In March 2021, Rep. Deb Haaland of New Mexico was confirmed as secretary of the Department of the Interior. The move also made Haaland the first American Indian to serve in a presidential Cabinet. Equally as important was that Haaland represented a more progressive view of the job of than previous large landowners and fossil fuel company stooges who have held the position in previous administrations.
One of Haaland’s responsibilities as the secretary is to reshape how Americans see our country’s natural resources and beauty. It is a job of stewardship over an area Americans are supposed to call home. This includes protecting wildlife and waterways and analyzing what and how we should share our lands. Another way is to try and evolve our interior spaces to better represent our development as a country.
To that end, Haaland has made one of her missions to rename parts of the country that were given their names by racists, at a time when racism towards American Indians was considered a foundational attribute of being a white American. On Thursday, Haaland announced the renaming of five places that had once used a racist term towards Native American women, saying: “Words matter, particularly in our work to ensure our nation’s public lands and waters are accessible and welcoming to people of all backgrounds.”
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In a statement released Thursday, the secretary listed out the name changes:
- Sq___ Hill, Calif.: Name changed to Loybas Hill. Proposed by the Paskenta Band of Nomlaki Indians, the name translates to “Young Lady” and honors the past, present and future Native women from and living in the area.
- Sq___ Valley, Calif.: Name changed to Yokuts Valley, which was proposed during the public comment period. Yokuts translates to “people.”
- Sq___ Gap, N.D.: Name changed to Homesteaders Gap, which was selected by the community in the populated area as relevant to their local history.
- Sq___berry, Tenn.: Name changed to Partridgeberry, another common name for the plant for which the community is currently named.
- Sq___ Mountain, Texas: Name changed to Lynn Creek in honor of Isaac Lynn, who lived on the creek nearby that bears his name.
In November 2021, Haaland announced the Interior’s plans to do away with the offensive term “squaw” that remained attached to nearly 650 federal sites. In a statement, Haaland explained, "Racist terms have no place in our vernacular or on our federal lands. Our nation’s lands and waters should be places to celebrate the outdoors and our shared cultural heritage – not to perpetuate the legacies of oppression.”
This past September, those names were changed officially after a long process was worked on by the Board on Geographic Names and the Derogatory Geographic Names Task Force. Haaland established the two groups to go through over 1,000 recommendations for name changes suggested during a public comment period, and included federal and Tribal representatives. You can see the updated list of sites renamed here.
Haaland has been able to make these changes on federal land sites and sites not under the municipal jurisdictions of any given state. She has repeatedly said that she hopes states will use their powers to continue the work of renaming problematic places, and some have. In November, Colorado changed the name of Mount Evans to Mount Blue Sky after Native American groups organized around the effort. Mount Evans had been named after “John Evans, Colorado’s second territorial governor. Evans resigned after an 1864 U.S. cavalry massacre of more than 200 Arapaho and Cheyenne people — most of them women, children and the elderly — at Sand Creek in what is now southeastern Colorado.”
The first story in American history is its beginnings as a continent that was expanded into by Europeans beginning in the late 1400s. The relationship between the newly landed Europeans and the Native nations living throughout the land is this part of the world’s modern history. When America became an official country, our nation’s identity proceeded to wrap itself up in the wholesale expansion and destruction of the American Indian.
At every point in our country’s history we have used the American Indian as symbology of something other than human. Whether using the term Apache or Cherokee to symbolize wild savagery in the Monument Valley landscape of hundreds of American westerns or offering up a two-dimensional quasi-mysticism in thousands of other American popular stories, Native people have always been othered in the most profound way.
Changing what we call the things around us is a step towards not simply identifying the world and people around us more correctly, it is a step towards reconciling what we are and what we may still hope to become.
Enjoy a short interview we did with Haaland back in 2019 as a part of our Making Progress series.
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