DENVER – A federal committee approved the renaming of a Colorado summit after a Cheyenne woman who died in the early 19th century.
Mestaa’ehehe Mountain, pronounced “mess-taw-HAY”, bears the name and honors an influential translator, also known as the Owl Woman, who mediated between Indians and white traders and soldiers in what is now southern Colorado.
The renaming of so-called Squaw Mountain, 30 miles west of Denver, comes after US Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland formally declared “Squaw” as a derogatory designation in November and took steps to remove it from federal government use and rename others derogatory place names. Haaland is the first Native American cabinet officer.
The unanimous vote of the U.S. Geological Survey’s Board on Geographic Names on Thursday is also part of a national effort to unravel a history of colonialism and oppression of Native American and other colored people following the 2020 protests calling for racial justice reform.
The word “squaw”, derived from the Algonquin language, could once have simply meant “woman”. But over generations the word turned into a misogynist and racist term to denigrate indigenous women.
Squaw Valley Ski Resort in California changed its name to Palisades Tahoe earlier this year. The resort is located in the Olympic Valley, which was known as Squaw Valley until the 1960 Winter Olympics. For decades, tribes in the area have asked the resort to change its name.
The name change to Mestaa’ehehe Mountain was welcomed by Teanna Limpy, director of the Northern Cheyenne Tribal Historic Preservation Office and a leading proponent of the change, according to a report from Colorado Politics.
“There is no longer a derogatory name that is supposed to belittle the holiness and power of our women,” Limpy said in a statement. “Mestaa’ehehe will stand on this mountain for many generations to come and will continue to be an inspiring story for everyone and perhaps also a story that inspires others to continue learning other indigenous cultures and languages.”
The name change of the 11,486 foot peak, located in the Arapahoe and Roosevelt National Forests, is the first of several geographic name changes being considered by a state body.
Among them is 14,265-foot-tall Mount Evans, named for John Evans, Colorado’s second territorial governor, theEvans resigned after a U.S. cavalry mass in 1864sacred more than 200 Arapaho and CheyennePeople, most of them women, children, and the elderly, in Sand Creek in what is now southeastern Colorado.
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