[lg policy] Fwd: Tribes See Name on Oregon Maps as Being Out of Bounds

[Harold Schiffman]

Forwarded From: Fierman, William <wfierman at indiana.edu>
Date: Sun, Mar 29, 2015 at 12:36 PM

Tribes See Name on Oregon Maps as Being Out of Bounds



 *Tribes See Name on Oregon Maps as Being Out of Bounds*

By RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/p/richard_perezpena/index.html>MARCH
28, 2015

Photo

[image:
http://static01.nyt.com/images/2015/03/29/us/29names/29names-master675.jpg]

Teara Farrow Ferman of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian
Reservation. “I really didn’t think it would be this hard,” she said of an
attempt to change place names with “squaw.” Credit Mason Trinca for The New
York Times

Grant County, a mountainous patch of eastern Oregon, has few Native
Americans, but maps point to a different past, marking a spring, a rock,
three meadows and several creeks with “squaw” in their names.

Calling the term offensive, nearby tribes have asked for name changes, and
state law is on their side. But what may seem like a simple matter has
turned into a dispute with the county’s white leaders that has dragged on
for years, and may have years to go. Oregon and many other states have
learned the hard way that erasing objectionable place names is slow and
difficult at best, risks opening old wounds, and can divide people along
racial lines over what is offensive and whose history the names should
reflect.

“I really didn’t think it would be this hard,” said Teara Farrow Ferman,
manager of cultural resource programs for the Confederated Tribes of the
Umatilla Indian Reservation. “I didn’t think that we would still be
disputing this after so much time.”

The county agreed to change most of the names, but it would not accept the
Indian names proposed by the tribes.

Photo

[image:
http://static01.nyt.com/images/2015/03/29/us/29names-web02/29names-web02-master315.jpg]

Boyd Britton, a Grant County commissioner, said some of the proposed
changes raised safety concerns. Credit Blue Mountain Eagle

“When somebody says because we’re not embracing the Umatilla names, that’s
racist — that couldn’t be farther from the truth, and it makes me angry,”
said Boyd Britton, a county commissioner and its main representative on the
issue.

The American landscape has no shortage of potentially offensive labels that
mostly go unnoticed. There are Wetback Tank, N.M.; Hebe Canyon, Utah; and
Chinaman Flat, Ariz., to name just a few.

Once in a while, particular names draw attention, as when a Montana state
legislator this year proposed eliminating names that include “halfbreed” or
“breed.”

But the United States Board on Geographic Names, the obscure federal panel
that is the last word on maps, sets a high bar for name changes and will
not accept new ones without a consensus among interested local groups and
state and local officials.

Few words are off limits nationally — in fact, when it comes to ethnic
slurs, there are just two. Decades ago, the federal board banned a
derogatory term for blacks and one for Japanese, forcing hundreds of name
changes.

“There’s been discussion over the years about prohibiting others, but our
board takes a very conservative approach to making any changes,” said Lou
Yost, the board’s executive secretary for domestic names. “People disagree
on what’s acceptable, and views change over time.”

A case in point is Negro, once a commonly accepted term that fell out of
favor in the 1960s, though some government agencies used it until recently
<http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2014/11/07/us/politics/07reuters-usa-defense-race-language.html>.
It remains in hundreds of place names around the country, including many
that were changed from the n-word that was banished.

There are occasional efforts to change one or more Negro names. Yet after
South Dakota required removing the word from names there, some black
leaders argued for keeping it, and lawmakers rescinded the mandate last
year.

Efforts to remove “squaw” can draw bewildered reactions from white people,
who say they had no idea that Indians objected to it. Some Native Americans
do not take offense at the word, but many do, and some consider it so ugly
they call it “the s-word.”

English speakers have used the term for almost 400 years, starting in what
is now the Northeastern United States. Linguists say it probably derives
from terms for woman in Algonquian languages, but Indians often contend
that it comes from a word for vagina. (Sometimes, the vulgarity is beyond
debate; there are summits called Squaw Teat or derivations of that.)

No other objectionable word appears nearly as many times — about 1,000 — in
the federal place name database, and until the past decade, Oregon had the
highest concentration, though no one seems to know why.

And no other word has been the target of such a widespread and sustained
renaming campaign, with tribes around the country lobbying to eliminate it
since the 1990s. State legislatures in Maine, Minnesota, Montana, Oklahoma,
Oregon and South Dakota have passed measures to require or encourage the
elimination of “squaw” names, and there have been more scattered efforts in
other states.

The going has been slow. Montana’s law dates to 1999, and Oregon’s and
South Dakota’s to 2001, yet in all three states, some changes have not been
completed.

“It’s not like people here fought to keep the names — it just takes time,”
said June Hansen, chairwoman of the South Dakota Board on Geographic Names.

Members of state naming boards typically have other jobs and receive little
or no staff help or compensation, but before proposing any changes, they
are expected to research the history, consult all sides, hold hearings and
find common ground.

In many places, local resistance has made that hard. In 1995, Minnesota
became the first state to pass a law banishing the word squaw from map
locations, but the tiny city of Squaw Lake refused to change, and the name
survives. In Maine, Piscataquis County commissioners disdained the
name-change mandate and just changed every “squaw” to “moose,” then tried
to change them back
<http://archive.bangordailynews.com/2006/09/08/piscataquis-county-leaders-want-squaw-names-restored/>
.

Such disputes have flared around the country, and lately, none is hotter
than the one in Grant County, home to 7,000 people, 95 percent of them
white. The Umatilla reservation — home of the Cayuse, Walla Walla and
Umatilla tribes — lies in neighboring Umatilla County.

Five years ago, the tribes proposed a set of Indian names, but many local
officials and residents balked, often insisting that squaw names were fine.

“A lot of non-Indians don’t think they’re being derogatory when they use
the s-word,” said Ms. Farrow Ferman, of the Umatilla tribes. “But there’s a
history of it being used as a slur, and most of us hear it that way.”

Officials protested that some of the name changes proposed by Native
Americans — like Sáykiptatpa and Nikéemex — were too hard to pronounce,
prompting the tribes to create an interactive pronunciation guide
<http://data.umatilla.nsn.us/maps/namechanges/>.

“Seriously, can you pronounce them?” asked Mr. Britton, the county
commissioner. “It’s a safety issue. Someone making a 911 call has to say
the location, and the dispatcher has to understand and repeat it to the
sheriff.”

Opponents of the name changes have argued with the Umatilla tribes over
which tribes actually lived in the area, turning public hearings into
debates on archaeology and linguistics.

“There’s some feeling in Grant County that because the Indians don’t live
there, they should have no say, but of course, they’re not there because
they were forced onto reservations,” said Phil Cogswell, a retired
journalist who heads the Oregon Geographic Names Board. “People often want
names with a historical reference, but they tend to think back to settler
days, not the people who were there for thousands of years.”

The County Commission proposed replacing most of the squaw names, but not
all, with names in English. The tribes eventually agreed to a list with
about half the names drawn from each camp, which the Oregon board adopted
and sent to the federal board. The county rejected the compromise and
submitted its own list to Washington.

“When it comes to Grant County and representing our citizens,” Mr. Britton
said, “I want it all.”

A version of this article appears in print on March 29, 2015, on page A16
of the New York edition with the headline: Tribes See Name on Oregon Maps
as Being Out of Bounds. Order Reprints
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 Harold F. Schiffman

Professor Emeritus of
 Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
Dept. of South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone:  (215) 898-7475
Fax:  (215) 573-2138

Email:  haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/

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