Native Americans Propose Change To Yellowstone Landmark Names

Above, bison in one of Yellowstone's valley meadows. Photo by Armand Vaquer.

In Yellowstone National Park, there's a peak named Mount Doane. Indian tribes want it and other places renamed.

Here's why (Source: National Public Radio):

On a cold January day more than a century ago, U.S. troops massacred nearly 200 Piikani people on a Montana river bank. Most were women, children and old folks. 

"It's hard to imagine," Chief Stanley Charles Grier of the Piikani Nation in Alberta, Canada said. 

The people killed were his ancestors and accounts of the massacre are brutal. Soldiers killed a mother breastfeeding her baby. They shot sick people hiding under blankets. 

"Survivors were basically executed by axes," Grier says. "That's pretty barbaric." 

The man who helped perpetrate this massacre was Army Lt. Gustavus Doane. He later went on to explore parts of Yellowstone and his compatriots named Mount Doane after him. The name stuck, and Grier wants to change it. 

"Lieutenant Doane led that attack and fully implemented the massacre," he says. "We feel that's an atrocity to humanity and it's essentially a war crime." 

Massacres like this were a major part of what some historians call a forgotten genocide during the colonization and settlement of the American West. The perpetrators of these massacres were sometimes honored with mountains, valleys and towns.

Changing geological names isn't that easy. There is opposition to names changes.

But earlier this year, Park County commissioners in Wyoming voted against changing Mount Doane and Hayden Valley. They said people there like the names. They're used to them. 

"This has nothing to do with the Native Americans," Jake Fulkerson, vice chairman of the Park County commissioners, says. "There was one article we saw that said commissioners against the Indians or something and that's garbage." 

According to Fulkerson, the whole issue is overblown. 

"If you go around digging up dirt on people and changing names everywhere, I mean, once this horse leaves the barn, where does it end?" he says.

According to the NPR article, the government body with the power to rename geographical places is the U.S. Board On Geographic Names.

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