After Denali name change, attention turns to South Dakota's Harney Peak

...The Obama administration’s decision last month to rename Mount McKinley to Denali gave hope to Lakota Indians and their allies who are fighting to get the federal government to change a name they find offensive and inaccurate. It’s the latest controversy to come before the Board on Geographic Names, an obscure federal committee whose job it is to sort out naming disputes. Many of them are routine: Last week it voted to rename Mud Lake in Oakland County, Mich., to Lake Hope, in part because there are 216 other places named Mud Lake in Michigan. But the board is also called upon to settle the most contentious battles at the intersection of language, geography and culture. “There is no better argument for the importance of geographic names than the controversies that arise when someone, or some organization, or some government agency proposes changing them,” says Mark Monmonier, a distinguished professor of geography at Syracuse University and the author of From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow: How Maps Name, Claim and Inflame. He spoke Friday at a Library of Congress Symposium celebrating the 125th anniversary of the Board on Geographic Names. There are, for example, 866 features in the United States that still carry the name “Squaw,” which many Native Americans find to be a pejorative word for an Indian woman, even after the board has renamed 246 of them. There are 617 places that have the word “Negro” many of which were last renamed following a 1963order from the secretary of the Interior ordering a ban on place names with a similar, even more offensive, moniker. There have been proposals from Native American groups to restore the original native names of Devil’s Tower in Wyoming, Mount Rainier in Washington and even the iconic volcano Mount St. Helens. And then there’s the case of Harney Peak, named for a particularly brutal Army general who Lakota tribes blame for killing 86 people including women and children under Chief Little Thunder’s flag of truce in the Battle of Ash Hollow in 1855. Like Mount McKinley’s namesake, Gen. William Harney probably never visited Harney Peak, which sits in the Black Hills of South Dakota. It was named for him by a military surveyor before the Civil War...more