Wyoming Republicans would cancel Indigenous culture

In 2015 with the Oglala Lakota Nation as an interested party Chief Arvol Looking Horse submitted a request to the US Board on Geographic Names saying the words “Devils Tower” are a malapropism. The tower, a remnant of an intrusive laccolith, has been called Mahto Tipila or Bear Lodge for centuries by some twenty Indigenous cultures including the Arapaho, Cheyenne, Crow and Lakota, who inhabited the region for at least a thousand years. 

After successes by tribal nations renaming geographical features in Alaska and South Dakota Yellowstone National Park could see at least two name changes. Hayden Valley memorializes Ferdinand V. Hayden who advocated for “extermination” of tribal people and Mount Doane is named for Lieutenant Gustavus Doane who led a massacre of the Piikani, part of the Blackfoot Confederacy. Senator Lisa Murkowski and the US Park Service succeeded in what Alaskans asked of Congress after urging the body to approve a name change for North America's highest peak to Denali, an Athabascan name meaning “the high one.”

Now, Senators Cynthia Lummis and co-sponsor John Barrasso have introduced a bill to permanently cancel the name Bear's Lodge or Mahto Tipila from Devils Tower National Monument in the Wyoming Black Hills. 

Exploiting the gap between the Cordilleran and Laurentide ice sheets during the Wisconsin Glacial Episode the Clovis People were the first humans to see the Missouri Buttes and Mahto Tipila in Wyoming. The Clovis culture thrived on the high plains and in the Black Hills before settling the rest of the Mississippi basin but those pioneers had already explored parts of Montana long before they found Clovis, New Mexico where their stone tools were unearthed in the 1920s. 

Before US 14 was widened a team led by Adrien Hannus from Augustana University uncovered evidence of human habitation from over 12,000 years ago in a cave in Boulder Canyon near Sturgis, South Dakota. At one excavation site in Wyoming evidence revealed that humans killed a mammoth with a Clovis pointed spear launched from an atlatl, a type of throwing stick. Nearby Inyan Kara Peak in the Wyoming Black Hills is the bastardization of Amerindian words where chert was quarried for atlatl points. 

Sure, the Lakota acquired horses around 1742 then used them as weapons of mass destruction conquering most of the northern plains and the Black Hills region. But, likely with help from dogs for some ten thousand years before that the ancestors of the Crow, Arikara and others drove bison over cliffs and into sinkholes like the Vore site near Beulah, Wyoming.

With Democrats controlling the White House, both chambers of Congress and a tribal member set to become Interior Secretary with Park Service oversight the Wyoming Republicans' bill is likely doomed.

Read more about the Republican effort to cancel Indigenous culture at the Casper Star-Tribune and more about the Indigenous history in the Yellowstone here.

Photos: the Missouri Buttes framed with Mahto Tipila at sunset and Inyan Kara across the Belle Fourche River under a nearly full moon from near Carlile, Wyoming.