Renaming ‘squaw’ sites going slowly

SISTERS, Ore. – Olivia Wallulatum finds it hard to even look at the sign, a marker for the Squaw River. It reminds her of all the names she was called as a girl. And she wants something done about it. She wants the name changed.

“I don’t care what they change it to. I just want to see it go,” said Wallulatum, 50, a member of the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs.

Nearly a thousand places across the country – rivers, buttes, meadows, mountains – are named “squaw,” and most American Indians want them to be called something else.

Changing the names, though, isn’t happening with any great speed and certainly not without a struggle.

American Indians’ heightened sensitivity to the word came about in 1992 after an activist announced on a television talk show that squaw is derived from a vulgar Mohawk word.

Linguists maintain “squaw” means “woman” in the language of the Massachusett tribe, which once lived on the East Coast.

Three years later, activists and the government joined forces to change the names, but their efforts have been far from stellar. The U.S. Geographic Names Board shows that a decade of work has brought about different names for only 74 of the 967 places, less than 8 percent.

In Oregon, which has more places named “squaw” than anywhere else in the nation, only six of the roughly 170 names have been changed since 2001, the year lawmakers passed a bill banning the word.

The board’s executive director, Roger Payne, said part of the holdup is that tribal officials can’t agree on what word should replace the offensive term.

Payne cites a board survey of American Indian tribes. Although the majority wanted the squaw name to go, each tribe wanted to replace it with a word from its language, he said.

Oregon’s Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs is an example. In 2004, after three years of debate, the Warm Springs tribal council passed a resolution approving 42 words to replace squaw on the tribe’s ancestral land.

Public opposition also has slowed the process of erasing “squaw” from the U.S. map.

In Arizona, officials faced a fury of public opinion after they renamed Squaw Peak for Lori Piestewa, a Hopi servicewoman killed in Iraq.

Still, there have been times when eradicating “squaw” has gone smoothly.

In Maine’s Piscataquis County, commissioners voted to universally change “squaw” to “moose.” In Colorado, the endangered squawfish is now the Colorado pikeminnow. Glacier National Park’s Squaw Mountain is now Dancing Lady Mountain.

In Minnesota, 18 of the 19 squaw land and water forms were rechristened without objection. The exception is the town of Squaw Lake, population 99.

“Are we supposed to change our entire language to justify a few people’s misgivings?” asked Mayor Art Mertes, who maintains that the word is not derogatory.

Linguists say that Mertes is essentially right about the original meaning of “squaw.” It was a word from the Massachusett tribe used as early as 1663 in a translation of the Bible to mean “woman,” said Ives Goddard, a senior linguist at the Smithsonian Institution.

But Goddard cautions that the meaning of words change over time: “As we know, lots of words are considered offensive that have perfectly innocent etymologies. The famous ‘n’ word just meant black.”