One group of researchers has managed to find 960 locations across 16 of the country’s national parks that sport names that they deem as overtly racist, stand to promote white supremacy, or that they claim present similar issues.
These ‘discoveries’ were unveiled just last month via an article in People and Nature from a group of researchers that included Grace Wu and Kurt Ingeman and sported the research data of well over 2.241 others throughout the United States.
“Part of decolonizing our professional and recreational practices is to expose settler colonial biases and recognize the histories of colonized lands and the peoples who have stewarded these lands for millennia prior to colonization,” highlighted the abstract of the article.
“All national parks examined have place names that tacitly endorse racist or, more specifically, anti-Indigenous ideologies, thus perpetuating settler colonialism and white supremacy at the system scale for future generations,” continued the author.
This study seems to indicate 254 names that it claims “memoralizes” colonialism. Making use of one example in Roys Peak located in Texas’ Big Bend National Park by making the claim that such a name threatens to try and “erase Indigenous knowledge.”
Additionally, it highlights another 214 names marked under the cultural appropriation section.
The list is then divided again into quite a few categories such as erasure and dimensions of racism, derogatory, and colonialism. Such categories were utilized in an attempt to help provide national parks with some options for potential new names for the places.
One associate professor at Oregon State University, Natchee Barnd, drew a comparison to the current recommended changes to professional sports teams such as the NFL’s Washington Commanders.
“We change things all the time. You mentioned sports; we change the names of stadiums every couple of years. People have no problem figuring out the new name of the stadium based off who is paying the rights to have their name attached to it. So we can shift and adjust as we want,” claimed Barnd.
In a series of surprises to the American public, these have not been the only recent people attempting to force the renaming of public lands because of some perceived offense.
Just last month, Scientific American put forth an opinion piece authored by Bonnie McGill that was titled “Offensive Names Should Be Removed from Public Lands.”
This piece from McGill came with a series of more clear examples of possible recommended changes “such as Squaw Canyon and Squaw Flat in Canyonlands National Park and Squaw Creek in Theodore Roosevelt National Park.” She claims that the term “squaw” was used as a way to throw insult and to “demean Native American women.”