On Tuesday, the Interior Department released its proposed name changes for 660 federal sites that include “squaw” in their monikers, a term that American Indians and their allies consider a slur against Native women. For each site, five alternative names are offered.
This is part of the department’s move to scrub demeaning names from public lands under Interior Secretary Deb Haaland’s Secretarial Executive Order 3404 and 3405. The first order created the 13-member Derogatory Geographic Names Task Force made up of representatives from federal land management agencies and the Department of Agriculture.
Its first decision was to mandate that “sq---” be used in all future official communications. Order 3405 created the Advisory Committee on Reconciliation in Place Names to solicit, review, and recommend changes to other derogatory geographic and public land names. When the orders were announced in November 2021, Haaland said:
"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. Today’s actions will accelerate an important process to reconcile derogatory place names and mark a significant step in honoring the ancestors who have stewarded our lands since time immemorial.”
Under the current system, the Board on Geographic Names makes case-by-case changes based on what proposals it receives. But this isn’t the first time efforts have been made to change derogatory place names wholesale. Sixty years ago, Secretary Stewart Udall ordered the N-word struck from any place names, and the board later determined that a slur against Japanese people be eliminated. In addition, according to the department, Montana, Oregon, Maine, and Minnesota have all barred use of “squaw” in place names.
The public has 60 days to make comments on the matter.