Parts of Yellowstone National Park could be renamed after Native Americans criticized the glorification of men responsible for Indigenous genocide
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Parts of Yellowstone National Park could be renamed after Native Americans criticized the glorification of men responsible for Indigenous genocide
Mount Doane is a 10,500ft peak in Yellowstone national park, named for Lt Gustavus C Doane, a US army cavalry captain and explorer. In January 1870, he led a massacre that killed around 175 Blackfeet people, and he continued to brag about the incident throughout his life.
Hayden Valley, a broad valley that holds Yellowstone Lake, was christened for Dr Ferdinand V Hayden, a geologist and surveyor. He also advocated for the extermination of tribal people who refused to comply with federal dictates.
A group of Native Americans say such names can no longer stand. The Great Plains Tribal Chairman’s Association, an organization of tribal chairmen of 16 Sioux tribes from Nebraska and the Dakotas, is pursuing an application to change Mount Doane to First Peoples Mountain and Hayden Valley to Buffalo Nations Valley.
The proposal echoes moves to take down monuments commemorating Confederate leaders and proponents of slavery. And it mirrors other efforts across the US – and online – to rename landmarks bearing appellations rooted in racism.
“We’re not against certain names,” said William Snell, executive director of the Rocky Mountain Tribal Leaders Council, who supports the Yellowstone renaming. “But we’re not for names where individuals have been involved with genocide, where elders and children have been killed and there have been some traumatic events in our history that don’t meet standards of honor.”
The US Board on Geographic Names has received a slew of requests since the early 1990s related to the word “squaw”, which has an unclear history but is now recognized as insulting, and has given new names to everything from mountains to waterways and neighborhood streets. Notably, in 2013, it changed Squaw Peak in Phoenix, Arizona to Piestewa Peak, after Lori Ann Piestewa, the first Native American woman to die in combat serving in the US military.
“We’d be driving down the freeway and saying: ‘Oh my God, why do we still have to look at this disparaging name?’” said Jack Jackson Jr, a lawyer and former Arizona state senate member whose father, Jack Jackson Sr, drafted several name-change bills during his 15-year career in the Arizona legislature. “Native people are always facing disparaging names and mascots.”
In 2016, the board approved changing the name of Harney Peak, a mountain in South Dakota named after the US army general William S Harney, who led troops in an 1855 battle against the Brule Sioux and killed women and children as well as warriors. Its new title is Black Elk Peak, for a man believed to be a survivor of the battle.
At Yellowstone, the name change request has so far met with resistance. Local county representatives voted against it in early May, and in a motion the county commissioner, Tim French, said a name change was like “trying to change history”. The commissioners’ opposition could prove fatal. “The board on geographic names places a good deal of emphasis on local opinion,” said Lou Yost, its executive secretary.
The board, which meets monthly, has not yet scheduled a meeting to discuss the issue because it is waiting to hear from other state and federal officials.
Renaming efforts move more quickly online, where another grassroots effort is taking hold. The organization NativesOutdoors is both an outdoor apparel company and an Instagram account with 18,000 followers. The founder, Len Necefer, of the Navajo tribe, has been working for years to encourage Instagrammers to use original tribal names in the app’s geotagging feature instead of Americanized names.
Necefer himself used the Facebook geotagging system to identify four mountains surrounding the Navajo Nation, considered sacred boundaries, by their traditional names rather than the colonized terms.
In Colorado, he used the names Sisnaajiní and Dibé Nitsaa instead of Blanca Peak and Hesperus Mountain. To the west, he geotagged Arizona’s San Francisco Peaks as Dook’o’oosłiid. And in New Mexico, he tagged himself on Tsoodził rather than Mount Taylor.
“The creation of the first national parks, like Yellowstone and Glacier (national park), was predicated on the forced removal of indigenous populations from these areas,” Necefer told Outside Online earlier this year. “It created this myth that these are untouched wilderness areas.”
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Change all these names. This is the 21st century and the time to glorify racists and murderers is over.
“We’re not against certain names,” said William Snell, executive director of the Rocky Mountain Tribal Leaders Council, who supports the Yellowstone renaming. “But we’re not for names where individuals have been involved with genocide, where elders and children have been killed and there have been some traumatic events our history that don’t meet standards of honor.”
That shouldn't be difficult to understand.
There's a group here in NM that is pushing for replacing Onate's name with a traditional Pueblo/Tribal name. Onate was responsible for the massacre of thousands of Pueblo/tribal members yet the state has 17 monuments, a high school and numerous administration buildings and parks named in his "honor".
" Today Oñate is known for the 1599 Acoma Massacre. Following a dispute that led to the death of thirteen Spaniards at the hands of the Acoma, including Oñate's nephew, Juan de Zaldívar, Oñate ordered a brutal retaliation against Acoma Pueblo. The Pueblo was destroyed. Around 800-1000 Acoma were killed.
Of the 500 or so survivors, at a trial at Ohkay Owingeh, Oñate sentenced most to twenty years of forced "personal servitude" and additionally mandated that all men over the age of twenty-five have a foot cut off. He was eventually banished from New Mexico and exiled from Mexico City for five years, convicted by the Spanish government of using "excessive force" against the Acoma people.
Today, Oñate remains a controversial figure in New Mexican history: in 1998 the right foot was cut off a statue of the conquistador that stands in Alcalde, New Mexico in protest of the massacre, and significant controversy arose when a large equestrian statue of Oñate was erected in El Paso, Texas in 2006."
Excellent thread John - thanks.
Good seed, John.
This should be a no-brainer... but when the deciders have no brains.... 
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Hayden Valley was named for a geologist and surveyor who supported the extermination of tribal people who rejected federal dictates. Photograph: Ed Austin/Herb Jones