Colorado to change offensive place names

IDAHO SPRINGS, Colo. — Colorado takes immense pride in the soaring peaks, sparkling creeks and red rocks that have made it famous as a wilderness wonderland. But in recent months, the state has been publicly grappling with shame over what some of those landmarks are called.

A new state board mulling proposals to rename more than two dozen natural features has made addressing derogatory names its top priority. Negro Mesa and Redskin Mountain are being reconsidered. Chinaman Gulch, the board decided Thursday, should be changed to Yan Sing Gulch, which means “resilience” in Cantonese.

This fall, the panel recommended changing Squaw Mountain, which rises above this quaint Clear Creek County town and contained a term widely considered offensive to Native American women. The replacement, approved this month by a federal board, is Mestaa’ehehe Mountain, after a 19th-century Cheyenne translator also known as Owl Woman, who brokered peace between white people and Indigenous people on the Colorado plains.

“Words mean ideas,” said Randy Wheelock, a member of the county commissioners’ board, which had previously declined to endorse a change but this year decided the time had come. “These new words that we learn will connect us to the real history.”

The Colorado names are hardly unusual. Hundreds of natural features nationwide bear similar terms that were once common but are now viewed as unacceptable slurs. This is especially so in the American West, where 19th-century government mapmakers sometimes named spots in the wide-open spaces using rough approximations of what Indigenous people already called them but often based on what white settlers had dubbed them — pejorative or otherwise.

Debates over such names, and over landmarks named for enslavers and others with tainted legacies, have simmered for decades. But the Colorado Geographic Naming Advisory Board’s formation — after several years when such proposals gathered dust in the state — reflects an energized push to reassess names across the landscape amid a reckoning over racial justice that has led to toppled statues, new sport teams mascots and debate about bird names.

The problem, some advocates and lawmakers say, is that the very formal process for renaming mountains, lakes and gullies does not meet the urgency of the moment.

That argument was endorsed last month by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, who declared the word “squaw” to be derogatory and ordered the creation of a task force to scrub it from more than 650 geographic names, as well as a diverse committee to recommend changes to other offensive place names. The moves, she said, will “accelerate” the current process, under which a long-standing federal naming board considers proposals on a case-by-case basis after input from state bodies like Colorado’s. By next fall, “squaw” could be history on U.S. maps.

“Racist terms have no place in our vernacular or on our federal lands,” Haaland, the first Native American to serve as a Cabinet secretary, said in a statement.

Her orders followed momentum in several states to revisit names on maps. California announced in the fall of 2020 an initiative to “redress discriminatory names” attached to state parks. Utah lawmakers passed a bill to facilitate geographic renaming proposals, and Nevada’s assembly required a state board to focus on recommending changes to racist place names. In June, the federal board renamed 16 Texas sites containing “Negro” after urging from state lawmakers.

Under the current process, renaming a summit or stream is subject to layers of review and can take years. Final approval rests with the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, which was formed by President Benjamin Harrison in 1890 to standardize names and spellings on federal maps.

In the year ending Oct. 14, the board received or acted on 430 proposals, about a quarter of which addressed names considered offensive — a category of submissions that is growing, said Jennifer Runyon, a senior researcher for the board. Among them: Mulatto Run in Virginia, Sambo Creek in Pennsylvania and Dead Indian Mountain in Oregon.

“A lot of the names did, of course, override what was a name given by a tribal group,” Runyon said. “We can’t disregard the fact that they had names for those places.”

Successful proposals must follow certain rules: The n-word and a slur for Japanese are banned, as squaw now is. Long names are discouraged. Only people or animals dead at least five years can have places named for them. The board researches the history of current names and suggested replacements, seeks input from state and local players, and solicits feedback from all 574 federally recognized tribes.

But the board has long given significant deference to states, which approach the task with wide variation. Colorado’s 15-person board, largely composed of scholars and politicians, meets monthly. California’s meets three times a year. Arizona’s was frozen during the coronavirus pandemic, when its funding expired. Most state bodies consist of one or a few people, and North Dakota has no active board, Runyon said.

Jennifer Touchine, a Navajo resident of Mesa, Ariz., was shocked last year when she was hiking outside Phoenix and saw on Google maps that a nearby summit was labeled “Squaw Tits” — a name that hit her like an insult with a flourish of misogyny. Soon after, she learned the federal board agreed to change it to Isanaklesh Peaks, after an Apache deity.

Touchine, an accountant, had found a new calling: changing other place names containing squaw.

But she was frustrated to learn that several existing proposals in Arizona had been pending for several years, which the federal board says is because local tribes disagree on replacements. Touchine has since submitted a proposal to change a Squaw Peak in the Prescott National Forest to Porcupine Mountain, a name she selected in consultation with the Yavapai-Apache Nation, who told her the Tonto Apache knew the peak as Das Zine Das Dahe, or “Where the Porcupine Sits.”

But because the Arizona board has no meeting scheduled, Touchine wasn’t sure when her concern could be aired. She is thrilled about Haaland’s order.

“It was very validating, like I have someone at the highest rank to say yes, it is derogatory,” said Touchine, who plans to keep writing proposals, which she hopes can serve as “a starting point” for the future federal task force. “It’ll be easier for them to help me push these names forward.”

The task force will choose replacements for squaw-named places from nearby geographical features — “a complete 180” from the current process, which starts with proposals from the outside, Runyon said Thursday. The public, including state bodies and agencies, will then have 30 days to comment, a timeline that some on the Colorado board expressed concern is far too hurried.

The change to Mestaa’ehehe Mountain, a pine-blanketed summit about 45 minutes west of Denver, was encouraged by activists who formed a group called the Mestaa’ehehe Coalition in 2020.

“After the killing of George Floyd, it seemed like people were ready to start talking about these injustices and how the names of places either perpetuate them or serve as a form of erasure,” said Katie Simota, a Denver-area community organizer who helped found the group.

Teanna Limpy, tribal historic preservation officer for the Northern Cheyenne tribe, submitted the proposal to change it to Mestaa’ehehe, which is pronounced mess-taw-HAY. The coalition hosted webinars on the proposal and the county held town halls. This time, the idea won broad support in Clear Creek County, said Wheelock, the county commissioner.

The effort, though, almost ended in the governor’s mansion. At the board’s October meeting, Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, who ordered the creation of the board, said he liked the name but nearly rejected it over concern its written form was “not something people can text or really even say.”

Participants were unmoved. Board member Adrienne Benavidez, a Democratic state lawmaker, called Polis’ view “really problematic.”