Panel OKs name change of Colorado mountain tied to massacre

DENVER (AP) — A Colorado state panel really helpful Thursday that Mount Evans, a distinguished peak close to Denver, be renamed Mount Blue Sky on the request of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes.

The Colorado Geographic Naming Advisory Board voted unanimously for the change. Colorado Gov. Jared Polis will weigh in on the advice earlier than a closing resolution by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names.

Thursday’s vote comes as a part of nationwide efforts to deal with a historical past of colonialism and oppression towards Native People and different individuals of shade after protests in 2020 referred to as for racial justice reform.

The proposed identify change acknowledges the Arapaho had been generally known as the Blue Sky Individuals, whereas the Cheyenne maintain an annual renewal-of-life ceremony referred to as Blue Sky.

The 14,264-foot (4,348-meter) peak southwest of Denver is known as after John Evans, Colorado’s second territorial governor. Evans resigned after an 1864 U.S. cavalry bloodbath of greater than 200 Arapaho and Cheyenne individuals — most of them ladies, kids and the aged — at Sand Creek in what’s now southeastern Colorado.

Fred Mosqueda, a member of the Southern Arapaho tribe and a Sand Creek descendant, mentioned throughout Thursday night time’s assembly that when he first realized Mount Blue Sky was a attainable various, it “hit me like a bolt of lightning. It was the right identify.”

“I used to be requested as soon as, ‘Why are you so imply to the identify Evans?’” he recalled. “And I informed them, ’Give me one cause to be good or to say one thing good. Present me one factor that Evans has completed that I as Arapaho can have fun.’ They usually couldn’t.”

Mosqueda, who has been actively concerned in Mount Evans’ renaming course of, mentioned Evans was within the excellent place as territorial governor to offer the tribes a reservation, however “as an alternative he went the genocide route.”

Polis, a Democrat, revived the state’s 15-member geographic naming panel in July 2020 to make suggestions for his assessment earlier than they’re forwarded to the federal group.

Final yr, the federal panel authorized renaming one other Colorado peak after a Cheyenne girl who facilitated relations between white settlers and Native American tribes within the early nineteenth century.

Mestaa’ėhehe Mountain, pronounced “mess-taw-HAY,” honors and bears the identify of an influential translator, also called Owl Lady, who mediated between Native People and white merchants and troopers in what’s now southern Colorado.

The mountain 30 miles (48 kilometers) west of Denver had been generally known as Squaw Mountain. Its renaming got here after U.S. Inside Secretary Deb Haaland, the nation’s first Native American cupboard official, formally declared “squaw” a derogatory time period and introduced steps to take away it from federal authorities use and rename different derogatory place names.

Squaw, which is derived from the Algonquin language, could as soon as have merely meant “girl.” However over generations, the phrase become a misogynist and racist time period to disparage Indigenous ladies.