The map dots, resembling a scattergram of America, point to snow-covered pinnacles, remote islands and places in between.
Each of the 660 points, shown on maps of federal lands and waterways, includes the word “squaw” in its name, a term Native Americans regard as a racist and misogynistic slur.
Now the Interior Department, led by Deb Haaland, the first Native American Cabinet secretary, is taking steps to strip the word from mountains, rivers, lakes and other geographic sites and has solicited input from tribes on new names for the landmarks.
A task force created by the department will submit the new names for final approval from the Board on Geographic Names, the federal body that standardizes U.S. place names. The National Park Service was ordered to take similar steps.
“Words matter, particularly in our work to make our nation’s public lands and waters accessible and welcoming to people of all backgrounds,” Haaland said in a statement. “Consideration of these replacements is a big step forward in our efforts to remove derogatory terms whose expiration dates are long overdue.”
The move comes as private companies and professional sports teams are shedding names and imagery that many Native Americans find offensive amid a broader national reckoning over systemic racism.
Several states have passed laws mandating the erasure of the slur from nonfederal sites. They include Oregon, Maine, Montana and Minnesota, where at least one community, the city of Squaw Lake, has clung to its name. A bill has been introduced in the state Assembly in California to rename more than 100 places in that state.
Few places are more closely associated with the reckoning than Squaw Valley, the ski area in Lake Tahoe, in Northern California, that hosted the 1960 Winter Olympics. The private resort, which is not part of the federal renaming effort, rebranded itself Palisades Tahoe last September after years of debate over its identity.
All but 10 states appear to have at least one geographic feature on federal land or waterways that contains the slur, according to an interactive map maintained by the federal government. The names of civil features, including counties and incorporated places like Squaw Lake, Minnesota, are not part of the federal effort because they are outside the government’s authority.
Vanessa Esquivido, 36, a member of the Nor Rel Muk Wintu Nation in Northern California, said the slur’s continued use perpetuated demeaning stereotypes of Native American women.
Esquivido, a former professor of American Indian studies at California State University, Chico said that the reckoning over the word was long overdue but that Indigenous people still encountered a lack of awareness over its meaning.
“Native women and Native land are synonymous,” she said. “By calling them the S-word, it takes away their humanity. They’re nameless. They’re tribeless.”
Some places on the federal government’s list are better known than others. Among the more familiar is Squaw Mountain, an 8,000-foot peak near Provo, Utah, that is more commonly known as Squaw Peak and is popular with hikers, in part for its panoramic views. It is featured on the website of Explore Utah Valley, a tourism organization, which did not respond to a request for comment.
Other locales that bear the slur are far more obscure, relegated to nautical charts, such as Squaw Rocks, an outcropping in Long Island Sound off the coast of Branford, Connecticut.
Jane Bouley, a former town historian in Branford, said that the name most likely referred to a member of the Totoket tribe, a branch of the Quinnipiac Indians, who is identified in deeds from the 1730s and 1740s as Hannah Squaw.
“They eventually sold out to the colonists, whether under duress or of their own accord,” Bouley said, referring to the Totoket tribe, explaining that the nautical feature is not really a landmark. “It’s not even something you can hardly put your shoe on, especially with the tides rising,” she said.
Type the word “squaw” into Google Maps or Apple Maps, and a number of hits come up. Google, which relies on third-party data, information from local authorities and other sources, said the federal name changes would be reflected on its maps once they are finalized. Apple did not respond to requests for comment.
On Facebook and Instagram, visitors can still check in at Squaw Valley and tag their photos with the retired name more than five months after the resort became Palisades Tahoe. Meta, which owns both platforms, did not respond to a request for comment last week.
State governments have for decades been slowly chipping away at the pejorative names.
In 2003, a state panel in Arizona voted to rename a mountain in Phoenix called Squaw Peak for Lori Piestewa, an Army specialist who was killed in Iraq that year and was the first Native American woman to die in combat while serving in the U.S. military. Many Native Americans had been pressing for the change, which the Board on Geographic Names affirmed in 2008, but some critics said at the time that it was a heavy-handed, political move.
In 2000, mountains, waterways and other features in Maine were renamed under a state law targeting the slur, which a tribal representative said at the time had been used to slander women with offensive sexual connotations.
Name changes made at the state level are approved by the Board on Geographic Names, which has previously done away with pejorative terms for African Americans and Japanese people, to ensure they are used uniformly throughout the government.
The National Association of Tribal Historic Preservation Officers published a report this year that said national efforts to rename geographic locations in the United States that still bear racist or sexual slurs against Native Americans and African Americans were not “canceling history.”
“Rather,” it said, “it is an opportunity to provide a more honest accounting of America’s past and a gesture toward healing historic wounds.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
