumored, only lately have members of the skiing community started to acknowledge and accept it.
“My initial response was, ‘Oh, c’mon,’ but I’ve been convinced that it does have a derogatory and demeaning aspect to it that has to be observed and rectified,” said Dale Chamblin, a ski instructor who serves on the board of the Squaw Valley Ski Museum Foundation, another name that will have to be changed. The working title is the Sierra Nevada Olympic and Winter Sports Museum — SNOW for short.
Also expected to follow are the private businesses such as Squaw Valley Electric, Squaw Valley Glass and Squaw Valley Snow Removal, then all the names on the mountain, including the Squaw Peak chairlift.
“Even the road name has to change,” said Jim Lewis, who splits his time between homes in Orinda and Olympic Valley, and has been a Squaw season ticket holder since 1969. He is among the oldtimers who agree that the term “squaw” is derogatory and offensive but the name Squaw Valley is not.
“Squaw Valley is referring to a place that was honored by having the 1960 Olympics and one of the best ski mountains in the world, KT22,” Lewis said. “‘Squaw’ is a derogatory reference to female Indians.”
According to Antonucci, author of two books on the 1960 Winter Olympics, the name Squaw Valley Ski Area was attached to the resort by its cofounders, Alex Cushing and Wayne Poulsen. They took it from a topographical map where it was first listed in the 19th century. Cushing later added to the lore by branding the resort Squaw Valley USA, as if no other geographic locator were needed.
Antonucci, who also serves on the ski museum board, is comfortable with the name change, and not just because he won’t have to retitle either of his books, “Snowball’s Chance: The Story of the 1960 Olympic Winter Games” or “The 1960 Winter Olympics.”
“Having the Olympics there kickstarted the whole Western ski industry,” Antonucci said. “For current generations it will probably always be known as Squaw Valley, but over time the new name will prevail.”