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A Colorado mountain has a new name: Mestaa’ėhehe. The peak, located near Echo Mountain ski area in Clear Creek County, is renamed for Owl Woman, an influential Cheyenne translator who helped maintain peaceful relations between local Native American tribes and new settlers before her death in 1847. Owl Woman was inducted into the Colorado Women’s Hall of Fame in 1985.
A petition to change the name from "Squaw Mountain" was approved by the U.S. Board on Geographic Names last week. In November, the Interior Department officially recognized the word "squaw" as a derogatory and offensive ethnic, racial, and sexist slur, particularly for Indigenous women, and established a federal task force to find replacement names for geographic features on federal lands bearing the term. When announcing the change, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said, "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."
Teanna Limpy, director of the Northern Cheyenne Tribal Historic Preservation Office, celebrated the removal of the mountain’s former derogatory name, which she said diminished the power and sacredness of Indigenous women. “This goes to show that there is nothing we cannot achieve if we think with our own hearts and always remember who we are doing this for,” Limpy wrote in a press release from the Mestaa’ehehe Coalition. The U.S. Forest Service co-filed the renaming petition with the Northern Cheyenne Tribe, and will be renaming the mountain’s administrative sites accordingly, and will update its signage as quickly as possible.
Following Interior's order, other states across the West are evaluating changes to potentially derogatory place names in Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, and Montana.
Revealed: Biden administration was not legally bound to hold massive Gulf of Mexico oil lease sale
The Biden administration admitted that a court decision did not compel it to lease vast tracts of the Gulf of Mexico for oil and gas drilling in a massive lease sale last month, though it previously claimed it was legally obliged to hold the sale. The Guardian revealed that a court ruling in response to a lawsuit filed by a dozen states that sued to lift a blanket pause placed on new drilling permits did not force the government to auction off drilling rights to the gulf, according to a memo filed by the U.S. Department of Justice before the lease sale.
“The administration has been misleading on this, to put it mildly, it’s very disappointing,” said Thomas Meyer, national organizing manager of Food and Water Watch. “They didn’t have to hold this sale and they didn’t have to hold it on this timeline. We know this will exacerbate the climate crisis, it undermines U.S. credibility abroad and it contradicts a campaign promise by Biden. If the administration was taking the climate crisis seriously they would be fighting tooth and nail to keep every molecule of fossil fuel in the ground. They are nowhere near to doing that.” The sale, held on November 17 just days after the climate summit in Glasgow, was the largest ever auction of oil and gas parcels, offering up more than 80 million acres of the gulf and locking in decades of carbon emissions.
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We’ve had 5,000 years of farmers trying out different strategies for dealing with heat, drought and water scarcity. We need to begin to translate that.”
