Colorado moving to update offensive place names, whither Custer State Park?

In 2015 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." California has finally changed the name of its famous Squaw Valley Ski Resort to Palisades Tahoe. 

Now, blue state Colorado is moving to rename Chinaman Gulch, Negro Creek, Negro Mesa, Negro Basin, Negro Draw and Squaw Mountain.

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 the 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. But local opposition has been able to obstruct those changes so far.

Veteran columnist Kevin Woster wants to change the name of a South Dakota state park.

Open your mind for just a moment, and consider this as an alternative name for Custer State Park: Elk Song State Park. Or, in the Lakota: Makoce hehaka olowan. Certainly lovelier than Custer State Park, however attached you might be to that well-established name. The Elk Song alternative was suggested by Lanniko Lee, a Lakota writer from the Cheyenne River Tribe, when I reached out to her through my friend, Chuck Woodard. Makoce hehaka olowan is wonderfully lyrical and appropriate for a 71,000-acre park where elk do indeed sing. And a closer interpretation of the Lakota by Lee has it as “Land where elk sing.” George Armstrong Custer, after all, had a bit of a reputation with indigenous people, and not in the best of ways. In some of the worst, actually. [Kevin Woster]

Senators Cynthia Lummis and co-sponsor John Barrasso have introduced a bill to permanently cancel Indigenous culture by blocking the name Bear's Lodge or Mahto Tipila from Devils Tower National Monument in the Wyoming Black Hills. With Democrats controlling the White House, both chambers of Congress and after a tribal member just became Interior Secretary with Park Service oversight the Wyoming Republicans' bill is likely doomed. The Wyoming Board on Geographic Names is notoriously slow in removing offensive names from geographical features.

The area was originally referred to as “Squaw Buttes” in a 1906 U.S. Geological Survey publication, according to research by the federal government, but “Squaw Teats” became more common starting around 1938. Board chairman Herb Stoughton of Cheyenne said, over the years, the panel has heard proposals on a number of controversial names, including some that contained the N-word. [State board considers name change for the ‘Squaw Teats’]

Learn more about Colorado's progress linked here.

Photo: Mahto Tipila rises above the Belle Fourche River in a shot from Thorn Divide.