CAMP VERDE - In 2021, the U.S. Department of the Interior declared the word “squaw” to be a derogatory term that needed to be erased from geographical place names on federal lands. Last week, the department issued a list of the new names, including 66 for Arizona landscape features.
For Vincent Randall, former chair of the Yavapai-Apache Nation, the battle to be rid of the word had been going on for a much, much longer time.
“Going way back to when I was just a young boy – in 1962 I was the youngest tribal member elected when I was 22 years old,” he said. “It was an issue then.”
That tribal council used the Apache names when talking about the dome-shaped summit the official maps called “Squaw Peak” that rises over Camp Verde and “Squaw Canyon” and other Yavapai County locations. The term rankled the council.
“And we said, ‘Those aren’t the right names,’” Randall said. “My Uncle Ted Smith tried to do something to have the name changed.”
But such objections over the years had little traction with big government. “We’ve always called it that,” seemed enough of a justification to keep the name, even with a more prominent Squaw Peak in Maricopa County.
Randall said the term was “awful.”
The Apache term for the mountain south of Camp Verde translates to “Where the porcupine sits and suns itself.” Randall said they spoke of people who lived on the mountain as Where the Porcupine Sits people. It is unclear why the porcupine was so identified with the summit that offers one of the grandest views of the Verde Valley.
There was little will to even hear that “squaw” was derogatory, let alone any real effort to make big changes – until the 21st century. The first glimmer in Arizona that something could be done was the renaming of Maricopa County’s Squaw Peak to Piestewa Peak in 2008.
That change was proposed in 2003, shortly after Army Spc. Lori Piestewa, a Hopi soldier from Tuba City, was killed in the Iraq War.
There were more signs that public opinion in the nation was shifting, too, when the NFL team in Washington, D.C., and the MLB team in Cleveland opted to change their names away from monikers deemed culturally insensitive at best.
When Deb Haaland was named Secretary of the Interior last year, as a Laguna Pueblo woman she immediately saw an opportunity. In November, she issued Department of the Interior Secretarial Order 3404, creating the Derogatory Geographic Names Task Force and ordering the Board on Geographic Names to expunge the work “squaw” from place names and find replacements.
“Racist terms have no place in our vernacular or on our federal lands. Our nation’s lands and waters should be places to celebrate the outdoors and our shared cultural heritage – not to perpetuate the legacies of oppression,” Haaland said.
The task force reached out to Native American communities affected by the coming change, asking for suggestions for new names.
Randal said his office at the Yavapai-Apache Cultural Resource Center would have loved to have the names be the Apache terms they had always used, but they knew it would be “too difficult” for others to pronounce. They told the Interior representatives the history of the summit.
“She said, ‘Why don’t we just name it Porcupine Mountain?’” Randall recalled.
Porcupine Mountain is one of 17 features in Yavapai County that received a name change (including another Squaw Peak). Squaw Canyon is Porcupine Canyon. Squaw Butte is Verde Butte. Squaw Creek Mesa is Hósh Flat, one of the places given a Native American name.
Because the U.S. Forest Service is a member of the task force, it is expected that some forest roads may also see name changes.
This was not the first time the Board on Geographic Names has been called on to eliminate pejorative terms from the federal landscape. In the 1960s and ‘70s, the board got rid of place names using derogatory terms for Black people and Japanese people.
“Squaw” is considered a racist and sexist term. It is not used among Native American people in the United States. The word is only a small component of much longer words used by some northeast indigenous peoples. It has no relation to any Native American languages in Arizona, the Southwest or the West at all but has been persistently used in the broader white culture for Native American women.
Over the years, Randall said, there had been increasing local support for changing the name of the prominent summit that rises above the Verde Rim at an elevation of 6,525 feet. Those who understood were already calling it Porcupine Mountain even before it became official this year.
“I’m glad they worked it all out,” Randall said.
